Action Learning Tutorial

I find that when I'm thinking about the Diploma it can all get a bit tangled up in my head. One of the yields of having an 'Action Learning Tutorial' is getting one's disorganised thoughts presented back to you in a form that seems to make more sense.

At the 2013 National Diploma Gathering, I had a chance to sit down with my Diploma Tutor Graham Burnett and another apprentice Ben Lambert and have a tutorial. We used the classic '4 questions' model. Here's Graham's write up:

James Taylor Permaculture Diploma Support Tutorial 29/11/2013

 

Held at Castleton, Derbyshire at National Diploma Gathering (with Ben Lambert)

 

 

What is going well with my Permaculture Diploma journey?

 

• Plenty of designs

• I feel I have a good understanding of of what I am doing and what is expected of me

• Feel good to be supported by Graham again after a long hiatus

• Feel excited about the diploma

 

What are my barriers to accrediting at this time?

 

• Prioritising which designs to include as the 10 required for the portfolio

• Barriers around how to write these up

• Overcommitment – taking on too much?

• Started in 2006 – why rush now? What are my 'rewards' for procrastinating? 

 

Goals re Diploma Accreditation

 

• This time next year? Sooner? Maybe June 2013? Stack into PDC? Perhaps too ambitious?

 

Next Steps

 

• Portfolio assessment Feb 15 2014 most likely at James' place (TBC)

• Designs to be sent to Graham by Jan 7th 2014

 

Other points

 

• “I need a 'taskmaster' to set me clear goals and dates”

• Discussed 'informal' relationship with Graham - 'boundaries' between 'work' and 'friendship' modes recognising and acknowledging these.

• Overview of design portfolio and activity

• Questions re. Which 'system' James is registered with, logistics of payment

• Agreed previous tutorial with Graham to be considered 'informal' as was for benefit of both parties

to come up to speed with the new system

 

 

So I've got a set of actions to follow up on:

 

• Choose which 10 of my designs to accredit with
• Pick an accreditation date
• Confirm location for portfolio assessment
• Get 5 designs written up for Jan 7th 2014
•  Confirm with PA office which system I'm registered on/where I'm at with payments

Action Learning Pathway Redux

Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here? Asked Alice.

That depends a good deal on where you want to get to, said the Cat. I don't 

much care, said Alice. Then it doesn't matter which way you go, said the Cat.

                                                                                                                  Lewis Carroll (1)

An 'Action Learning Pathway' (ALP) or 'Diploma Learning Pathway' (DLP) is a commonly suggested first design for apprentices on the Diploma in Applied Permaculture Design. It's a pattern design for the entire Diploma, which will be filled in with detail by the Diploma's conclusion by (at least) another 9 designs, an account of technical training and more.

Back when I first registered for the Diploma in late 2006, an ALP was just a suggested design - now, while it is not an essential portfolio design, most portfolios contain one and it's highly recommended to have one. For apprentices that are very land focused in their designing, it provides an opportunity to apply permaculture design skills and methods to an 'invisible structure' - one's own learning. It also centralises and promotes the fact that the Diploma process is one of action learning - acting and reflecting on one's actions in order to influence and enhance future actions - learning by doing.

At the start of the Diploma journey it can provide a structuring element in the field of possibility, identifying a destination and a proposed route. The route may of course, in fact will, change as the journey progresses - but having a route map provides the confidence to begin and an initial action from which to learn. It reflects something of the maxim President Dwight D. Eisenhower learnt in the Army 'Plans are worthless, but planning is everything.'(2).

When I signed up for the Diploma I didn't take the suggestion to design my learning pathway, I took the minimum two year term to complete as an invitation to take as long as I liked, I wasn't in a hurry. At the time, my objective in signing up for the Diploma if I could be said to have one at all, was simply to stay engaged with permaculture. But I found myself staying engaged with permaculture anyway, supporting courses put on by Naturewise, participating in monthly London meet-ups, volunteering at Plot 21 and the Naturewise Forest Garden. All of these could have been consciously part of a pathway, but they weren't consciously designed into my life.

