permaculture school curriculum

Geoff said that permaculture is now established in Australian school curriculum. Is there any way to get hold of this material and/or anything that was used to help establish this in the schools?

I know that in a few schools here, teachers do the "baby chicks" thing (the place supplying the hatching eggs and chicks take them back at the end of the school year or whenever the teacher's need to get rid of them) but materials and curriculum is sadly lacking in the sustainable agriculture in the majority of schools. If you can get the kids, then you have got the future. And right now they are being lost by default to mainstream ideas about how food must be grown "to feed the world' etc. because the chem companies DO have material in the schools and in the assumptions made by most text books.There needs to be a counter possibility.

I was thinking of trying to develop some such but don't really know enough and zeal can only take you so far:). If it's already been done in Australia, why reinvent the wheel? I would really love to hear more about this.

I am interested in the exact same thing. I am currently a teacher and will be taking my PDC this spring. I was recently approached by someone in the district to ask if I had any ideas about setting up a "program" that could be done at our alternative high school / adult ed center. Apparently I made a good impression at the board office when I was part of the committee to design our curriculum to include 21st century skills. I was really promoting green technology, sustainability, creative problem solving, and open ended questions. This was before I had ever even heard of permaculture. As soon as this person had asked me if I had any ideas I immediately thought about permaculture, but didn't / don't really know how to pitch the idea. Having a model and a curriculum to base it off of and show as an example would be extremely helpful.

We are hosting the Permaculture challenge for NSW here at Zaytuna Farm.
http://permaculture.org.au/2011/11/06/the-permaculture-challenge-nsw-australia/


Here are two great textbooks that we sell at our store that are used in schools here in Australia.
http://permaculture.org.au/store/outdoor_classrooms2c_a_handbook_for_school_gardens_2d_by_carolyn_nuttall_and_janet_millington.htm

http://permaculture.org.au/store/eat_your_garden__2d_organic_gardening_for_home_and_schools.htm

You can contact Janet Millington (the author of Outdoor Classrooms) at: miltech(at)bigpond.com

Thank you !

When I was looking at the Permaculture Challenge link it struck me as an excellent fit for an organisation called Katimavik here in Canada. It might be interesting to chat with them about this as one of their program is called Ecocitizenship. I have no idea what that entails, exactly. If they are interested and aren't already doing it, which I doubt, would the next step be to find some people with their PDCs who would take on a program or two with them?

The school garden is possibly a bit more of a challenge as we have no history of such things here. We used to have prison farms where the prisoners were raising food but the government booted that because the economists said it wasn't "cost effective". Since it was just published that it will soon cost over a $100,000 per year per prisoner, it might be time to look at that again. Hmm, odd how my mind went from schools to prisons. Time to have the kids break out!

The books both look intriguing. I will follow up and contact Janet.

Thank you for this and for all you have done and continue to do.