A local environmental project is teaching people in under-resourced areas how to make the most of what they have
Barry Streek
This week 22 Cape Town teachers went on a five-day permaculture process course at a Khayelitsha school as part of a pioneering new approach to incorporate environmental education in schools.
The course, conducted by the Schools Environmental Education and Development (Seed) Project, will enable the teachers to utilise their “school grounds as an outdoor classroom for all Curriculum 2005 projects”, says project leader Leigh Brown.
“It [the permaculture process course] should involve the whole school. It is not just about growing vegetable gardens. It involves the whole school development, such as harvesting water, growing windbreaks, creating an edible landscape.”
She says a recent survey found that 25% of children in South African schools are so malnourished that they cannot study effectively. She cites schools in the Cape Flats as an example. “Their grounds are so windswept that little can be done with them at present.”
The Seed Project operates on a limited budget and is staffed by three “semi-volunteers”, as Brown describes its activists. The project began at the Bongelethu Community School in Phillipi.
The relative success it enjoys has earned support from the Green Trust to develop pilot projects at four Cape Town schools.
After the five-day course, the Seed Project hopes teachers will translate their experiences into lessons.
But what is permaculture? “Its not just the latest fad,” says Brown, who grew up in Richard’s Bay and abandoned journalism to spend last year studying permaculture in Australia.
“It involves finding appropriate solutions that can be taken anywhere. You must use whatever resources you have It gives rise to projects running on their own energy.”
Brown says a classic example of permaculture is free-range fowl, which not only provide meat and eggs, but are also weed- and pest-eaters and create manure that they scratch into the ground.
To support the pilot projects in schools, the Seed Project is trying to come up with education resources for the school libraries and to develop projects relating to the soil, air, wind, water, recycling, trees, sun, seeds, nutrition and permaculture.
Brown says very few pupils and teachers in Cape Flats schools have had any practical experience with these essential elements of outcomes-based education.
“Setting up a garden is very, very difficult in the sandy soil. But take sewage, for example, instead of pumping it out to sea, we should be nourishing our soil with it. We need to get practical production into our lives,” Brown says.