PermaVET aims at increasing awareness about climate change among VET trainees in various sustainability-relevant sectors and at developing vocation-specific competences in order to reduce energy use, save resources and process sustainable organic food. The idea is to make use of the permaculture concept to sensitize vocational groups for their specific potential in making a change. The permaculture concept has become increasingly popular in agriculture in recent years. It, however, holds additional potential for optimizing consumption of resources and energy that are meaningful for other vocational fields in environmentally relevant sectors.
Partners Responsibilities:
CEPROF as owner of a VET school and ZAUG as VET education center, both active in vocational training for cooking and electronic engineering, develop the theoretical and practical parts for the specific vocational fields whereas Farm-Advisory designs the theoretical and practical input for permaculture and its positive impact on the environment. CIP having extensive experience in developing pedagogical educational material in various environmental topics such as agriculture, agribusiness and permaculture, develops innovative methodologies and didactics for the curricula of the 3 modules.
Intellectual Outputs
IO1
The first training module (IO1) introduces the topics of climate change and the effects on agriculture and climate adaptation through permaculture.
For pilot testing, these topics are worked on with VET trainees in cooking and electronics/mechatronics in order to raise their awareness for the EU Sustainable Development Goals and to create the basis for completing the profession-specific modules.
IO2
In the second training module (IO2), which is developed for cook training, the trainees learn to recognize the quality and taste differences between ecologically produced and conventionally produced products.
They will also learn how to use these products, how to wash them properly, how to adjust the amount of ingredients based on their more intense taste, and how to make food in an ecological and sustainable way.
- The trainees learn important skills to be able to work in high class restaurants with a high proportion of organic food.
- An additional output that the trainees work on, is an exclusive international recipe collection containing dishes that consist of regional, seasonal and ecological products from the partner countries.
IO3
The curriculum of the third training module (IO3) enables the trainees to get to know the production processes of permaculture, to take into account material consumption and energy consumption and, in a further step, to identify the production steps in which resources remain unused.
- The trainees learn how to use these unused resources to generate energy for other production steps.
- By completing the module, the trainees not only learn about organic farming and deal with the important topics of resource use in production processes, but also acquire important skills for a later professional career.
RELEVANCE:
The modules are suitable for expanding existing VET curricula in a purposeful manner and are developed in such a way that they can also be easily adapted for the training courses of other professions. In this way it is possible to integrate a central topic of the EU Sustainable Development Goals, the ecological and sustainable agriculture, into existing VET curricula and to combine these topics with the acquisition of important key competences for different professions. The agricultural cultivation method of permaculture gives trainees and trainers an insight into an agricultural business model that enables the successful establishment of small agricultural businesses and thus favors entrepreneurship, especially in economically weaker countries of the EU.
https://deepgreenpermaculture.