permaculture

[Toby Hemenway <toby@patternliteracy.com>]

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 PDC, 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