2010 PDC VERMONT
PDC Vermont Unlearnings
The six years Corinne and I had been together up to the year 2010, we had been living a fairly holistic and simple life style, but didn't have a real deep understanding of Permaculture. Wherever we were, with friends or care-taking, we would plant our garden make a compost, build ovens and other such homesteading activities. We never had much money so we used what we had/knew to push our life to integrate with nature and to be resourceful.
It was 2010 when we decided to invest and take our first PDC in Vermont. We were very fortunate to have two great and knowledgeable teachers, Mark Krawczyk and Keith Morris. The classroom part of the PDC was intensive! Our classroom days were 9am to 9pm, of course we would take breaks, have lunch and take some of our learnings outside into the field. The inundation of information was overwhelming for many, including Corinne. I had had a lot of exposure with many of the topics discussed so I enjoyed it.
We went on a field-trip for several days, visiting local farms and projects that were using permaculture techniques. This was one of the more exciting and inspiring experiences of the PDC (Video of a honey bee swarm below). The hands on portion of the course was minimal and this provided me with my main unlearning.
It wasn't until I took another PDC that used a different approach than the-classroom-lecture-and-note-taking format, that I realized this unlearning.
The scope of information to transmit in Permaculture is so vast that using this approach is too much to take in, in too little time. I experienced another approach to learning Permaculture in my PDC in Auroville, South India with Bernard Alonso, which you can read about in the section PDC India Un/Learnings, in the right hand column.
This course was a great experience and an eyeopener for everyone who participated. The overarching message that made a big impact was, there is potential everywhere and permaculture has (or is developing) the tools to holistically turn our local and global problems into solutions.
Honey Bee Swarm
Video above of the honey bee swarm filmed by Simha Bode at Willow Crosssing Farm 2010. This was my first real experience being around bees. I have since taken a beekeeping workshop and helped a local beekeeper, see middle column of this page in my Capstone LIPD.
Huglekulture Workshop Switzerland
This hugelkulture workshop was given by someone who had just received their PDC diploma and did not know much about what he was doing. I ended up helping him lay the contour lines showing everyone how to use an A frame level. It is two years since I did this workshop and I just revisited the site with one of the friends I made from the workshop, it was abandoned and growing grass and weeds. All was not lost I made some good friends and it got me more interested in hugelkulture mounds, I have since done many variations of mounds. I also learned the valuable lesson of looking into a teachers background.
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1.2 Un/Learning with Permaculture by Will Bode is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported license.
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PDC 2012 Auroville, India
PDC India Un/Learnings
Corinne and I don’t usually make our decisions for our seasonal winter travel until the last minute. 2012 was one of those years, I saw the PDC+ Bernard Alonso was teaching in India. On contacting them I found out the course was full. I reached out to my Permaculture support web and it broke down the barriers and we were accepted as part of Bernard’s “Flying Crew” (teacher's assistants). The flying crew was a team of seven people who had already taken a PDC. The PDC was a two-week residential and we were a total of some 35 people from 18 different ethnic origins.
The first unlearning of the Auroville PDC was with the function and necessity of TEAMS! “You can’t do it alone”; the natural world always works with interdependence and so should we. By applying teams to any design process, you are stacking a multitude of perspectives and niche strengths. This creates a resilient, redundant, broad perspective base for the design. The flying-team took notes when the participants introduced themselves, later in a meeting the flying team and Bernard created the groups with the most diversity possible.
These groups were each assigned one ‘flying team’ assistant to help guide their learning throughout the course. We had a daily task list and the groups rotated through each task on the dawn of a new day. Time Keepers used a gong to keep us on schedule, the Scribes took all the notes (which were later compiled into google documents and shared with everyone), the Composters were to manage the compost, Bathroom team was keeping up on hygiene and so on. This worked amazingly well! At the end of the day we would do a group recapitulation of the day and everyone would have the chance to write a comment, a concern or an issue on a piece of paper. The flying team would meet with Bernard after the closing of the day, read over the papers and discuss the issues, propose solutions and next-steps, agree on action for the following day, and a review/update on the outcome would be reported the following day.
| The second unlearning was one that was hammered on, over and over again. “Throw that negative, problem-based approach out the window!”, with Bernard it has to be positive and solution based thinking! This came up so many times that we really got to see how deeply this pattern runs in most of our approaches. |
We were many people and the facilities were below capacity so we had to use our solution based approach to balance all the systems. One such approach was when you would see something needing to be done, instead of bringing it to someone's attention, use the "Why not me approach?" and do it yourself. This PDC was focused on the Social aspect of permaculture “Human Permaculture”. We made many group activities to break/loosen our left-brain analytical perspectives to help us enter the synthetic (unifying) right-brain perspectives. Exploring different types of awareness was a large portion of the unlearning experience.
This was a deeply transformative time for everyone involved! Many negative patterns were brought to the surface and discarded. Unlearning negative patterns is an on-going process for me and with reflection and remembrance of this course I see it is quickened.