by Tamara Griffiths, Ali Ma and Delvin Solkinson
Parrots announced the dawn and we knew we were officially on farmer time!
As the week progressed people felt more and more comfortable in the group and we had built up a lot of trust. After three days of presenting on our chosen topics we had become fluid in creative processes and Robin Clayfield said we were all flying. On day six we all did our final gifts to the class, and by this stage we were enjoying the creative process of coming up with ways to get core information across in an engaging way.
Our class began with a beautifully facilitated ‘milling’ process from the Deep Ecology toolkit facilitated by Ali Ma. We met eye to eye and connected with each other from a place of love, respect and support. It was an incredibly bonding experience to do on the last day of the course.
We engaged in a brainstorming exercise that evolved our current skills. We discovered that words written in pencil or yellow pen were generally invisible to an audience and a great way to make sure all the topics are covered. This kind of process can be a useful tool for documenting the events that happened in a class, and to capture the essence of a discussion. Robin reminded us to write things on the board, making eye contact with each new person who was throwing in a comment, slowing down the process so it was manageable and interactive.
A mind map of our brainstorming on brainstorming!
Next came a module on getting started teaching permaculture. Some suggestions included buddying up with other teachers for support and check ins, carefully picking creative facilitation strategies, starting work groups to build confidence and gain practice, doing teacher trainings, starting by teaching friends and just jumping straight into it.
Robin gave us advice when beginning to get the confidence to teach. Begin by teaching a few small classes. Find a small circle of friends who might be willing for you to teach a PDC to. Try team teaching with a friend who is committed to exploring the journey together. If there are areas that you don’t have the confidence to teach, find someone who has loads of experience in areas where energy might be lacking. Always be okay to say ‘I don’t understand’.
A permaculture speed dating game show was very high energy and inspiringly intelligent. Ali Ma was ‘Resources’ and Delvin was ‘Catch and Store Energy’ and they won the game show as the most compatible element and principle of the group!
Next came a stunningly beautiful labyrinth walk presentation by Ali Ma and Tamara about female courses. It was a time of reflection and initiation for the group, who realized the deeper potency of ritual as part of a transformative education toolkit. An innovative presentation on presenting to the mainstream including an awesome large crossword puzzle followed; we were very impressed!
We revisited our goals on the final day – this process is called ‘goal clouds’
A series of evaluations came next followed by some tear-jerking closing processes. The class had evolved us all and given us all sorts of additions to our teaching and learning toolkits. It felt like we all emerged with the ability to be better teachers and facilitators of any subject. With this came empowered confidence and dynamic abilities to hold space for learning in new and creative ways.
Final thoughts and critique
Crystal waters is a great place to learn about permaculture — for both visible and invisible structures. Crystal waters was set up in the late 80s as a permaculture village and has approximately 300 people living there. We’ve been staying in the bunkhouse, learning in the purpose built eco room and eating at the community building. We’ve checked out Robin’s rammed earth office and had sourdough bread straight from the bakery.
Robin’s Dynamic Groups course is a perfect opportunity to open up a tool box of creative processes on content that may otherwise be dry, lengthy or traditionally delivered in an academic approach. It included ways to relate to the content from a ‘sensory’ perspective, that involves the seeing, hearing, doing and playing involvement, uniquely different from passive chalk and talk approaches.
Robin’s style is about as far from “Chalk and Talk” as you can get. The planetary Permaculture Pilgrimage was put together to get as many different styles of teaching and jumping into Robin’s course after Geoff’s was pretty interesting. Tamara loved Geoff’s course but really wanted to show the other students that creative processes can be used to teach permaculture and that it was worthwhile. It all comes down to using lots of different teaching methods to get permaculture across.
It was an evolutionary course in learning, very activating and full of practical, inspiring and accessible processes to help facilitate in a creative way. Our teaching and learning toolkit got an incredible upgrade during this fantastic experience. Anyone who is interested in enhancing their ability to communicate, facilitate or design learning environments would greatly benefit from this program.
