"SEED's Organic Classroom Program, has the potential to help transform our education system by fostering inspiring learning and participation in food growth using Permaculture principles. In this way it can help to prepare our society for the radical changes that lie ahead in the production and distribution of food. I support SEED and their work at transforming learning through Permaculture."
Cameron M. Dugmore MPP, then Provincial Minister for Education

Teachers for Permaculture Education

This is the starting point for out work with schools. The courseaccomplishes skills transfer and helps us to identify champions to partner through the schools-based work.

This five day course incorporates participatory learning and covers the planning and design of a schools Permaculture, the necessary organic methodology to bring the plans to fruition; it also equips teachers with resource management skills and how teach Permaculture and deliver the teaching outcomes of the National Curriculum Statements (NCS). The course empowers 30 teachers from 10-15 schools to initiate a Permaculture project at their own schools and link this to teaching practice.

The Organic Classroom Programme

The Organic Classroom has been a success because of the way it completely transforms the learning environment. It brings an agriculturally productive ecosystem, with the diversity, stability and resilience of natural ecosystems, directly into the school grounds.

The Organic Classroom Program partners schools for three years, each year with a slightly different focus building on the skills of the previous year. We identify champions in each school, teachers who are eager and interested and give them support and encouragement. Our facilitators provide weekly mentoring of teachers to plan and deliver education in the garden. Continued mentoring and support is essential to build capacity of teachers and students to affect a degree of self-sufficiency for each school. SEEDs lessons are based on the needs of the garden and the Western Cape Education Department's compulsory work schedule for teachers. This means that SEEDs work supports teachers in the relevant delivery of Outcomes Based Education. After three years we leave each school with inspired learners and teachers, and a productive, beautiful garden for food security and education.

Participating school pass through three project phases - each with a slightly different focus:

• Year 1 (Green Beginnings) starts with a consultative Permaculture Design process. The implementation includes: The Outdoor Classroom, Indigenous shelter belts, Food forests, Rain harvesting systems, Mulch and compost systems, Vegetable gardens, Herb barriers. The education component is theme-based and linked to the implementation process.

• In Year 2 (Green Practice) we really work with the food garden; planting calendars, crop rotations and building fertility so that the arden is part of the heartbeat. We plan with soup kitchen staff around plantings and harvesting and hold garden feasts. We also contunue to enrich the Permaculture systems around the food garden.
  

• Year 3 (Green Abundance) we begin to see the abundance from the garden; learners are involved in Economic Management Sciences (EMS) projects that make value-added products from the garden (remedies, creams, teas, fertility products).