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Introduction I was first attracted to natural building in 2003 when I baked in an earth oven at a community in Palenque, Mexico. It took me another three years before I built my own little oven. As time went on I built bigger and bigger ovens. Years later, in 2012, I was asked to co-teach an earth oven course for a local natural building school. Teaching was completely new to me and fortunately I had a good teacher to apprentice under. I loved teaching these courses because of the sense of community and empowerment they brought to myself and the participants. Through my studies at Gaia University I have realized the importance of pedagogy and made it the theme for my Capstone year. Pedagogy is essentially the relationship and interaction between the teacher and learner. The form of these interactions determine what is gained from the experience. In the long process of searching for my final project I discovered a gap within the fields of these regenerative trade skills. That gap is pedagogical guides for teachers. I thought of how useful it would have been if I had had such a resource when I was starting to teach oven building. I decided my OP4 project was to write a pedagogical manual for teachers of earth oven courses. This project has layers of benefits; the oven course manual is helping to bridge the pedagogical gap of facilitating earth oven courses, and this OP is aiding in the process of bridging gaps in other fields through sharing my process and inspiring others to create their own guides.
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Key Term Definitions
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OP (Output Packet) - Project report Regenerative - Replaces the idea of Sustainable to better articulate the need of improving our environment and way of life. Skill-flex - A replacement term for 'skill-set', bringing attention to the dynamic and flexible nature of skill acquisition. Integrative EcoSocial Design - A transformative process of creating balanced systems using ecological and social principles.
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OP Goals
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The purpose of this report is to present my project of creating a pedagogical manual for facilitating earth oven courses. In presenting this project I hope to inform other teachers of the importance and need of such manuals, inspiring them to create their own. My Process Goal:
My Content Goals:
My Presentation Goals:
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Project background
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I am a BSc associate (student) at Gaia University➚ studying Integrative EcoSocial Design. This OP4 report is for my final project of my Capstone year. The original theme I chose for this project at the beginning of this program year fell through for various reasons which I cover in the commentary section. During the time of this OP4 project I was traveling India with my wife, as we have done for many of the past winters. I needed a new project for my OP4. As we traveled, I reached out to some local organizations trying to find a project related to teaching that would meet my learning goals and the criteria I had outlined previously. I found two potential projects during this time which you can read about in the right column of the Supporting evidence page. Neither of these projects met my requirements. This contingency led me to go on program pause. I met with my advisor and discussed the need to renegotiate the project and its deadline. In the past, I have found that having a meeting with someone I resonate with can help me break out of such a rut. I setup a guild meeting with my Gaia U peer Liam. Liam has been a consistent support, always giving me insightful feedback. In our guild meeting Liam listened and probed with questions. We were speaking about teaching being the theme of my capstone year and the oven courses I teach came up. I had previously dismissed my oven courses as not being sufficiently in-depth of a project for an OP. Liam suggested a new meta-level perspective on my courses, teaching to facilitate an oven course. This simple change in my frame-of-reference changed everything! This project seemed it would meet many of the learning goals I had outlined at the beginning of the year and the project criteria I had previously set. You can see a mind map of my learning goals on the Commentary page center column. After my meeting with Liam I started to assess the field searching for teacher guides for earth oven courses. After extensive searching online I found nothing. I went further looking into the broader topic of guides for teaching workshops. What I realized is our out-of-date educational model is being perpetuated even within the seemingly endless resources provided by the internet. You can find content on every subject imaginable, but what is missing is pedagogy. Pedagogy is the method of delivering the content. It gets at the deeper level of the whys and hows, where content is simply the what. I did find a few pedagogy guides for running workshops which are open topic. I have included them in my annotated resources on the Supporting evidence page. Seeing this gap in the regenerative field has made collecting pedagogical guides a side project. I set up a page on my permaculture resource website to host them here➚. I wanted this teacher's manual for facilitating an earth oven course to be as comprehensive as possible. I saw three main components to accomplish this: write from my own experience of teaching, integrate feedback from other oven course teachers and teach an oven course while looking through the lens of teaching to facilitate. My first attempt at the third component failed due to the host dropping out after a month of consultation. The team members and details of attempting to set up a course can be found on the right column of the Supporting evidence page. I will be teaching an oven course in June with Mark Krawczyk which will fulfill this component. I have decided to move forward with this OP for two reasons: the project is feeling quite complete and I can not afford to put my Gaia U. program on pause for another 2-3 months. |
Creative Commons license
1.1 introduction by Will Bode is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available from Will Bode.
Meta Context
Why are pedagogical guides important? The predominant education model assumes that students are empty vessels that the teacher must fill. This assumption disconnects the teacher from the mutual exchange which makes learning wholesome and unifying.
Our world in rapidly becoming more complex with social, economic and ecological issues creating new and unknown dynamics. The legacy system of education which we were indoctrinated into is unfit to solve such complex issues. To transform such a system requires personal transformation and a deep interdisciplinary dedication to accumulating and disseminating best practices. Co-teacher Internships and pedagogical guides and practice are the essential approaches in this transformational process.
“ …What we build together is not ovens, or buildings, but stories. Stories provide us, over time, with the building blocks of culture. Ultimately, what I'm hoping people learn from oven workshops is to think of themselves not as consumers, but as participants in the work of culture”.
- Kiko Denzer
Project Goals
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Before I knew what my project was going to be I set some criteria I wanted the project to meet. My OP4 Criteria:
Once I knew what the project was and that it could meet my criteria I identified specific project goals. Manual Goals:
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My experience
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I have been building earth ovens since the summer of 2006 and teaching to build earth oven since the spring of 2012. This will be my third year co-teaching the oven course at Yestermorrow Design/Build School➚ with Mark Krawczyk. I have taught a total of seven courses of 3-10 students each, including courses in Mexico and Guatemala. |
Project team and roles
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Team members for this project: Mark Krawczyk, Kiko Denzer, Corinne Chatelan, Christine Detrick and myself. Mark and Kiko are both experts in the field of building and teaching to build earth ovens. They both fulfilled the rolls of technical and critical feedback of content. Corinne and Christine are my editors fulfilling the role of checking grammar, spelling and comprehension (sentence structure). My roles and responsibilities were: Research, design, writing, formatting, implementation of feedback, and dissemination.
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Client Goals
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The clients: Earth oven builders and enthusiasts, hands-on teachers, you the reader and all my Gaia U peers Client goals: Outlining a process of creating a teachers guide, transferring pedagogical and technical knowledge of building earth ovens.
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