Permaculture is a project funded by the Erasmus+ Cooperation partnerships in school education action type. The project started February 1st, 2022 and will last 24 months. The project develops outputs and activities for school education and involves 3 school partners, 1 research foundation, 1 NGO and 1 social company. Project partners come from Spain, Malta, Turkey and Greece.

Permaculture involves the co-creation of didactic material and digital resources for teaching and learning. Its aim is to support teachers, school leaders and other teaching professions via addressing digital transformation through development of digital readiness, resilience and capacity. The team-based professional development approach involves teams of teachers working together to design/redesign (blended) lessons following guidance from experts.

• Design/Redesign to make lessons more environmentally aware
• Design/Redesign to make lessons more student centred
• Design/Redesign using a collaborative platform/digital tool that hosts the final didactic materials so that other teachers can reuse them.

In other words, teachers collaborate with researchers/experts in developing, implementing, reflecting on and improving lesson plans. The methodology and digital technology are co-created and tested with school teachers as part of a series of teacher professional development workshops involving non-school partners and schools. In the workshops, teachers and experts work in teams to learn from other experts/researchers in order to create, implement, reflect and iterate on lesson plans before presenting the results to their schools and community.

The overall project aims to:

1. Create didactic material to be used in a daily basis in teaching & learning activities at schools related with environmental education
2. Help teachers adopt student centred learning approaches and inclusive teaching strategies
3. Contribute resources to the educational community (best practises, improved lesson materials related to environmental awareness and permaculture).

Project activities include:

• LTT mobility training sessions for teachers (Coordinator: PERMACULTURA CANTABRIA)

A 5-day training event in Penagos (Spain) for teachers. Held during the first half of the project, the event is both a formative training session and a participatory design session. E.g. During the workshops, teachers participating in the project will have the opportunity to learn about the main topics of the project from experts and will be mentored by them in order to create/improve a lesson/course to be implemented at schools. Partners are required to participate as trainers for the teacher mobility sessions; arrange to send teachers from their institutions to the teacher mobility sessions 2 teachers from partners.

• LTT mobility training sessions for teachers (Coordinator: GENISTA RESEARCH FOUNDATION)

A 5-day training event in Rinella (Malta) for teachers. Held during the first half of the project, the event is both a formative training session and a participatory design session. E.g. During the workshops, teachers participating in the project will have the opportunity to learn about the main topics of the project from experts and will be mentored by them in order to create/improve a lesson/course to be implemented at schools. Partners are required to participate as trainers for the teacher mobility sessions; arrange to send teachers from their institutions to the teacher mobility sessions 2 teachers from partners.

• Multiplier events (1 per country)  (Coordinator: all partners)

An event held in each partner country at the mid-end of the project from which teachers can share their experiences and lessons learned with teachers from their region. Participants to the event should be from outside of partner institutions. In Permaculture, all partners will run a multiplier event for 30+ participants from outside of their institutions (in person or a larger target number if a virtual event) toward the end of the project.

• Transnational Meetings (Coordinator: SEK and Hilal Dogu Akademi)

Face-to-face partnership meetings hosted by each partner in their countries. Held roughly once a year, the meetings tend to last 3 days.

The project is centred around 2 teacher professional development workshops previous to the collaborative development of a web platform, a mobile app and an e-book on the topic of Permaculture and Environmental Education. All the didactic materials will be Open Educational Resources (OER) and will be available in English, Spanish, Turkish and Greek.

To accomplish the project aims, the main work packages are:

(1)   Project management/administration: SEK

(2)   R1: free online platform where the students can enrol and learn about environmental education: HILAL DOGU AKADEMI (NOT APPROVED)

(3)   R2: mobile application called PermacultureErasmus: SEK

(4)   R3: e-book called PermacultureErasmus: PERMACULTURA CANTABRIA

(5)   C1: Permaculture workshop: PERMACULTURA CANTABRIA

(6)   C2: Crop Rotation: GENISTA RESEARCH FOUNDATION

(7)   Overall dissemination: all partners

Each partner coordinates a work package and/or contributes toward tasks within each work package. Work packages include coordination, quality, evaluation and dissemination tasks in addition to implementation tasks.