ROUGH DRAFT 30 August 2010 ROUGH DRAFT
Counsel for the Movement: Certification in Permaculture Education
by Tom Ward
INTRODUCTION
I took my first Design Course in 1982 at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington. Andrew Jeeves and Bill Mollison were the instructors. I already had two BS degrees in Forestry and Botany. In the early 70’s I was an administrator for a program at Laney College in Oakland, California (Wild Edible Plants and Woods lore) and in the mid 80’s I spent two years at D-Q University (a Native American and Chicano institution) as acting Agriculture Department head and administrator for curriculum development and for Western Association of Schools and Colleges accreditation. I received three Diplomas of Permaculture from Bill Mollison in 1985 and I have trained many active Design Course teachers, several of whom apprenticed with me. Now we are way down the road in Permaculture and I get a lot of questions about certification and curriculum.
ABSTRACT (How to do a Proper Certificate)
To present a proper certificate to participants that have completed a course of study one should consider several factors:
1. Only claim to represent who one is. In the academic world of educational accreditation the main concern is to not misrepresent. So only claim that the certificate is from the organization that sponsored and presented the course. If one has a relationship with other institutes one could say “in association with” on the certificate. Thus we can rebuild a legitimate consistency of curriculums.
2. Be sure to state “certified by” and the organization’s name, date, address and contact information on the certificate so that anyone questioning the value can contact your organization and confirm the content and the completion of the course. With typesetting easily available on every computer, producing your own attractive certificates ought to be within every teacher’s capability.
3. Sign the certificate. At least the head instructor should sign and it would be great to have all instructors sign each certificate. It is unnecessary to have contact information for the instructors. Co-instructors that are not part of the same PC Institute as the head instructor can sign as a Guest Instructor.
4. The design of the certificate is important only as it contains all the necessary information and so that it can be framed and hung proudly by the participant. Any logo should not be borrowed from any other organization without permission. Often one sees a logo on a certificate that has been slightly altered from some other logo but it would be best if we used logos that represent the locale and the ecosystem that the courses take place in and reflect. The traditional Andrew Jeeves/Mollison logo is still used by the Permaculture Institure/USA.
5. Certificates are useful when a graduate needs to cite educational experience. Some people are now coming from developing countries to take advanced courses such as Teachers’ Trainings and they use such certificates for job advancement and access to further education. Anyone who issues educational certificates needs to keep curriculum documents that can be sent on request. A group photo with signage of where the course took place and the title of the course is useful for folks from overseas who may need lots of documentation to use the certificate to qualify for government jobs.
BACKGROUND (The story of Permaculture Trainings)
In the early phases of Permaculture education Bill Mollison invented a series of institutions and certificates so that we could present credentials and thus participate in academic, business and government conversations. The idea was that we would need to mimic the main stream institutions in order to gain audience and entrance. Thus we had the Permaculture Institute, with an address in Australia and the Permaculture Academy, with international accreditation filed in Tahiti. There was once an international registry of Permaculture Designers that was updated and discussed at International Permaculture Convergences.
The Permaculture Design Course or Permaculture Consultant’s Design Course was originally outlined in a document called the Permaculture Design Course Handbook. The certificates commonly issued used the logo from the front of the book PERMACULTURE: A Designer’s Manual and the address in the handbook and on the certificates was for The Permaculture Institute in Tyalgum, Australia.
The Academy offered a series of Diplomas (two year experience based certification with a thesis submitted) and advanced degrees (Masters and Doctorates) and used a system of Vice Chancellors located in various regions of various continents. One submitted documentation to the Vice Chancellors who forwarded the applications to The Permaculture Academy for the issuing of diplomas and degrees signed by Bill Mollison as the Academy Chancellor. Although in the module called The Permaculture Scene at the end of our Ecotopian courses we still talk about opportunities for further Permaculture education, the Academy is no longer functioning and folks asking for diplomas are referred to Scott Pitman who files the requests or are told to send the application to the Design Course facilitator for later action when we do have a system re-established.
The Permaculture Institute of North America, founded in the mid-eighties, now exists only on paper. Maritime Permaculture Institute was formed in the Pacific Northwest in the early 90’s for regional networking and has not met recently. There were and are also various Permaculture magazines published both locally as newsletters and internationally (such as “Permaculture”, in England, “The Permaculture Activist”, in the USA and “The Permaculture Journal” in Australia, now defunct). These publications continue to be the advertising platforms for courses and gatherings. In the USA some intentional communities became serial campuses for periodic courses and regional convergences.
DISCUSSION (Where to From Here)
Bill Mollison is now elderly and still teaching but the elaborate set of institutions have mostly succumbed to lack of funding and continuity. None the less, in the USA we still find Permaculture courses claiming that all this international structure is functional or just in abeyance. The logo of the Permaculture Institute has been deployed without permission by T-shirt manufacturers, advertising campaigns and on course completion certificates.
Many Permaculture teachers have continued to reproduce the certificates that they received in the early eighties. Bill Mollison was heard by many early “permies” to encourage all to just get to the work and use the term Permaculture any way that may lead to a change of culture toward the sustainable ends taught in the courses. By the late eighties the word Permacuture had become a commonly used word in the English language and was found in some dictionaries. Litigation before the courts failed to find that the term had a copyright. Although there was some litigation instigated by Bill Mollison to limit the use of the concept in other authors’ publications these litigations failed to confine the use of the original ideas. Eventually, Bill Mollison refused to certify individual teachers claiming that the two week Design Course needed to include all the material in the Designer’s Manual.
