b. Curriculum

PDC Curriculum

PDC = Permaculture Design Certificate

May 2012 - Expanded Options

See full page >> http://bit.ly/ActionLearningCourses

Nodo Espiral has been teaching permaculture courses in Spanish since 2003, although we've had fluent bilingual teachers (Spanish - English) from the start.
In 2011 we started offering our in-depth Integral Permaculture Certificate (the PDC+++) also in English &
In May 2012 we expanded the offer of courses to these:

Mini-Process Diary

5 Nov 2012

We're very pleased with how it's all going! We have some AMAZING students doing all level of courses with us now (from introduction to diploma level) and some time ago developed a new more 'atomized' steps structure (see summary TABLE) to enable people to come in at any level they wished.

We are pleased to be able to offer 2 courses at beginner level, 2 at intermediate level & 2 at advanced level.

We're also slowly building up a wonderful team of teachers, recently organized into a Facebook group, as it seems more & more people are using this tool, and despite our initial doubts, it seems to work well.

16mar11 - in response to a dialogue on eco-village design in the GEN mailing list.

Thanks for the interesting dialogue & hope there is space & willingness to consider a design-science take on all this:

together with some permaculture teacher colleagues & from time, we have become increasingly concerned about an apparent demand for recepies or quick / simple answers to follow and what we have noticed to be a 'recepy' / toolkit adoption of much sustainability conversations and teachings. Examples of good practice are elevated to kit-parts and copied outright or at best combined in different ways, instead of the underlying science informing a much more creative and efficiently adaptive approach (which would make much of the framework of this conversation redundant, in a very interesting & useful way).

It is very worrying to us that even Gaia Education is doing a great dis-service to sustainability science by spreading some quite incorrect & very confusing information about permaculture design (eg. by presenting it as a sub-section of something they call 'ecological practices' which are separated from cultural, social & economic practices).

This is very mis-leading and potentially destructive to progress for all of us because infact the genius and most important contribution of permaculture is precisely that it integrates all of these aspects and provides a *design language* or science for the BASES of these and more facets, that can be used in all scales and contexts (permaculture design techniques, principles, ethics, directives, frameworks and methods can be used to design anything from a balcony to a bioregion - so putting exactly this kind of conversation on a more integral and powerful, useful base): they give the basic building-blocks, re-framing the issue always as a unique design problem, not a 'which model to apply' problem.

No recepies are needed (or useful) when a fundamental science or language of sustainable design is understood, and we notice that all sorts of re-invention of the wheel are avoided when we become fluent in some useful patterns, ways of thinking & basic science (rather than ready-made 'kit-type' designs to swap and change around).

We discovered this also through making many errors in teaching permaculture design throughout four decades: for eg. we noticed people would 'learn' things like "strawbale houses are ecological" or that there was "one or two best kinds of compost toilet" - when infact this kind of thinking is the mark of a non-designer: someone who copies rather than designs, through a lack of knowledge of basic design principles & science), and so often will waste resources and rarely be able to come up with precisely crafted, ingeniously flexible & locally adapted solutions to local problems - the mark of excellence in sustainability.

It is the (big) difference between being familiar with raw science (the basic models themselves) and just knowing about many different technologies that have already been designed by people who understood the basic science. The first does take more effort and an ability to manage levels of abstraction, but also delivers the matching benefits.

In terms of teaching, it is the difference between teaching to fish and giving people fish, we think, as sustainability practitioners & teachers very keen to make the latest, most radical (= going to the roots) & most usable & effective contribution to the eco-literacy of future generations.

Click on the image to zoom in.

Sept 2011 - IPC10

Presentation to IPC10 Convergence

21st September 2011 - WATCH RECORDING HERE

IPC10 Slide Presentation: *click here to see with notes* (select speaker notes, below slides) the Integral Permaculture Curriculum

Apr2011, Launch of PDC+++

Video Launching the PDC+++, April 2011

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lir6Qoc_ffE

We were hoping for some professional video-help which never materialized, so we finally left it at this, which was the first basic draft.

