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permaculture - Re: [permaculture] official certification

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  • From: Toby Hemenway <toby@patternliteracy.com>
  • To: permaculture <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [permaculture] official certification
  • Date: Sat, 23 Oct 2010 10:53:47 -0700

On Oct 22, 2010, at 4:24 PM, Cory Brennan wrote:

> Every PDC I know of gives a certificate at the end of the course saying
> "Permaculture Design Course" and none of them say "trainee." I was told by
> my teacher that I should apprentice for minimum two years to become a
> teacher, but not a designer.

There's no restriction on doing design work. Get out and design, no matter
whether you've taken a PDC or whatever. And design, and design some more. The
issue is in calling oneself "certified," as the paper you get is simply a
certificate of completion of the PDC, not of certification as a designer (I'd
hate to think there are certificates out there saying "certified Pc
designer", but then, most people just make up their own. I use the one
Mollison created, via the Permaculture Institute USA). It seems bizarre for
someone who has done one team design project in a class to say they are a
certified designer.

And I totally agree that BIll set up many policies in very vague ways, and as
Paul and other say, plenty of people claim the certificate makes them a
certified designer. There are currently a number of efforts, in Oz, NZ, UK,
and US, among others, to clarify this and correct it. The comments here so
far all suggest a high level of integrity, which is the saving grace for all
this.

Paul's Java story points out a related issue. Java certification, for one,
claims from the get-go to be a certification program, and the PDC was never
intended to be that. I think some people engaged in what I call "resume
bloat" and started saying they were certified after a PDC because it sounds
very grand, and it caught on.

And the Java program ends with an exam. There is no exam in the PDC. The
design project is not very rigorously "graded." I know there are rare times
when a PDC teacher says a design presentation is too lame to warrant a
certificate, but that almost never happens. You show up for the project, you
get your certificate. That's not really grading. PDC teachers all recognize
that the design project is a student project and is not graded with anything
at all approaching the rigor of a project that might actually get built as
designed. I don't think this is so much a weakness of a PDC as it is proof
that the PDC is a merely an intro to permaculture, and underscores that
nobody gains enough experience in a PDC to actually do competent design work.
The PDC's main function is to get people thinking in permaculture terms.

Toby
http://patternliteracy.com

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