Agroforestry is a sustainable agricultural system that integrates largely diverse cultures of shrubs and trees, with various stages and progression phases in time, which we call succession, living in the same cultivated space of soil. It has been gaining attention and popularity in recent years given its hability to promote biodiversity, sequester and store carbon, improve soil health, while producing food, fibers, oils, wood and other products. To tackle the crescent demand for education and training in agroforestry we designed this Teachers Training in Agroforestry, oriented to people who already works with agroforestries and who have practical experience combined with theoretical knowledge on agroforestry in different contexts and climates, and who wish to work as teachers in this field. It is a comprehensive training program designed to equip individuals with the necessary skills and knowledge to effectively coordinate and manage projects and teams. Participants will also learn about the legal and ethical considerations of agroforestry and ecological restoration in different scales, as well as best practices for recruitment, training, and evaluation. In addition, the course will delve into the importance of community involvement and engagement for resilient communities.
The 120-hour course covers a wide range of topics and subjects, including the principles of syntropy, the cycles of homeostasis, resilience, autopoiesis and self-organization, and the formation and building of healthy soils. Also we will work with plant-fungi interactions, microclimates and the structure and succession of ecosystems. The curriculum is designed to be flexible and adaptable to the needs of different environments, as it is built as a bond for the continental mosaics of landscapes, fostering interterritorial processes of identification, coalition, and partnership. Therefore, although the themes and curriculum of the course is set, it will be tailored to meet the unique needs and challenges of each participant. Participants in the course will have opportunities for hands-on design and planning work, development of strategies, and the presentation of their own program designs. They will also learn key factors of pricing in and how to set them, as well as strategies for promoting short circuits and fair trade. The course will explore participative methodologies and tools, community involvement tools, empowering participants to engage in collaborative community-led initiatives.
The program emphasizes the holistic approach of embodied learning, from integrated visions of humans in convergence with the evolving socioenvironment, while goes through different systems of psicology of learning and the art of teaching. Participants in the program will be incentivized to share their concrete works on the lands and on the development of specific designs to implement, comprehending key factors of multidimensional pricing of agroforestry systems, on how to involve communities in the evaluation and development of short circuit commercial strategies and fair trade for local and regional agroecological networks, and for non-wooden products in the managed ecosystems, while the forest management will be transversally approached as central in most of the Program´s topics.
The topics and subtopics of the course include the following:
Fundamentals
- Introduction, Course Overview, and On-Site Orientation
- Principles of Ecological Restoration
- Principles of Syntropy
- Learning Patterns from Traditional Cultures
- Energy Flow
- Patterns 1 – presentation
- Patterns 2 – finding patterns
- Basic Ecology
- The inseparable cycles of homeostasis, resilience, autopoiesis and self-organization
- Entropy, Negentropy and Dissipative Structures
- Water in the Landscape
- Soil and the Pathways Through Time
- Plants and Fungi
- Plants, Soils, and Water 1 & 2
- Stratification
- Succession
- Soil Formation and Building
- Reading the Site and Landscape
- Making Soil – Practice
- Design Patterns, Methods & Tools
- Gardens, Edible Landscapes, and Accessible Food
- Culture and Society in Deep Ecology
- Economics and Justice in a Possible World
- Marketing of Ecological Restoration Products and Services
- Participative Methodologies and Tools
- Educational Methodologies and Approaches 1 and 2
- Community Involvement Tools
- Community Involvement and Learning of Ways of Life
- Microclimatology
- Microclimates and Ecosystems
- Climate and Biomes
- Climate, Forest, Soil, Landscape, Rainmaking
- Forests and Ways of Life
- Succession and Structure of Living Systems
- Energy Resources and Conservation
- Water Systems – Cycle and Recycle
- Holistic Prospective Integral Life in the Countryside
- Deep listening
- Live and Let Live
- Integral Visions of Human Beings in Harmonic Convergence