Regenerative Approaches to Education in Agriculture and Land Use
Teaching and Learning from a Living Systems Perspective. June 27, 2024
Enroll in Course
LIVE ONLINE: Thursday, June 27th,10:30 AM to 12:30 PM Eastern Daylight Time. Check here for your time zone.
Are you interested in increasing your effectiveness as an educator, organizer, or technical service provider?
Are you wondering how to engage people to listen and follow through on key understandings that you know are important for a healthy planet and society?
Join international educator Didi Pershouse for this 2-hour workshop exploring how to keep ourselves and others engaged in deep, purposeful learning for the long-haul, and why this is key to growing climate-resilient landscapes, peaceful societies, and thriving ecosystems.
We will use live case studies and living-systems frameworks to reveal principles for effective educational, ecological, and social-change work. We will ground-truth this conversation with examples from our own lives–as well as successful projects around the world.
Join us if you are interested in exploring any of the following topics:
- How to create conditions in which people naturally get excited about learning about land systems, and then apply it in projects with a strong sense of purpose and personal agency
- Why certain approaches–such as “expertism” and “incentivizing”--can have unintended consequences on long-term engagement of land stewards, citizens, and policy makers.
- Why working in living systems (social systems, ecosystems, agricultural systems, policy making, etc.) requires a different mind than working with machines.
- How to create dynamic ongoing learning communities and effective mentor networks.
This is a chance to experience the ongoing work we do in our weekly meetings of the Land and Leadership Development Community.
Your Instructor
Didi Pershouse is well known as an innovative international educator both in-person and online. She is the founder of the Land and Leadership Initiative. Her facilitator's guide Understanding Soil Health and Watershed Function, is used in over 60 countries.
She became deeply involved in the intersection of food systems and health systems while providing rural health care for two decades at The Center for Sustainable Medicine, and wrote The Ecology of Care: Medicine, Agriculture, Money, and the Quiet Power of Human and Microbial Communities.
Currently she is writing a field training manual for the UN-FAO Farmer Field School Program and the Andhra Pradesh Community Managed Natural Farming Initiative in India, involving over 800,000 smallholder farmers. She was a contributing author to The Climate Emergency: How Africa Can Survive and Thrive; Climate Change and Creation Care; and Health in the Anthropocene. She was one of five speakers at the United Nations-FAO World Soil Day in 2017.
She serves on the Planning Commission for her town, is a board supervisor for the White River Natural Resources Conservation District, and is on the board of directors of the Soil Carbon Coalition and the Vermont Healthy Soils Coalition. While serving on the state appointed Payment for Ecosystem Services and Soil Health Working Group, she helped to reorient the program back to its public roots. She led a successful effort to conserve the Zebedee Headwaters Wetland while serving as a Vermont Conservation Commissioner.