Educational design at it’s core is community-oriented and community-inspired. It is not something that is done to children, but rather an opportunity to invite our children into a reciprocal relationship that honors both the authentic individual as well as their role within their families and communities – including not just people, but Nature and all our relations.
Educational Design is not a “program,” but an emerging process with a framework that helps provide a support structure that is then filled in by our children to reveal a learning landscape that is connected to their place, time, family, and community. By playfully inspiring a sense of awe about Nature, ourselves, family, community and all our relations our children organically cultivate a loving consciousness and sense of responsibility as integral caretakers of our world.
Wanting to enrich the learning landscape at home: Join the EDC and our online group collaborations and co-create a learning landscape with children that nourishes life.
Our educational “story” of today shapes our children’s tomorrow. Using a shared framework that is tailored to your specific place and community, children and youth learn how to intentionally integrate the best of “me” into the “we” to create a more just, responsible and compassionate world for all. Together with our children we engage in an emergent learning process to co-create new educational story.
Working With Nature – Explore and understand our ourselves and our children as both learners and educators playfully as connected to our place, time, and passions.
Reading Your (Learning) Landscape – Meet children where they are relevant to their place, family, and community and then interact with them based on their path in learning and life.
T ransforming Problems into Solutions Opportunities- Holistically integrate children’s passions into other subjects, topics, skills, and community resources and relationships.
Potential of Small Choices, Great Effects – Help our children, even our young children self-regulate and plan how to structure their learning and life.
Consciousness of Choice – Designing education from patterns down to details that help with creation, documentation and assessment of the educational plans.
How the Yield is Limited Only by the Creativity of the Designer – Put everything together to facilitate the journey from knowledge- and skills-based explorer to active “do-er” who can apply learning through personally meaningful projects.
Everything Gardens – Our children integrate their new knowledge and skills into the lives of others within their family and community.
Note: Highly recommended prerequisite for the EDC includes having taken the What’s Home course, the Seventh Generation Education course, another Institute of Permaculture Education for Children (IPEC) course or a Permaculture Design Course (PDC). Yes, our Guild Members also have access to the “What’s Home?” online course and can take both courses concurrently.
In Educational Design, we learn how to help children playfully and naturally find their bliss in learning and life and use their passions to embrace their role and responsibility as part of the “we” within this world. Along with our children, we learn, design, inspire, write a new educational story that will transform the future!
Learn the art, science, and wisdom of mentoring our children on their unique journeys in learning and life. This is not a “program,” but an emerging process with a framework that helps provide a support structure that is then filled in by our children to reveal a learning landscape that is connected to their place, time, family, and community.
We work together with our children to figure out where they are, where they want to go, and what their true north is to navigate their learning landscape. However, it is the unique path that emerges on that journey that is the blessing. So rarely do journeys of significance and value in our lives follow a straight line. It is the mindful and purposeful wondering and forging of our own path through the landscape that deepens our understanding of ourselves in relation to the world around us.
It is the journey and not the destination that can change the story of what it means to learn, educate, and be educated. And when we change the story we transform the future.
Develop the confidence, knowledge, and skills to help children playfully and naturally integrate their passions into a holistic education that includes subjects like science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics. Taking action with their new knowledge and skills filtered through the lens of their values (true north), children design projects that weave in language arts, history, economics, as well as business and entrepreneurship.
These projects are not the end goal (destination). Rather they are a means for learning how to use their passions, inherent gifts and developing talents to expand their understanding of their authentic selves and their role within this interconnected world.
In this new educational story the climax is not when the project is done, but instead when children share their new understandings and skills with the community and create real change in the world around them. This is the climax, not the end point. It is a milestone and an indicator that the next leg of this journey is about to begin.
We co-design a learning culture that cares for people and the earth. Through community-oriented education that enriches self-discovery and empowerment children come to better understand their place, time and relationships with the people and world around us.
Through, as Dr. Blumenkrantz from Center of Youth and Community might call, an emergent design process this experience can help early childhood and primary age children, parents, educators, and communities learn to design a holistic education with our children to forge their path interconnected in learning and life. Just as we can design living landscapes like backyards and kitchen gardens, we can design our learning landscapes.
In the beginning, we called this a “course,” but from the first cohort it became obvious that this is not a course. It is about community, a learning community, and it doesn’t not “end,” but instead endures, evolves, and grows. Our hope is that our Educational Designers (young and old) become community organizers and facilitators to help others in their community continue on their journey.
Individually we work to enrich the relationships in our local systems and collectively we are designing regenerative whole systems learning landscapes across the globe.
Who is Educational Design for?
This experience is for parents, educators, and community mentors of children from early childhood through the primary years. Together through an emergent design process, you will learn the framework and consciousness to integrate systems thinking into the educational design within your family, homeschooling group, learning center, classroom, school and/or community.
The online experience is hands-on and experiential and is unlike any other “teacher training” program. This isn’t an educational story about a new technique, scripted set of activities or even prescribed educational curriculum to “solve” the problems of today. This is about changing consciousness and writing a new educational story that that can transform the future.
There are families and educators from all walks of life around the globe who have joined our community. Some homeschool. Others unschool or use some form of experiential education. Others have children who attend public or private school, but they want to enrich and connect learning at home in the evenings and on the weekends using the Educational Design framework. Yet other participants are educators who want to learn how to better work with children to co-design their learning learning landscape.
Bottom line, there is a wonderfully diverse, growing community and we designed the learning framework to use and value that diversity.
Join a community of learners just like you – dedicated parents and educators – who desire a collaborative, shared learning experience. We share our knowledge, skills, techniques, and unique tools designed for and with our community. We honor the individual paths we are all on while at the same time knowing we are interconnected and supported by one another along this journey that shapes us as well as our children.
Note: This is not a course to teach children how to do permaculture in the landscape. This is a community that wants to utilize the ethical, scientific methodology of permaculture and the principles of youth and community develop through initiation and rites of passage designed by Dr. David Blumenkrantz from the Center for Youth and Community to help children, families, communities, and this world learn and develop, regardless of what is being learned. Many children may develop a passion and find their bliss by taking their learning into that realm. However, the Educational Design Community is dedicated to helping children, parents, educators, and community learn how to design holistic education plans that are place, time, and culturally meaningful.