Diploma Tutorial - Looking Back & Looking Forward

Last week as I began organising my planting and growing plans for the coming year I also took an hour out to have my first tutorial as part of my Permaculture Diploma. As I live in Manchester and my tutor, Hedvig Murray, lives down in Brighton this meant arranging time to hook up on Skype and spend an hour talking about where things are up to with my Diploma. Tutorials are an important part of the Diploma process as they are a great way of stepping back and considering where you are really up to with things and where you would like to head with them next.

I have to admit that before the tutorial I was a little apprehensive as life has been very busy for me so far this year meaning I was not sure how much progress I had actually made on my diploma. I knew I had been doing things (though not as much as I had wanted to!) but a lot of this doing had not been recorded meaning I was feeling a bit behind in the documentation aspect in particular.

We began the tutorial by talking about where I felt I was up to with things - this is where I outlined to Hedvig the things I have just shared with you in the previous paragraph! Despite the seeming setbacks, in talking to Hedvig, I realised that I was actually well on track with things and that it was just me documentation that had slipped a little. In order to start things moving forward with this we talked about different tactics that I could used to start getting my projects and ideas on to paper.

From my tutorial it became clear that my key learning so far had been:

• increased understanding of the Permaculture Design process and how it fits into my personal and professional practice.
• increased confidence in explaining what Permaculture means within my practice to other people, who may or may not know about Permaculture.
• developing my Action Learning Pathway.
• developing a design process that suits my work, and the predominantly non-landbased projects that I am working on.
• clarification of what my diploma guild was and how it would support my learning.

I also became clearer about the key objectives that I have for my diploma in the coming months:

• to research and develop ways that work for me of recording my work as I go along.
• to use my blog more as a way of documenting my learning and development.
• to complete the documentation of my first two designs and to allocate time to proper development of my third design - creating a eco garden for my friend Anne.

All in all my tutorial felt like a very positive experience and I am looking forward to putting the actions that I have identified into practice.

Comments

[Liz]

Dear Gerard

I'm glad that you have found my site useful. Here is the paper that I wrote following my Cuban trip that may be of interest to you:

http://www.myebook.com/index.php?option=ebook&id=120186

And if you are in Manchester in July you should try and visit this if you can:

http://www.mif.co.uk/event/the-biospheric-project

[Gerard O'Neill]

Hello Liz,
What a wonderful site you have developed here. I came across it when I was surfing the web about Cuba and the gardens there. My wife and I are avid gardeners and we go to Cuba almost every year and we have managed (because of our very astute observational skills) to totally miss the entire movement around the huerto intensivo.

Thank you for showing us more of the world of gardens and food production. You are an inspiration to us. Our next trip to Cuba will be all about growing and dirt.

We are going to be in Europe this summer and in Manchester in July. Perhaps you could recommend a garden or two for us to see.

Once again thank you for your hard work in the earth and here in the ether.

Gerard O'Neill
Canada