* doing practical project work or making changes in your lifestyle
* systematically noting your observations about effects of the actions you have taken, or the actions other people have initiated
* thinking about how your observations further your understanding of permaculture theory
* working out how your conclusions will affect your designs for the next action opportunity
* designing another project to see if your new learnings work on the ground.

And at Brighton Permaculture Trust we describe the Diploma as a deliberate self-managed journey of experimenting, watching, thinking, waiting, writing, trying out, talking it through, living it and sharing, supporting, recording the changes and eventually telling the story of your journey to other people who think like you!

So it's not a course, it's your course, there's no laid down topics apart from your topics, and how you use the Permaculture Ethics and Principles to shape what you do...

The Diploma's essential accreditation criteria are:
Theory in Action - showing how you recognise and use the Ethics and Principles of permaculture... living the theory, if you like
Design Practice - putting permaculture designing into practice on a diversity of levels, appropriate designing for land or space-based, virtual environments such as changing living habits, or redesigning relationships... maybe up to ten projects.

The 'complementary criteria' are:
Dissemination - sharing your design work, writing, speaking, teaching...
Symmetry - giving something back to the permaculture community, especially the one that 'nurtured' your interest...
Community Building - a deliberate focus on your wider community, not just ploughing your own sustainable furrow...
Evaluation and costs - keeping on going round the quality circle, measuring your success and using it to plan the next step, knowing what the costs are, to help gauge the 'value' of all the activities to which permaculture can contribute.

Above, a new Diploma group using the concept of natural patterns to understand what an Action Learning Pathway can be... Every 6 months or so you can meet with your Action Learning Tutor, to check out how your self-managed study is going. When you need it, you can find a Design Support Tutor for specific technical help, or to see how the Permaculture Ethics and Principles are being illustrated in the project ideas, and if you are using a wide enough range of tools, techniques, design methods to get the best yield from your design. And your own Action Learning Guild should meet regularly across the time you've planned for your Diploma, to ask the Four Questions of each other, and generally support the community of Permaculture Diploma Apprentices.

Your Action Learning Pathway (ALP) So your life goes around and you realise that the Permaculture Design course got you into thinking about shopping in the little local shops rather than Tesco's. Or maybe cooking a bit more homemade food instead of buying stuff that's got lots of packaging on it - saving a few kilos of plastic going into landfill. And you think that a walk to work is a useful way to get some exercise, rather than paying through the nose for a Gym that you have to drive to, so you rarely go! And when you talked about Peak Oil, your partner got keen on putting in solar panels for hot water. Some parents at the school start a Walking Bus, so you think it'd be 'fair shares' to volunteer, even though your children moan about getting wet! Your Action Learning Pathway can begin like that. You can plan a project from scratch, such as getting information about eco-paints, to make your home greener. Or you can start observing the changes that you want to make in your life anyway, and call each one of them a project. Your ALP is a two-year plan made up of many ideas and projects, some with short timescales, others longer term - something that lets you design a solution, observing, analysing, using tools such as natural patterns, zoning and mapping to recognise multifunction, the richness of the edge... So, go with the flow, see what you need to do right now - OK, that's your first project decided! Or rather, your second ~ get your ALP down on paper, meet with your Action Learning Tutor, and maybe your AL Guild, and start your "journal" to keep a record of the next two years. This can be your first &, on evaluation, your final project.

> access your year group: seedling, sapling and fruitbearing trees!

> To know more about how to do the Diploma, including costs, go to the Permaculture Association Diploma webpages