1.1 Project description

This report is about my experience teaching an unorganized permaculture and ecovillage design course. The purpose of this report is to help others identify the potentials of such a situation prior to commitment and to give tools to transform similar circumstances. 

Using a new and more articulated version of the cynefin model this report shows what navigating the complex domain can look like. The report leads you through some interventions which kept this experience from complete collapse, as well as possible interventions which could have improved it from the beginning. You will see a design-on-the-fly model articulated and be introduced to tools and processes to help you write a report on an emotional and sensitive subject.

In the spring of 2014 my wife and I moved into an institute for sustainability (for this OP I will call it I.S.). We were hoping to help the owners with their vision of becoming an ecovillage. After two and a half months of not meeting eye to eye with the owners (for various reasons) we decided to leave. This decision came just before the permaculture and ecovillage design course was to begin. Previously I had agreed to teach the course and my wife agreed to organize the kitchen, so we saw our promise through. 

Roles: 

Simha - I was one of the two lead teachers for this course. I was the only teacher who had a Permaculture Design Certificate (PDC) with hands on experience of teaching/implementing permaculture design.

Note: The names of people have been changed in this report to protect the privacy of individuals involved.

Je - The other lead teacher of the course and owner of the institute thought up the course, created the syllabus and asked me to teach it with her. Je understood permaculture through the lens of David Holmgren's permaculture flower.

Ko - Another teacher who had taken a PDC many years back and did not feel confident teaching. Ko served as a scribe for the two weeks (besides teaching a few sessions on leadership and yoga). 

Ri - The partner of Je and also a owner of the organization. Ri co-taught a few sessions with me and was the lead teacher for the yoga classes.

Resident team - The resident team of interns was five people including my wife. Their role was to manage the farm and daily chores as well as assisting my wife as the kitchen focalizer. 

Participants - There were eight students for this two week course, seven were in their early twenties and one was in her sixties. 

Je's goals for the course as I saw them: (See also Course description in the left column of Supporting Evidence for her published version)

• Focus on the social permaculture while touching on ecological design.
• Keep the over all focus of a leadership course, empowering the participants to become world-changers.
• Use leaderful and experiential teaching methods for all the sessions

My responsibilities involved lead teaching many sessions and co-teaching most of the other sessions. I created a group design project that wove through the two weeks, I was the lead teacher for all these sessions. I was a support role for Je and Ri co-teaching many of their sessions. I was in charge of multi-media, choosing film clips for the various subjects, setting up and running the projector while narrating, as well as creating all the handouts. I designed and focalized the implementation of a polyculture berm and swale with the participants, seen in image below.

Click image to be taken to a photo album of the polyculture mound (press back arrow to return to report). 

After the course I turned to the cynefin sense-making model trying  to understand how and why things happened the way they did. Cynefin model seen in the right column. I found the website Cognitive-edge who had developed the model further, see image below of the complicated domain. This map of the complicated domain spoke to me directly on an intuitive level, even though I did not understand it explicitly at first glance.

From my frame of reference as a lead teacher, this course falls under this domain with the qualities of the "longitudinal problem" - which is the red square in the lowest corner. Cognitive-edge describes the longitudinal problem as "where we have engaged too many people before the ideas are fully formed. That means that entrenched ways of doing things will actively compete with novel and new ways." As teachers we needed time before the course to orient and rapid prototype sessions. (see blog post linked with image for more information).  

An unbalanced power dynamic of ownership was a continuous thread that ran through the entire time I lived and worked at I.S. I kept balance in this unbalanced context by praising what they had accomplished and acknowledging that what they had presently was working for them. When I would offer possible solutions to issues, or changes in their systems to consider, I would do it without criticizing. This is using David Holemgren's 12th permaculture principle creatively responding to change.

Image from cognitive-edge.com - click the image to go to a blog post explaining it in full (press back arrow to return to this OP).