Sept2010 - EUPC

In September 2010 we sent this presentation to the European Permaculture Convergence that was being run in Belgium, which we could not attend because we (of Nodo Espiral) were busy teaching a PDC course near Madrid.

It was a little of a rush (so many things to do that month!) but managed to get two videos about this which I quite like; this one is the shorter one

http://youtube.com/watch?v=O43V0eXAiAE

(see presentation page for the longer video in which I just speak)

One of the innovations we tried out was a PC Certificate curriculum in 5 modules which I designed, (modules of 3 days or 21hrs each, usually a weekend) that would both highlight the various large areas covered by permaculture, make the course flexible, more accesible and also easier to manage amongst various & dispersed teachers.

< discussion group in class

The Five Modules + 1

Module 1 (M1) - People-Care deals with the Ethics, group & meetings design, personal support (how to design for it), collective intelligence, the meaning and history of sustainability, the scientific process (= design cycle = the action-learning cycle) and the advantages of having clear conscious models that can be tested out in practice: the basis for action-learning. for this Module: See full Programme here See e-book materials as links from each class

M2 - Design Techniques focuses on the tools for good design, the principles, the importance of thorough observation, the resources scale, the great variety of maps that exist and how to make a base map from raw field data, the choosing of apropiate design frameworks and an overview of the very many design techniques available (this is taken straight out of the Designers Manual adding many practical examples)

for this Module: See full Programme here See e-book materials as links from each class

M3 - Earth Care is concerned with studying soils, increasing fertility, earth works, plants and animals, cycles, acuaculture, designing and installing forest gardens + the principles are revisited with earth-care focus (this is taken straight out of the Designers Manual adding many practical examples).

for this Module: See full Programme here See e-book materials as links from each class

M4 - EcoTechnology and BioConstruction is about giving some physics basics (eg. optics for solar-ovens, thermodynamics for choosing types of heating and cooling, EMERGY basics for sustainability), we cover apropiate technology, innovation, alternative energy sources & eco-building techniques. (mostly from the Manual).

for this Module: See full Programme here See e-book materials as links from each class

M5 - EcoEconomics & Transition - emphasizes the design of local economies, how the current design of money creates most of the structural problems we live with today, history of and different designs for complementary currencies, also we cover the various legal structures and main areas to consider in setting up a small business, with living examples. for this Module: See full Programme here See e-book materials as links from each class

M6 - Diploma & Invisible Design - not part of the PDC, this is a follow-on for people who are considering the diploma. It is a revew of all modules + introduction to the diploma process and the significance of invisible design, and we advise taking this module some time after the first 5 which together amount to the Certificate in PC.

for this Module: See full Programme here

See ModularCurriculum for more detail of the day to day programme for each Module

The idea is that anyone can take any module as an Introduction to Permaculture and build up to the Certificate slowly, or just take the modules that most interest them, as they are designed to stand alone if required.

Each modules is taught by an experienced teacher and an apprendice or two and all teachers have to have solid practical experience in whatever they teach.

The Logo

The logo is multi-functional and also designed by me (in 2004 and before seeing the Holmgren flower!).

Essentially it is a sun-spiral to remind us that the focus of all design is “harvest only sunshine”, a good sustainability maxim.

The action-learning spiral + ‘paw’ symbol is about walking the talk, and keeping on learning by checking results of applied theory (there is an epidemic of ‘copying designs’ which is not designing at all).

Each of the ‘coloured sun rays’ represent one of the modules (M1 the violet, M6 the red).

< Group design presentation

Designers Manual

The curriculum is based on the Designers Manual, with a few added parts (in M1 & M5) which we consider important today + with as much practicals as we can fit in.

The new additions are my effort to teach PC in Spain in a way that highlights the need for critical own thinking and scientific experimentation, as I see there is a strong mystical (new age) current on one hand, and another 'experts know best' fairly dogmatic and recepy-based trend in PC which produces people who don´t really design but copy what they see as 'permaculture patterns'.

See ModularCurriculum for more detail of the day to day programme for each Module

< end of Action-Learning celebration on the beach

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... permaculturing anything I can get my paws onto ...

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