So my Diploma lacked some purpose and a clear destination, like Alice I didn't seem to care much where I was going - so perhaps as the Cheshire Cat suggests, it didn't matter much what route I took. Only, it's difficult to be completely convinced of that when the minimum two years has expanded to spill over into eight... I have engaged in much permaculture related activity, attended many courses in related skills, applied permaculture design thinking, implemented permaculture designs and more - but I think I can attribute at least partial causation for my lethargy in completing the Diploma to that initial (and ongoing) avoidance of setting clear goals and route planning.

I have scratchy and half-formed ALP notes from over the years, which are partial materials for an ALP design, but where an ALP design could most effectively help me now is in designing a route for my final Diploma stretch from Here to Accreditation, so that would be the most best place to make my next steps.


1) Carrol, Lewis Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865)
2) From a speech to the National Defense Executive Reserve Conference in Washington, D.C. (November 14, 1957) ; in Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States, Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1957, National Archives and Records Service, Government Printing Office, p. 818

Design: Sustainable Commute - Survey Stage 1

Definition of commuter:

(noun) a person who travels some distance to work on a regular basis

In May 2012 I began a new full-time job in central London, while living out in Essex. Not for the first time in my life, I became a commuter...

There are reasons and justifications for all the decisions that led to this situation, living in Essex - working in London. All of which are worthy of inquiry in their own right, but for now I'll just accept these as boundary conditions of a situation that requires design.

In fact when I began the job, I felt my options were limited and chose to repeat actions I had made before, which had largely worked. [this is a design process of a sort, of course, and one commonly used - what worked before? do that again - but a very limited one]. I bought a monthly season ticket for the local railway, which was expensive but affordable within my new salary and began a daily return journey to work using train and tube to get me to work.

I'm now in my fourth month of repeating that pattern and at the end of a 3 week hiatus after a week's leave followed by a fortnight of telecommuting during the Olympics. It seems to be a good moment to pause and reflect - to do a survey of how things stand as the initial stage of a design process.

I think a good place to start a survey/begin reflection might be with a client interview - a pre-determined list of questions that I can use to structure my reflections and guide me toward capturing valuable information that an informal account might miss.

There are a few pro-forma permaculture client interview sheets around, including:

1.  one put together by Joe Atkinson for the Permaculture Association's Introductory Course materials.
2. one put together by Aranya and provided as a download for purchasers of his book Permaculture Design - A Step by Step Guide.
3. A client interview checklist printed in Patrick Whitefield's book The Earth Care Manual.

These all share many common attributes, not the least of which is that they are all land based/site focused. This means that they are not immediately appropriate for a non-land based design.

I feel that Aranya's provides the most easily modifiable to my purposes, so I have adapted his Client Interview questions for a wider context. [It's a quick and dirty solution however, as thinking about the type of information the site questions are seeking to draw out and considering the non-site analogues for that type of information, quickly reveals that a non-land based based client interview sheet really needs its own design].

Patterns of Mind: Habits

Tyler Volk's book Metapatterns is subtitled 'Across Space, Time and Mind' - highlighting three distinct areas in which we might examine patterns. I have started to address some of the aspects of pattern in spatial terms, in my work on natural pattern that you can see some of here.

I've also been thinking a lot recently about mental patterns, patterns of mind - what we might also refer to as habits. This seems a fruitful area to explore for the Diploma student. In fact a commonly referenced book in regard to learning as a Diploma student, uses the formulation 'habit': Stephen R. Covey's The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People; Powerful Lessons in Personal Change.

Two other resources which may be useful in this regard are Leo Babuta's book and website Zen Habits, and  Charles Duhigg's book The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business.

Independent Scholarship

As the Diploma in Applied Permaculture Design is self-directed, as an educational experience its similar to post-graduate education (although apparently its considered to be about an 'A Level' qualification). The handful of tutorials included in the cost are less contact time than the average masters degree, and the task of getting educated is largely left up to you in terms of both form and content, with the accreditation criteria a framework goal.

Some voices would like to pattern permaculture education into a more recognised tertiary education format, indeed this is something of what Gaia University has done, by creating degree programmes for eco-social education. I'm not so sure about the value of doing that however, especially in the more mundane context of meshing with the UK HE sector.