Most of the course was immaculately relevant and accessible to all. We did lots of practice presentations to apply the things we learned, which was greatly beneficial. The feedback on these presentations was almost entirely positive and supportive with very little critical feedback — making a missed opportunity to push people a bit to out-evolve themselves. Robin always built upon the strength of the individuals and the group. The creative processes were incredibly awesome and very helpful in addressing many different learning styles, the only issue was they used a large amount of paper including felt, sticky notes and other mainstream art materials.
Delvin and Zoe giving us an awesome design exercise
There were many questions that the participants had about teaching groups. Rather than these questions being answered in the classes by Robin, the questions became the focus of group work and presentations. There was a sense of disappointment that our maestro was not to answer personally these pondering questions, but rather the students would be required to seek the answer, and bring their interpretations to the group as a substitute.
Robin’s masterful facilitation made for an engaging and inclusive course. It was a dream come true for us to study with one of our heroes who wrote the incredible resource book ‘Teaching Permaculture Creatively’ as well as ‘You can have your Permaculture and Eat it too’ and designed a series of wonderful learning-teaching card games that we have found super valuable in the PDCs that we teach. We highly recommend taking Robin’s course, and if you are somewhere else in the world you can order one of her two permaculture teaching manuals and her incredible permaculture learning-teaching card games. This work of dynamic groups can be influential and tailored to many group styles through out a spectrum in society.
Community Governance
We met with a group of 15 in the fantastic rammed earth and wood eco-classroom. After a short opening and introductory round, Robin passed out paper trees on which we wrote our intentions and hopes for the class to come. We spoke them as we pinned them on the wall. This process tells teachers where their students are at and what they want to cover in the course. A sticky carpet with group agreements cemented in the culture of the day as respectful and punctual.
We broke into small groups exploring positives, negatives and interesting aspects as well as decision making processes carried out by incorporated groups, unincorporated groups, co-operative groups and conscious businesses.
Next we went though Robin’s community governance box set containing three different card sets on kinds of organizations, decision making processes and support processes that help groups make decisions. This was followed by a unit on hand signals.
As a group focus we choose an event to organize in order to practice our techniques: an ethical collaborative social enterprise day.
Robin encouraged someone from the group to have a go facilitating a meeting using the “6 hats” method. Tamara would have preferred Robin facilitating this as she is so good at it and given us a taste of it really working.
We also tried out a method called “colours of empowerment” where people have different colour cards to make meetings function better. This method was noted to have come from the co-housing handbook. There were some people from a local community that use the cards for every meeting and find it works extremely well and keeps meeting times to a minimum and requires almost no facilitation by a chairperson. Again we’d have loved to see Robin weave her magic of facilitation and show us how it’s really done.
To finish the day we practiced open space technology that is based on the following rules: whenever it starts it starts, whoever comes are the right people, whatever happens is the only thing that could have happened, when it’s over it’s over, the law of two feet (leave at any time), and noted the importance of having facilitator and note taker.
Tamara suggested a topic “what methods of facilitation work for large groups?” and we had heaps of fun looking at what would and what wouldn’t work. Delvin had facilitated large groups of over 100 people and recommended an approach called “cut throat facilitation” where a person is stopped if they are not keeping to topic or start to waffle.
As a final gem Robin talked about this class in relation to Social permaculture.
She noted that community governance is about design and facilitating design and that it highlights the importance of creative design in all the invisible structures and processes that forge foundations for community development and group action. Using maps and patterns to anchor in processes and experiences before they happen, we are able to model permaculture approaches.
Robin also explained how this related to creating new successful patterns using patterns that work and avoiding patterns that don’t work in group decision making and community building. Social permaculture is about co-operation between different people and elements and community governance helps organize and place the right people together in the right way to create healthy and harmonic systems.
It was inspiring learn how all community governance strategies, processes, methods and toolkits enhance our ability to design and apply creative processes to group meetings and collective decision making.
Final thoughts and critique
This course was a great expansion of our toolkit. Only at one day long it did not allow for much time and Robin’s playful interest in letting the students be the facilitators did limit how much time she had to share her creative experiences and incredibly potent advice. Having inexperienced students take turns being teachers created some slow moments, but anytime Robin jumped in we were given key insights into facilitating group decision making processes.
Our highlight was Robin relating this day to social permaculture — her amazing comments on this to finish the day made it all worth while.
Wonderful people of the Dynamic Group!
