Thursday, January 9, 2014

Evolution of a PDC Endeavor?

With the recent unveiling of  Regenerative Leadership Institute's free online Permaculture Design course, many of us have elected to form small groups to meet together to watch and discuss these lectures by Larry Korn (translator of One Straw Revolution by Masanobu Fukuoka). We've also shared ideas on how to incorporate these lectures with hands on projects, which could include taking turns helping those in our small group with their own permaculture projects.

Without detracting from this valuable resource and generous offering, some concerns have been expressed over the teaching style of this particular course, which may seem disorganized to our Western brains,  although it may accommodate some people's  learning styles without any hangups. The challenge, therefore, is to come up with a way to work with multiple learning styles that will also lend itself to a group setting. To the best of my knowledge, the most organized outline for a PDC is the one from Permaculture's own cofounder, Bill Mollison in Permaculture: A Designer's Manual,, the textbook from which many PDC's condense and excerpt from. Below is an illustration (start from the bottom) of the intuitive flow in the organization of his subject matter that stood out to me after perusing the table of contents. 


So maybe to use an outline like this, we could take each unit (the bubbles with the numbers) and create multimedia lists of recommended reading, viewing and hands on projects including, but not limited to, the free online course lectures. These lists could be posted and continuously updated online (maybe on this blog) and each student taking the course could fill out logs for each educational activity pertaining to a unit, also including bits chosen for their own self study. Below is an example, complete with true-to-life mistakes. :) And fictional scenarios. 

Hopefully, this would accommodate both a self paced, autodidactical study as well as a group endeavor, and even both together, which would probably be what most of us would end up doing. So whatever permaculture related study or activity we happen to be doing, together or on our own, organized or scattered, we can keep a record of it under the basic unit/subject it would fall under.

2 comments:

  1. This is a great idea Sara. We had the same issues with the Regenerative Leadership free PDC course with our small group. I generated a spreadsheet that coordinated the class textbook, Gaia's Garden, with the video that it pertained to. Korn jumps around a lot, so the videos aren't necessarily in the same order as the text. (I'll be happy to share my spreadsheet if it will help). As an aside, the classes get better later on.

    My husband is holding me to applying what we learn each week, so this is a practical endeavor, not just an academic one. Forcing myself to think about where I'm going to implement it makes paying attention a little more urgent. I like that you put practical applications in your outline.

    Will this blog be sufficient for what you are talking about? Would a Google Doc work better, where we can all easily add to the document? Just brainstorming. I don't know enough about this blog site to know. Thanks for thinking this through. I think it's great and can't wait to see the elephant poop video!

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  2. I have been meaning to ask you about that spreadsheet since Eliza shared it at her last SCUPS talk. Yes, please share!

    I am really uncertain how to implement this. I shared the idea with my small group and we all thought something online that people could edit would be great, but I don't know where to start. I did commit myself to at least a printable version of the worksheet, but an outline and resource list might work on Google doc. Any suggestions are most welcome!

    Btw, the elephant poop video was fictional, but I sort of got the idea for it from Allen Savory's Ted talk.

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