Black Mountains College (BMC) is a brand new college in the Brecon Beacons National Park, Wales, aiming to create a future where nature and humans thrive. BMC focuses on the challenge of our times: how to build a fair and just society within safe planetary boundaries. Black Mountains College was founded as a response to the climate and ecological emergency and believe that education is central to understanding our current situation and preparing for a different kind of future.
Our learning model, applied across all our courses, integrates the head, hands and heart, multi-sensory protocols, outdoor learning and multiple hierarchies of knowledge or ways of knowing. Our vocational courses include an invitation to students to think critically about wider global issues and systems, and our higher education programme uses experiential and problem-based learning, practical skills and arts-based training in cognition and perception alongside more traditional activities of reading and writing. Moreover, we aim to encourage crossover between the vocational and degree strands, so students can study alongside each other and potentially transfer from one to the other.
Learning in context, on the land, in ecosystems, within economies and social structures and organisations is what applied, experiential and problem-based learning is all about. Embedding the college and its activities in the community and the land means that often the learning will have positive social and ecological outcomes too. All our courses acknowledge the forest school principle that re-connection to nature begins with making nature itself the classroom. We currently offer two NVQ Level 2 awards in Regenerative Horticulture, and Sustainable Coppicing and Greenwood Trades. Each of our year-long NVQ level 2 courses offers the opportunity to gain unique skills and experience for a rewarding, sustainable career. Students learn via practical indoor and outdoor learning backed up with classroom theory taught by passionate and experienced teachers. Our NVQs are accredited by City and Guilds and validated by NPTC Group of Colleges.
We also offer a range of short courses. Our courses cover a range of topics from practical skills like composting, tree planting and regenerative growing to more in-depth explorations of how to transform systems that are exacerbating our unsustainable economy and how to adapt and prepare for an uncertain future. We offer one day workshops, residential camps and bespoke training at venues across the Black Mountains and at our main site – a 120 acre hill farm called Troed yr Harn in the process of being transformed into an agroecological learning campus.
We are hoping to launch our very own Degree programme in 2023. We are developing the BMC degree in partnership with Cardiff Metropolitan University. It is designed to foster confidence, creativity, critical thinking, emotional intelligence and the ability to communicate and collaborate in order to imagine – and deliver – far-reaching changes to current systems. The foundation of the BMC degree is learning how to learn in relation to the natural world and human society in order to become an agent of change. The name of this degree is BA Arts, Ecology, and Systems Change.
Contact
| email: : | info@blackmountainscollege.uk |
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| twitter: : | @bmc_college |
| instagram:: | @blackmountainscollege |
| Facebook: : | @blackmountainscollege |
| website: : | www.blackmountainscollege.uk |