We have just held our third encounter (7/10/2025) out of a series of eight within the Grassroots Innovations Assembly for Agroecology (GIAA), a process that brings together communities of practice from across continents to exchange knowledge, methods, and stories of transformation.
This series of eight online Encounters offers a space for peer organizations Tzoumakers and l’Atelier Paysan to exchange structured knowledge and learn from each other, documenting valuable – and often invisible – practices that promote innovation co-creation at the grassroots level.
After exploring the process of building tools with the end-users in our first encounters, this third session turned to a crucial question: How do we learn? What are the pedagogies of grassroots innovation, and how are people’s organizations building spaces for collective learning that are open, empowering, and grounded in the realities of rural life?
A Conversation Between Greece and France
This encounter was shaped as a dialogue between two long-standing initiatives in Europe that share a common philosophy: Tzoumakers, in the mountains of Greece, and L’Atelier Paysan, a cooperative movement of farmers, engineers, and trainers in France.
Both organizations are engaged in relocalizing innovation – bringing the power to design and build technologies back to the people who use them, while strengthening local communities and regenerating rural life.
Their pedagogies emerge from lived practice. They are learning spaces as much as they are production spaces, places where people meet, share, and co-create.
Learning by Doing, Learning Together
At L’Atelier Paysan, the training method is simple yet transformative: learning by doing.
Farmers come together to build their own tools – from small hand implements to tractor-mounted machinery – and in the process, they learn the full chain of fabrication: reading a technical plan, cutting, drilling, welding, assembling, and testing.
Each training session is collective: every participant works on everyone’s tools, ensuring that all experience each step of the process.
The pedagogical model is open and replicable. All tool plans are open-source, enabling other networks, training centers, and schools to adopt the same methods. Increasingly, even agricultural colleges in France are inviting L’Atelier Paysan to lead training sessions — a sign that change is slowly entering the formal education system.
Still, as the team reminded us, this is no easy path. The cooperative’s business model depends on public training funds, and shifting government priorities can directly affect what kind of learning is possible. “Training is also a political act,” they said — shaping the future of agriculture through the way we learn and who controls that process.
L’Atelier Paysan continues to push boundaries, decentralizing its model into regional “swarms” of local workshops and supporting a new generation of trainers — often farmers themselves — who teach in their regions and share their experience. From mobile workshops to women-only trainings and tools like a “thermometer” to assess safe learning environments, the cooperative shows how pedagogy itself can become a form of social transformation.
From Makers to Facilitators in Greece
Across the Mediterranean, in the mountain villages of Greece, Tzoumakers shared a story that echoes this same spirit of collective learning, though from a different starting point.
Rather than focusing on specific tool design, Tzoumakers acts as an intermediary space — connecting farmers, makers, carpenters, welders, and others who hold valuable skills within the community.
Their learning process is distributed and relational. Some workshops take place in their own community hub, others in individual workshops scattered across villages. In each case, Tzoumakers helps bridge people and skill sets, cultivating a culture of peer learning rooted in everyday practice.
As one of their speakers explained, the initiative has taken many modes of operating over the years, depending on who is active and what resources are available. Yet the principle remains constant: knowledge lives in the community.
In this sense, Tzoumakers embodies the balance between external knowledge transfer and people-controlled processes. Farmers and makers may learn welding or design from others, but they remain masters of their own innovation process. This is education through co-creation — an experience of learning that is not imposed, but built together.
Like many grassroots spaces, Tzoumakers faces its share of challenges: burnout among volunteers, lack of institutional recognition, and difficulty documenting and disseminating its work. They operate “on the fringes of the education system,” though efforts are underway to institutionalize their methods through national legal frameworks. For now, they remain committed to hands-on learning and to what is starting to be known in English as a “dialogue of knowledges” that keeps their community alive.
Shared Principles, Different Pathways
What unites L’Atelier Paysan and Tzoumakers is their commitment to people-centered innovation — processes where learning, making, and community are inseparable.
Both reject the dominant, top-down model of agricultural modernization. Instead, they cultivate pedagogies of autonomy, where technical knowledge is shared horizontally and grounded in local realities.
Yet their contexts differ.
- In France, L’Atelier Paysan operates within a national system that allows access to public funding but requires constant negotiation with state policies.
- In Greece, Tzoumakers operates outside institutional frameworks altogether, experimenting with local partnerships and informal learning networks.
Both approaches reveal how education itself can be an act of resistance and reconstruction — whether by creating open, safe, and replicable systems of training, or by holding space for community-driven learning beyond the reach of official systems.
As a speaker from Tzoumakers summarized during the exchange:
“At the end, who controls the process is the key issue. When the process is people-controlled, knowledge transfer can truly happen.”
A Broader Movement of Learning
The dialogue between Greece and France resonates with the experiences of many others in the GIAA network. From Kenya to Indonesia, from community workshops to online “cyber cafés” where farmers learn digital tools, participants shared how grassroots learning takes many forms — from memory harvests and intergenerational circles to mapping innovations through videos, podcasts, and collective storytelling.
All these experiences reflect a shared aspiration: to reclaim the right to learn and innovate, to institutionalize a culture of co-creation grounded in agroecology, systems thinking, and inclusivity.
Looking Ahead
As the third encounter closed, one feeling was clear: learning is itself a form of innovation.
By opening spaces for exchange between makers, farmers, trainers, and movements, GIAA continues to nurture a global conversation on how knowledge is created, shared, and owned.
In the words of a participant, “We are not just sharing tools — we are cultivating new ways of learning together.”