See here for a generic description of the 2 year Masters pathway

Introduction: This 2 year-long program is for people working at an advanced strategic level in the regeneration and world change fields using approaches informed by the permaculture and ecovillage design disciplines - the extended Opening Workshop is designed to extend each Associate's mastery into areas of design that they may not yet have had good opportunity to explore.

The Opening Workshop is also guided by a key insight that realizes that the technical solutions for regeneration and social justice are mostly available to us right now. The delay in the widespread, successful adoption of these solutions has to do with the mostly invisible, irrational resistances embedded within the psyches of individuals and societies. These resistances to intelligent transformation are bundled here, for easy recognition and remediation , as the patrix. We will pay attention to raising our awareness of the existence and effects of the patrix, both within ourselves and without and we will actively explore sharp tools whereby we can deconstruct this major limiting factor.

The Set of Associates and Advisers will come together to form a lively and stimulating learning community in which mutual teaching and learning methods will provide opportunity for considerable exchange.

In the first place the potential Associate works on a Career Review BEFORE the start of the Opening Workshop and then proposes a project for the year in which they can a) display their mastery and b) learn self-identified knowledge and skills required to render their mastery increasingly complete and integrative and c) has strategic value to the regeneration and world-change community.

Who should apply: We seek regeneration and world change practitioners of substance and developed expertise who are good self-organizing learners and who work with permaculture and ecovillage design thinking or similar. A permaculture design course, an ecovillage design course or equivalent are pre-requisites as is experience at the application of the principles, strategies and techniques of these disciplines.

You will be excited by the prospect of designing your own curricula for your Masters program. You do not need to already have a Bachelors Degree. It is unlikely that people straight out of undergraduate school will have adequate experience or will be working at an appropriately strategic level. See: Masters programs- who should apply.

Dates, venues and fees:

Program outline: Core elements of this learning community oriented Master of Science program are a 14 day intensive residential Opening Workshop, a 5 day Completion Workshop a year later and a 2 day accreditation festival/graduation contiguous with the Completion Workshop. 13 + 6 + 2 = 21 days total. Only two trips to the venue will be required.

During the year Associates will work at a project(s) of their own choosing. Each Associate will need to identify a person(s) local to themselves who is prepared to undertake a project mentoring role. This person may well be a client who commissions and specifies the project.

Support in these activities is provided by a peer group (Action Learning Set), a Set Adviser, a Project Mentor and two Specialist Advisers.

Program detail: The mutual teaching and learning workshop culture will encourage exchange of knowledge and skill sets amongst participants and will provide a mediated experience of working in a group of leaders working up a large scale, integrated design. We will use Open Space to populate significant portions of the workshop.

We will attend to: -

Extending our knowledge of design frameworks and methods (pattern languages, exclusion zones, string diagrams etc)

The dynamics of working in a design team - using The 10 Faces of Innovation and/or other group role analysis

Latest thinking regarding context stimulated socio-technical evolution of human societies - Saharasia/Chalice and the Blade/Spiral Dynamics including historical perspectives on previous vMeme rEvolutions, large and small scale

Social organization - competent consensus, decision-making methods, meeting methods, policy governance, organizational design and leadership issues, regenerative economics

Scaling up and broadening out our design competence - moving towards bio-regional design and ecosettlement design and understanding the nature of integrative design

The patrix within and without - tools for its progressive deconstruction

Our position in the world today - strategies for increased influence and effectiveness

Project management skills - costings, analytical estimating for time content, costs and resource needs, negotiation skills, monitoring competence and attention, contracts.

We will practice: -


How to do effective learning conversations

How to function as a support person and how to ask for the support we need

How to recover and/or activate our multiple intelligences

How to think using pattern languages, conceptual models, diagramming

How to make effective use of peer counselling resources wherever we are

The Opening Workshop includes: -

An orientation to Gaia U systems and philosophy including:

Action learning practices (Sets/think and listens etc)

Doing documentation for outputs

Understanding a second tier competence and attention model

Being proactive around asking for competence and attention feedback

Skills for generating outputs