Since the late seventies the original Course Handbook curriculum has had new information on sustainability and the design process added, especially the use of a long list of principles. Also included are many handouts, articles, exercises and new sequences of material. Some instructors continue to hand out the Course Handbook and ask that participants confirm that the subjects have been covered as part of the current curriculum, as well as in the supplementary offerings. Most often, the seventy two hour minimum course length that includes the design group preparation and presentation, has been spread to more than ninety hours so as to include hands on projects, exercises, games and the additional subject matter. Some of the Course Handbook subjects have been dropped to make room and asking participants to be responsible for the Course Handbook curriculum has been used to justify handing out the original certificates. Weekend series courses often do not much exceed the seventy two hours minimum although the participants may meet locally outside of class time in between weekends to work on their design projects and to do hands on exercises.
Thus the Permaculture movement has grown with experience and with the ongoing discussion of ecological design found in many compatible books, courses and magazines. “We are surrounded by insurmountable opportunities” (a commonly stated permie- principle). Permaculture is understood by some as using specifically the zone and sector method of design supported by a collection of principles of design and couched in the three core ethics of care for the earth, care for the people and distribution of surplus. Careful observation and natural pattern mimicry are the all-encompassing skills. To many Permaculture has come to mean a basket of ideas and practices that lower carbon footprints and promise a more sustainable future for human inhabitation. Writers such as Kim Stanley Robinson have popularized the term in science fiction novels and what I call “permie-pulp”.
Some Permaculture Design Courses have also devolved into feel good celebrations and excursions into related speculative topics of the spiritual, intuitive or political.
There is no existing organization to which teachers are answerable for
a consistent curriculum or an adherence to measures of educational success. The movement is metastasizing and we find that some institutions of higher education are now offering so-called Permaculture courses. Many other colleges and universities are offering ecological design courses that may have been inspired by Permaculture but do not use the term. We might want to celebrate the success of a mimetic idea infection.
Early in this new century we have seen attempts at forming Permaculture Teachers Associations: Western PTA and Eastern PTA in North America. Discussions in the initial meetings included the invention of new logos and the regularization of curriculums as well as some cooperation in scheduling to ease competition. Both these start ups floundered on the usual rocks of undercapitalization and lack of time for discussion.
Permaculture courses have been organized on a free lance basis and represent a grass roots movement that has trained many thousands of designers who have gone out and done great stuff on a local and small experimental basis. This is remarkably successful even if it is wild and inconsistent. To institutionalize such a system of idea dissemination may be inappropriate to the ecological crisis we now find worldwide. Exclusivity and pretensions of true knowledge are old paradigm conservatism. Open source sharing is more appropriate to the challenges now before us.
If “old growth” teachers are unhappy with the competition of what might be considered “woo-woo” courses or about the integrity of what curriculum is used and what is missing, it would be a waste of everyone’s time to try to police and constrain the abundance. Reputation is more important than advertising. If a teacher is worried about competition then they might want to consider that what they offer needs to stand on its own. With the wealth of courses being called Permaculture, potential students would do well to seek references and information on the teachers’ reputations to find the most useful education.
We are way beyond the place of warning the public and infiltrating traditional institutions as Bill Mollison intended early in the movement. As we watch the unfolding of predicted disasters, local food security and lifeboats for survival of species seems to be the agenda. Build your own and they will come. Focus locally and work with neighbors. Forget flying all over the world and placing magazine articles to advance one’s career. Enhance your ecological footprint, organize locally and hope that some of us are well placed for unknown eventualities.
The inertia of governments and educational institutions as well as the ongoing greed and shortsightedness of corporations and the very rich and powerful do not offer any hope or guidance for reform. At this point “only go where invited” (another permie-principle) seems appropriate.
We should certainly continue to offer design and advanced courses but how can we pretend that there is a coherent movement or coordinated Permaculture institutions? Certainly we might rebuild or form new certifying institutions and some of the traditional institutions are still somewhat in business, but I would prefer to be able to send students of mine to further study and good communications within the movement.
Cascadia Permaculture Institute was formed by Jude Hobbs, Rick Valley, Toby Hemenway and myself in the late 1990’s in order to have some standards in curriculum for the Design Course and Advanced Courses. We have all had extensive experience in design and in teaching an expanded version of Mollison’s original course. We still hold to the core permaculture curriculum but we have added exercises, hands on, updated concerns and much more on principles and patterns. I call this the Ecotopian curriculum and many other west coast teachers are using this basic format. There is still a need for some standardization and documentation so that inquiries can be accommodated and so that students attending advanced course have some common experience and language.
We all use local knowledge to illustrate design issues and we all change the content in flight as the situation and participant readiness demands. We have accumulated much more material than can possibly be presented in the over 90 hours we now teach in a Design Course. We are all very busy and since we are front line activists without an institute, without budget or walls, none of us has had the time or felt the need to get formal academic accreditation for our curriculum or certification of instructors.
I can still imagine that Permaculture education might someday be part of all public schooling. We have had a high school program in Ashland for ten years. The early students are coming back to us and thanking us for the inspiration as they move into graduate study and careers that were catalyzed by their early exposure. Very gratifying that!
So carry on bravely and pass the inspiration please.