A Living Laboratory in Every Garden
Planet Schooling is a movement, a methodology, and a book — created by Lucy Legan, a permaculture educator who co-founded Ecocentro IPEC, the largest permaculture centre in Latin America, in Brazil. Published in 2020 and sparked partly by the conditions of the COVID-19 pandemic, Planet Schooling addresses a question that has become increasingly urgent: how do we create meaningful, nature-connected education when traditional schooling is unavailable, underfunded, or simply disconnected from the living world?
The answer, in Lucy’s vision, is to transform every available outdoor space — whether a family backyard in Australia or a concrete schoolyard in rural Brazil — into what she calls a “living permaculture laboratory.” A space that is not only beautiful and productive, but that teaches by being: by demonstrating the principles of soil health, water management, biodiversity, and interconnection in ways that children can see, touch, and participate in.
From Brazil to Australia and Beyond
Lucy’s work has spanned continents. In Brazil, she worked with entire public school communities — in one case redesigning the schoolyard of a 600-student school, transforming its concrete play area into a functioning permaculture garden. The ripple effects extended into the community: organic produce from the school garden entered school meals, and local families began adopting similar practices at home. In Australia, East Africa, the USA, and at international festivals including Boom Festival in Portugal (attended by 30,000+ participants), the Planet Schooling methodology has been adapted and applied across radically different contexts and resource levels.
Learning Through Design
Central to Planet Schooling is the concept of child-led design. Children and young people are not passive beneficiaries of a garden created for them: they are the designers, the decision-makers, the experimenters. Working with permaculture zones — from intensive kitchen gardens to wildlife corridors — they develop spatial thinking, ecological understanding, and a deep sense of responsibility for the spaces they have helped create.
For schools, Lucy offers a mini design course framework in which students actively participate in redesigning their outdoor environment. For families, the book provides practical, low-cost guidance for transforming domestic spaces into educational gardens. The methodology is explicitly inclusive: designed to work in both wealthy and low-income settings, with emphasis on creative solutions that require ingenuity rather than expensive inputs.
Relevance for Sustainable Learning
Planet Schooling connects to SDG 4 (Quality Education), SDG 11 (Sustainable Cities and Communities), SDG 12 (Responsible Consumption and Production), SDG 13 (Climate Action), and SDG 15 (Life on Land). It represents one of the most holistic and scalable models of sustainability education in this collection.
Website: planetschooling.com
Contact: Lucy Legan – lucy@ecocentro.org
