Dr. Grauer's Column - Reading the School Like a Landscape

Reading the School Like a Landscape: Notes From the Education Front
By Stuart Grauer

Recently I sat down with several Grauer School newsletters — our weekly record of classes, field trips, performances, experiments, and student work that passes across our community’s desks. I was not looking for anything in particular, but something drew me in. As diverse as they were, all these diverse activities somehow did not seem separate. There was a “whole” that was forming.

Try it. Reading them together reveals a pattern that feels less like a school schedule and more like observing some kind of ecological zone. Across subjects and age groups, learning kept escaping its normal containers of time and place.

• Students wrote trigonometric equations from ocean waves they observed.
• Biology students taught peers while standing among native plants in the forest adjoining our school.
• Geometry appeared in soap bubbles as students created unique geometric designs for bubble wands.
• Physics students were engineering boats to test buoyancy and design efficiency.
• History showed up in local libraries and historic neighborhoods.
• World religions arrived in the form of a visitor singing sacred Sanskrit.
• Students read The Catcher in the Rye beside the ocean they were describing.
• Student artists stepped into the wild world of Banksy and formed questions about art and society.
• Robotics students mentored younger students—learners becoming teachers.
• French students made Belgian waffles and a bit of cultural history.
• Music students competed in a Battle of the Bands that drew students of all ages, teachers, staff, parents and friends all into the same orbit.
• Theater productions merged STEM design, lighting engineering, and storytelling.
• International students lived with host families, turning global education into daily life.
• Middle school electives ranged from embroidery to Dungeons & Dragons to open exploration that was perfectly named: “Pure Fun.” At school.
• Students explored Old Town San Diego to walk history where it really happened.
• A petting zoo appeared during finals week, reminding everyone that nourishing calm, joy, and care are full partners in great learning.

Oh, and a literature class was placing Victor Frankenstein on trial.

No committee designed the above. It “emerged.” Or something emerged, but what was it? The school was behaving less like an institution and more like a living landscape, growing and shaping by curiosity and shared interests, teacher-student connection and trust, and responsiveness to place/locale.

Then another realization followed: the pattern was appearing somewhere else unexpected. Without any particular goal, for the past few weeks, I had been sliding a handful of educational research journal articles into a folder—and I did not have any idea why. I was just selecting articles that drew me in, caught my eye.  I had no strategy.  Was it madness, or randomness? I decided to find out. It was time to see if there was some hidden method behind my own intuitions and noticings. Please come on this very brief exploration with me…here are the articles it turned out I had been collecting:

1. At Carolina Kids Co-Op in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, more than 150 students gather daily for school in a public park. Preschoolers through high schoolers move between classes marked by a ringing bell across open greenspace. Founded in 2022 by Jess Alfreds after she could find no “right” program for her daughter, the model now spans 17 locations across four states serving nearly 1,000 students. Alfreds described it simply: “It looks very much like you took a private school and took the roof and the walls off.”

2. From California, Kathleen McNamara describes: The Seven Hills School. In Beyond the Classroom Walls: A Journey to Global Citizenship (January 6, 2026), she outlines an experiential education program that moves students from self-awareness to stewardship — from local exploration to Yosemite, from Washington, D.C., to Normandy and Dachau, and finally to Japan. The progression is intentional: personal responsibility, cultural awareness, and global perspective. It all expands in widening circles.

Different geographies. Different structures.  Same instinct, I think. Engaged learning extends beyond walls and classrooms and “required” curricula. Schooling is not a system of boxes and schedules; it is a way of being in the world.

3. Meanwhile, Rick Ginsberg and the wonderful, renowned researcher Yong Zhao were asking in Can Artificial Intelligence Spark an Education Renaissance? (December 9, 2025): could decades of reform have failed because we merely tinkered with the machinery of schooling rather than reimagined its purpose. Through their Center for Reimagining Education, they propose small, experimental “schools-within-schools” where teachers and students co-create transformative practices without requiring systemwide compliance.

Wait! Didn’t I just finish 7 years of writing a book, The Way to Pancho’s Kitchen: A Trail Guide for Small School Leaders,  about the same thing, calling it “human-scale education?”

Innovation, they argue, rarely succeeds through universal mandate. It grows through local experimentation. Wait!

What I was finding was synergy. Put these strands together and a pattern appears out of nowhere.  But it has been in front of us all along:

• Outdoor schools in public parks.
• Developmentally sequenced global immersion programs.
• Micro-spaces inside traditional schools designed for experimentation.
• Classrooms organized around participation rather than stand and deliver.

Artificial intelligence may be accelerating this moment—not because it replaces teachers, but because it clarifies what teachers uniquely and irreplaceably provide. If information can be generated instantly, the value of schooling has a great shot at moving beyond information transmission—and that’s exactly what I found was happening! Students and teachers now have the nudge they needed all along to practice judgment, creativity, collaboration, SEO, and cultural/ecological encounters—capacities that deepen only through lived experience and relationships. That’s what we can observe in great schools.

This is a movement emerging. This is not an AI movement, either. Schools across the country implementing bell-to-bell cellphone restrictions, classroom distractions declining significantly. Teachers in small creative schools that reduce busy work and boost engagement.

When school boundaries become permeable to community, culture, nature, and meaningful experimentation, the job of “teacher” starts to shift, and they begin to rediscover the conditions under which attention and relationships can flourish. We are starting to look out and up again, not down. Direct experience is rising in small schools and experiential education.

In this emerging landscape, teachers design environments. Schools become ecosystems rather than factories.

What I saw in my stack of newsletters was not just variety: it was coherence. It was what Alfreds built in a park, what McNamara offered through global immersion, what Ginsberg and Zhao cultivate through experimental micro-spaces, and what Marshall and Pressley document in cellphone-free environments.

Education is rediscovering its human scale. If we automate a lot of the rest, maybe it’s not such a threat.

This all feels like a rebalancing after years and years dominated by standardization, increasing scale, and uninterrupted digital noise.

The movement does not yet have a fixed name, though I like human scale education. I like The Way to Pancho’s Kitchen.

Whatever the pundits end up calling it, and wherever educators reopen the walls of school, the great learning is beginning to resemble life again in thousands of smaller learning communities. That could be the most transformative shift of all, the emergence many of us feel and notice. It feels like a force of nature.

References

Alfreds, J. (2022–2026). Carolina Kids Co-Op, Myrtle Beach, SC.

Ginsberg, R., & Zhao, Y. (2025, December 9). Can Artificial Intelligence Spark an Education Renaissance?

Marshall, D. T., & Pressley, T. (2025, December 9). Early Lessons from a Statewide Cellphone Ban. Kappan, 107(3–4).

McNamara, K. (2026, January 6). Beyond the Classroom Walls: A Journey to Global Citizenship. The Seven Hills School.

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