Dynamic Groups, Dynamic Learning Dynamic Courses, Books, Resources and Tours for Healthy Groups, People and Culture with Robin Clayfield
MORE ABOUT EARTHCARE EDUCATION
The evolution of a tiny little business is an interesting one. It continues to grow and expand from humble beginnings, like a seed sprouting. We’ve become a viable young plant with many leaves, a strong aspiring trunk and deeply connected roots. We planted ourselves in fertile soil at Crystal Waters Permaculture Village in the Maleny bioregion, Sunshine Coast, Queensland, with many other sturdy ‘trees’ and ‘plants’ around us. May we all continue to grow together into a diverse, viable and healthy forest full of life and abundance and may our roots spread and connect around the world.
EARTHCARE EDUCATION HISTORY
Earthcare Education are pioneers in applying effective, empowering, creative and modern educational strategies and learning processes within the areas of Teacher Training, Facilitation, Group Dynamics, Permaculture, Community Services, Participatory Design, Strategic Planning, Men’s and Women’s Empowerment and Earth Healing.
In 1990 Robin Clayfield and Skye, based at Crystal Waters Permaculture Village in Queensland, Australia, began the Business partnership EARTHCARE EDUCATION as a vehicle for their passion to teach Permaculture Design Courses. Within a very short time they started to feel uncomfortable with the lecture format of teaching. It seemed impersonal, disempowering and from memories of college and university, neither effective nor efficient.
“With little more than our own creativity, intuition and commitment we decided to never lecture at people again” they said.
“What followed was an amazing journey of research, creativity and excitement, as we developed, tested and then later came to understand the real dynamics of how people learn. Within a couple of years we discovered that our developments were well founded in and supported by modern research in areas like Kinesiology, Neurology and Psychology (refer to writings of Carl Rogers, George Lazonov, Bernie Neville, Edward de Bono, Howard Gardner, Richard Bandler etc). Not only is our approach effective and sustainable, it is clearly the future direction of education at large.”
“Earthcare Education has merged two important philosophies, Permaculture and Creative Education while also working very much with empowerment of ourselves and all who come to work and play with us.”
Skye and Robin spent 9 years developing, co-creating and presenting over 28 Permaculture Design Courses (two week residential intensives) and 20 Creative Facilitation Courses (one week intensives) in 10 different and very diverse countries. In that time they also wrote and published The Manual For Teaching Permaculture Creatively and a variety of Games and Kits.
Skye then spent five years teaching and promoting Permaculture in Mexico and now lives permanently in Brazil with his partner Ivone where they live and work at a grass roots level with the local community.
Skye’s Web site is www.unigaia-brasil.org/ and worth exploring if you read Portuguese.
Robin continued teaching Permaculture Design Courses for some years, preferring to call them Permaculture, Deep Ecology and Earthcare Design Courses because it gave her additional scope to work more deeply with her participants. She then evolved the Permaculture Creative Facilitation Courses into 6 day or 4 day formats for wider audiences, calling the training Dynamic Groups.
She has led Wild Women’s Wisdom Weekends (with Zjamal Xanitha), Gifts For Wild Women Days, RECHARGE Processes, Earth Healing and Nurturing Days and a rich variety of other exciting and empowering workshops, seminars and presentations.
The experience gained through teaching Permaculture creatively, training Permaculture teachers, community workers and earth activists and leading women’s weekends and other empowerment workshops has led to the development of a holistic learning philosophy which Robin is now calling Dynamic Learning. She shares this in her Dynamic Groups, Dynamic Learning Courses around Australia and in other countries by invitation.
Robin has written and self-published You Can Have Your Permaculture And Eat It Too which is now out of print and treasured by many as a collectors item. A home made photocopied edition with a spiral binding is currently available for anyone who still wants he information. Many Libraries in Australia still carry copies as well.
Gifts For Wild Women, Robin’s latest book is also self-published by Earthcare Education and is being marketed in two different formats. Robin wrote the book to stand alone though it is best enjoyed as a boxed set combined with 80 cards.
Seeds For Change, a CD offering 7 of Robin’s guided journeys and meditations set to music, is now also available. It ties all the strands of her work together.
New projects for Earthcare Education include launching a mail order and on line Creative Facilitation Resources Catalogue and Robin is in the early stages of writing another book on Creative Facilitation.
