[permaculture] 9-day PDC???

David Glober david.glober at yahoo.com
Tue May 6 03:33:33 EDT 2008


Greetings:

I'm a recent PDC 'graduate' - not quite one year ago - with some prior organic gardening and farming experience.

My certificate says I've completed a Permaculture Design Consultancy Course. Basically that I went to school for some unspecified period of time and that was the subject matter. It doesn't use the word Trainee. What it means to me is I've taken a brief and condensed Permaculture Design overview course. But the message has seemed mixed to me. To me there was a certain amount of hype and confusion. We were told we could now teach a  Permaculture Design to other people, but - don't hang a shingle, don't advertise our services, we're not ready for that. Now I just look to my own skill set to sort that out, but initially it was confusing, not just in terms of qualifications - but expectations.

What happened in the course was that really qualified teachers went over the Design Manual and gave us some opportunities to practice Design methods and principles. And I think that gave us a Design mindset, attitude, overview, approach. That's not the same as becoming a Designer. Even Bill worked with designs on a couple hundred farms or so before he really put himself out there as a designer.

It seems to me the people who were most at ease and enjoyed the course most and benefited the most - were the students with prior landscape design experience and/or the students with more than an acre land or access to a good bit of land....

As with any other teaching - some of the one-on-one time was the most memorable, made the deepest impression, may last with me the longest. One of several examples I could mention - Geoff Lawton saying to me with great sincerity at lunch something he'd mentioned in class - Garden like you'd farm, and farm like you'd garden. Having done a bit of both, that really struck home, and I think about that one phrase very often, while doing hands on work - or when thinking in terms of design.

David Glober
San Francisco

Toby Hemenway <toby at patternliteracy.com> wrote: Similarly to what Steve Read wrote, it's a misconception that the PDC 
makes you a "certified Pc designer."  That was never Mollison's 
intention, and he and others have gone to great lengths to make that 
clear. My certificate from the course I took from Bill and Scott Pittman 
in the early 90s says that I "have completed a Permaculture Design 
Trainee Course," so I was a Pc design trainee. I've never seen a 
certificate that declares that the holder is a certified designer. Does 
anyone out there have a certificate that says that?
 
       
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