Module 1 - People-Care
(put up this page here in order to facilitate a dialogue about 'invisible structures' we're having - if you´re interested in this issue please join the PermPsych and/or CollectiveIntelligence groups)
This "M1" is the first part of the PDC of the Nodo Espiral España 'node' of the Permaculture Academy
http://nodoespiral.net
Our PDC is a PROGRAMME of 5 Modules
The course is based in the Permaculture Designer's Manual, adding the key modern themes that we consider essential any Permaculturist be familiar with.
Each module is a 3 day course (21 hours), and includes: practicals, excercises, project presentations, excursions, videos, documentation and the formation of some ongoing support groups so that you don´t lack stimulation nor support when you return home and try to put into practice into your daily life and your projects, all that you have learned in the course.
The Programme
Intro - People Care is one of the 3 basic ethics of Permaculture ... but, how to put it into practice?
We people are, as well as the context, without doubt the most dificult aspect when it comes to achieving truly sustainable systems.
"The greatest challenges for humanity are not hunger, poverty, peace, public health, education, economy, natural resources, nor a combination of these or other matters ... but our capacity to build new social organizations capable of providing the solutions. Our greatest challenge is Collective Intelligence"
In this module we explore in a theoretical and also very practical way, the different facets of this most ample context: the nature of people, of groups and relationships; the models of investigation, learning, the history and meaning of sustanability.
day 1 - Ethics of Permaculture, Principles and Directives, Action Learning, Support Structures, The Scientific Process, Models and the Human Mind, Pattern recognition, the work of S Covey and E de Bono
day 2 - Collective intelligence, JF Noubel, Dialogue v Discussion, designing Effective groups and processes, Facilitation techniques, Comercialization of Spirituality and 'Deep Ecology', Holistic health
day 3 - Systemic Thinking - Sustainability, Local Agenda 21, What is the 'destructo-culture'? Models that explain why "things are as they are" & why they don´t easily change, Globalization, 'Development' and Economy, Laws of Nature, Ishmael, Spiral Dynamics, Gaia Theory, Native Peoples.
This is a very sketchy summary of a very intensive 3 days .. which also is evolving as we get more feedback from our students.
Reasoning
Systems Thinking is fundamental for permaculture design, and, together with "invisible design", the hardest thing to teach.
Our historical inability to teach (or learn) this well has resulted in the critiques of permaculture as not being 'enough' to really effectively redesign society, as expressed in this important article by Ted Trainer: http://ssis.arts.unsw.edu.au/tsw/D16WhyBotherWPermcul.html?
Homgren and other good permaculture designers & teachers have argued that this is because we need to 'get back to teaching principles', but this is about fundamental working models, not just principles.
In Dana Meadows very brilliant article Dancing with Systems: http://www.sustainer.org/pubs/Dancing.html
she says:
"Remember, always, that everything you know, and everything everyone knows, is only a model. Get your model out there where it can be shot at. Invite others to challenge your assumptions and add their own. Instead of becoming a champion for one possible explanation or hypothesis or model, collect as many as possible. Consider all of them plausible until you find some evidence that causes you to rule one out."
Teaching model/scientific method literacy (especially the conscious questioning of ALL models) is essential to developing the search and vision for patterns that is essential for good permaculture design.
So we challenge our students right from the start to make conscious many of our unconscious models - which are often very sloppy and this is what make many 'people care' or 'invisible structures' fail.
The Feedback
Mostly the verbal feedback from the students is that there is "too much" packed into very little time ... which is the general feeling of all of the PDC (and most others' PDCs we know of too). Much of the verbal evaluation is very good, apart from this discomfort issue. Occasionally some people get very cross with some of the challenging models we present (probably the people who actually start to understand the full implications of them during class).
We haven´t been teaching it long enough (since 2004), nor do we have enough close contact with the majority of our students to really evaluate what the action feedback is. We are figuring out how to change that.
Certainly the programme is designed to challenge existing mental schemes that people come with, and this is bound to create discomfort. There is a natural tension between our wish to challenge destructo-culture patterns and our wish to have people enjoy our courses.
The rest of this Curriculum
is here: http://www.geocities.com/reddepermacultura/2006/programa.htm
in both spanish and english
In Module 2 (Design Techniques) we explore invisible structures once again, as well as issues like innovation & creativity, social resources & designing 'soft-technologies'.
Module 5 (Eco-Economics), the last one of the PDC, re-groups some of the people-care & invisible structure models and questions met in Module 1, emphasising the cyclical nature of all this.
Web References for Module 1
Will try to compile here a set of references as links on the web, of the content of this curriculum (these are not necessarily the best links .. just the first I found .. if you see any better ones, please do say, Stella)
- The RC Model is a theory of how the human mind works (and especially why it doesn´t) which we present as an example of a non-accepted model: but is in fact a very good one. It's described here: http://www.rc.org/theory/index.html, But a lot better and with concept diagrams in a booklet called "The Human Side of Human Beings" ... which I found here in summary: http://eap.mcgill.ca/Publications/EAP15.htm .. amazingly enough - or not - on an "ecological agriculture" site
- S Covey's 7 Habits .. is actually the mapping of our Natural Succession towards Psychological Maturity (Scott has one too, but this one is more powerful) and although from the original book with a very misleading title perhaps .. it´s all essentially pretty good permaculture, complete with ethics base, principles and ongoing praxis: http://www.leaderu.com/cl-institute/habits/habtoc.html
- Spiral Dynamics - a model, to be questioned. We throw as many models out as possible for review, in order to excercise pattern recognition and model-questioning, NOT because we 'believe' these to be 'true' - they are just all quite plausible and very interesting in that they ask the type of questions permies who pretend to design new systems for society. http://www.spiraldynamics.com/book/SDreview_Dinan.htm, http://www.wie.org/spiral/
Dialogue
There is a great need internationally to keep dialoguing about the evolving contents of the PDCs across the globe.
In the design of our 'node' of the Academy we've tried to facilitate this ongoing praxis dialogue by making sure we meet on the courses and teach in rotation with many teachers, mixing very experienced with less etc., also so that we keep learning from and cross-fertilizing each other.
This isn´t working as well as predicted, so other elements are being investigated in order to fulfill these important functions.
Feedback welcome: Stella
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