Free Thinking not Fee Thinking

With a bachelors degree and two masters behind me, I increasingly question exactly what is going on in universities, what value they provide and at what cost. Cost is obviously increasingly an issue in the UK, as tuition fees rise and government support retreats. Universities are cutting departments, students are getting into debt and as paying customers rightly demanding a different experience base don their actual needs. I doubt whether universities can ever meet some of those needs any more. The financial and resources crunch has implications for education as it does for everything else. Paying thousands of pounds for a course taught at some institution far from home for years as a prelude to a working life characterised by the need to pay that money back is going to be a less and less viable path of education.

The recognition of this is rising, with anarchist free schools making welcome reappearances, skill-shares and skill-swaps occurring elsewhere, the University Project, open source education, commentary from Kio Stark, James Marcus Bach (see videos below) etc.




There's a long history of independent scholarship of course, and a great resource to check out is Ronald Gross's work, especially his The Independent Scholar's Handbook, which is downloadable legitimately and for free from here, but would be worth paying for just for the bibliography.

Christopher Alexander: The Battle to Bring Life and Beauty to the Earth

Christopher Alexander

Last night I attended the Urban Design Group's 2011 Annual Kevin Lynch Memorial Lecture, which this year featured Christopher Alexander as its guest speaker. The 2011 Kevin Lynch Memorial Lecture, the highlight of the Urban Design Group's events calendar, welcomed Prof Christopher Alexander. Christopher was in conversation with the UDG’s patron John Worthington, discussing his career, his influential ‘pattern language’ and his forthcoming new book (with Hans Joachim Neis, and With Maggie Moore Alexander): The Battle to Bring Life and Beauty to the Earth; A Struggle Between Two World Systems.

Fundamental Aim: Wholeness

Key to his thinking here is the difference, and the titular struggle, between his vision of participative and place based design 'System A', and the way almost all mainstream, first world directed architecture occurs, 'System B'. System B, the business as usual approach favoured by governments, corporations and other large institutions is motivated by financial profit and observable all around us. In his lecture Alexander presented an example of the rarer System A approach, through an illustrated presentation of his work on the Eishin Higashino High School and College campus built near Tokyo, Japan between 1982 and 1985.

You Charm the Form out of the Configuration

Alexander was a gnomic presence on stage, evading containment within the discourse of contemporary architectural practice with Zen like turns of phrase, modesty and an idiosyncratic response to questions. He expressed the fundamental aim of his work as 'wholeness', and it seemed clear to me, though he never stated it explicitly, that his approach was essentially spiritually motivated. In appealing to essential harmonies, he presented his work not as conscious design, but as the act of 'dreaming the configuration' and then charming form from that configuration. In a challenge to his assembled professional colleagues, he proclaimed that 'Design is something that's going to get you in a mess'.

Do the Simplest Thing Always

As the lecture turned to a Q&A, the contrast between Alexander's method and those regularly used by architects was quickly reinforced. Repeatedly, the Ego of the architect was cited as a driving force that was both absent from Alexander's approach and a limiting factor preventing its wider application. This Egoic boundary was presented almost as if it were an unassailable condition, and it was clear that many of those present perceived their own professional identity to be synonymous with a heroic vision of the individual. A couple of questioners sought a middle path between their forms of practice and Alexander's; his reply noted simply the dangers arising 'the moment you touch a poisoned way'. Alexander's challenge was practical as well as psychological: he claimed to never use drawings and that in his work the construction phase was more important than the design one. He did not produce a 'finished plan' but adjusted buildings repeatedly during the building process, aligning them harmoniously with the site. He stated that this approach demanded the right kind of clients and the right kind of contractors, but never told how he harmonised his method with the requirements of planning and building control authorities...

Eishin Campus

While it was humorous to observe the challenge Alexander made to a room full of architects, I also felt a challenge to my own methods of permaculture design. The emphasis on the implementation phase, required me to think through the design frameworks I use again and recognise the importance of each stage. It was clear that Alexander saw construction as a time of observation and interaction, each step changing the site and providing new opportunities to creatively respond. This essentially is action learning, the 'praxis' that gives this site it's name.

I was left at the end of the lecture part inspired and part frustrated. I wanted to know more about Alexander's process than a short talk could provide, and so the book to follow (due early 2012) is excitedly anticipated. Tantalisingly, the pre-publication press indicates that the book outlines nine ways of working, "each one fully dedicated to wholeness, and able to support day-to-day activities that will make planning, design and construction possible in an entirely new way, and in more humane ways". Sounds like a great addition to any permaculturalist's bookshelf.