The Future of our University course began with no template. We had all the choices in the world, but also all the difficulty of choosing. After working as one group for the first few sessions, we found that we needed to split into smaller groups based on interest to really get our hands and minds around a specific topic. The process of narrowing down these topics wasn’t easy and took us about a month’s worth of sessions beginning in the fall semester, but after brainstorming specific interests and grouping them under larger themes, we found that a group of about 7 people wanted to learn more about permaculture. As most of us were already involved in different gardening and networking activities within the larger Edinburgh milieu of permaculture, we each brought different knowledge and approaches. We spent much of our time sharing past experiences, joys and difficulties with the topic, both in terms of gardening, bureaucracy, literature and actually grasping what permaculture is. When time came to create a final product, we found ourselves without anything tangible to present. Looking at the needs of ourselves and our current projects – particularly the new permaculture garden in KB that two members had successfully been granted land for – we agreed to create an ‘introduction to permaculture’ in the form a zine, which we could later develop a workshop for. Our process was a mix of individual and group work: we each researched a topic and met to creatively put it all together over coffee and snacks. Our plan is to create a workshop to accompany the zine in the fall, and to keep reflecting upon what permaculture means to each of us
