As part of my ongoing series about reimagining education, I want to try something slightly different today. For this one, we will imagine that what I’m calling “The Living Curriculum” is already implemented, and I wil describe one aspect of it. For the sake of this exercise, we will need to suspend our disbelief for a littl while, and put aside questions of how we get from where we are now, to this mildly utopian imagining. The point is not to lay out a perfect plan of how to achieve an ideal education system, but rather, to explore a vision of what such a system might look like.

If we want to transform education, we must go deeper than curriculum reform or policy tweaks. We must ask what a school even is, what purpose it serves, and whether its very architecture supports or suffocates learning. For more than a century, we have built education around the image of the factory: age-graded classrooms, bell schedules, standardized assessments, and hierarchies of control. These structures may produce compliance, but they rarely produce flourishing. To imagine something new, we have to stop thinking of a school as a building or institution and begin seeing it as an ecosystem. In the Living Curriculum, the school dissolves into something far more organic: the Learning Grove.

The word “grove” is not a metaphor for novelty, it is an orientation. A grove is a space where trees grow in communion, where each trunk stands distinct yet interconnected through root systems, fungal networks, and shared canopy. It is a place where life accommodates difference rather than erasing it, where shade and shelter nurture the growth of new generations. A grove is not planted in rows, it is not a monoculture, and it does not exist to maximize yield. It exists as part of a living system, adapting to seasons, cycling nutrients, hosting complexity. Learning Groves are meant to do the same. They are not institutions in the conventional sense. They are living systems of learning, embedded in place and culture, and oriented toward collective flourishing.

Place-Made, Not Prefabricated

The physical form of a Learning Grove matters. It cannot simply be slotted into four beige walls with fluorescent lights. It must be shaped by the land and the community that give it life. A Grove in the highlands of Peru will not look like a Grove in a Malaysian fishing village, nor should it. A Grove in post-industrial Detroit will require different materials, rhythms, and spaces than one in a rural farming valley. This is not a problem to be solved by scaling uniform models. It is the entire point. Groves are place-made, not prefabricated. They respond to climate, soil, language, and history.

Structures are designed to support bodies and senses, not just the transmission of information. Acoustic softness replaces echoing corridors. Natural light replaces flickering overheads. Outdoor learning is not relegated to field trips. It becomes part of the daily rhythm. A tree canopy may become a geometry classroom, a riverbank a storytelling circle, a rooftop garden a biology lab. Indoor spaces are modular and adaptive. Quiet zones, collaboration zones, and ceremonial spaces are created with moveable walls and locally sourced, biodegradable materials.

For neurodivergent learners, the Grove provides nooks for decompression, not as punitive time-outs but as sanctuaries woven into the flow of space. Movement-rich areas allow for sound, rhythm, and creative expression. These decisions draw on Universal Design for Learning (UDL), sensory integration research, and trauma-informed design principles that emphasize safety and agency.

Governance as Commons

But the Grove is more than its architecture. Each one is held as a commons, not as property. Land is placed in trust and governed by intergenerational councils. These councils do not exist for symbolic participation. They make real decisions about care, use, and development. By refusing private ownership, Groves resist the commodification of education infrastructure and protect communities from displacement. They are not speculative assets. They are shared inheritance.

The governance of a Grove is slow and participatory by design. Decisions are made in circles where facilitators, learners, elders, and community members deliberate side by side. These circles do not rush toward consensus. They allow space for dissent, for silence, for the recognition that not every decision must be made in haste. This tempo matters. It counters the speed of market logic and invites decisions to be rooted in memory, reciprocity, and ecological consequence. In this way, governance itself becomes a pedagogy. Children watch their communities navigate disagreement, balance needs, and revise agreements over time. They learn that power is not the privilege of a few, but a shared capacity that grows through practice.

Because a Grove is treated as a commons, stewardship is distributed. No single entity controls access or direction. Councils rotate membership to prevent capture and burnout, and there are deliberate practices of memory-keeping so that institutional knowledge does not vanish with any one generation. Rituals of accountability are embedded in the year: public gatherings where the community reflects on how the land was tended, what decisions served the whole, and where harm or imbalance may have occurred. These gatherings are not mere audits. They are ceremonies of renewal, ensuring that governance remains transparent, relational, and alive.

Importantly, commons-based governance also recognizes limits. Groves cannot be expanded indefinitely, nor can every desire be accommodated. Scarcity is not treated as failure but as invitation to creativity. When resources are finite, communities must prioritize together. This shared process of boundary-setting strengthens collective resilience. It teaches that autonomy is not the absence of constraint but the presence of self-determined shape. The Grove, therefore, becomes a living example of what it means to inhabit freedom without falling into chaos, to hold power without consolidating it, and to anchor decision-making in care rather than coercion.

Multigenerational, Reciprocal, Embedded

Perhaps the most radical departure from conventional schooling is that Groves dissolve the artificial separation of learners by age. In most systems, children are segregated by year, their development measured against fixed benchmarks. The result is fragmentation, not just of learning but of community. In the Grove, age becomes a resource, not a delimiter. Children, adolescents, adults, and elders all participate in a shared ecology of learning.

A twelve-year-old might learn metalwork from a local craftsperson in the morning, share lunch while listening to an elder tell the history of the land, and spend the afternoon guiding younger children through puppet-making inspired by the morning’s lessons. These experiences are not extras. They are the curriculum. They weave learning with belonging and restore what anthropologists like Barbara Rogoff describe as “intent participation”, which describes the practice, common in many Indigenous and traditional societies, of learning through meaningful contribution to real community tasks.

Roles within the Grove reflect this commitment. Learning Coordinators facilitate inquiry rather than delivering information. They know when to guide and when to step back. Catalysts, practitioners from across disciplines, bring living knowledge into the space: a dancer, a farmer, an engineer, a healer. They are not brought in as guest lecturers but as members of the community. Mentors offer continuity, walking alongside learners across seasons and projects.

Accountability is held through relationship, not coercion. Learners co-create agreements that are regularly revisited and adapted as the social fabric evolves. When conflict arises, it is addressed in circles of care and restoration. The Circle of Coherence, often a weekly ritual, provides space for reflection on what is working and what needs to shift. These practices draw from sociocracy, Indigenous council methods, and restorative justice pedagogy.

Learning as Pulse, Not Product

The rhythm of the Grove does not mimic the factory. Time is not a container to be filled with units of instruction. It is a pulse, responsive to the questions, curiosities, and needs of learners. Threads of inquiry are not chosen from a preset syllabus. They emerge from observation, conversation, and the living world. A child might follow the migration of birds, the history of textile patterns, or the chemistry of compost. Threads can last a day or years, intersecting and braiding together in unique ways.

Rather than report cards and grades, learners maintain living portfolios that capture sketches, journals, dialogues, and moments of insight. These portfolios are shared in witness circles, where growth is honored rather than ranked. Rest is integral to this rhythm. Dedicated “in-breath” periods provide time for silence, integration, and reflection.

Failure is not treated as error but as information. When a thread collapses, learners explore why and what can be learned from the disruption. Over time, they begin to sense the rhythm of their own learning cycles and trust their own timing.

Inclusivity as Foundation

In the Grove, inclusivity is not a retrofit. It is foundational. Disability is not treated as deficit but as a dimension of human diversity that reveals how to build better systems. Neurodivergence is not disciplined into compliance but welcomed as a way of broadening the collective field of attention. Communication is multimodal: speech, art, gesture, and silence all count as fluent contributions. This orientation is shaped by Disability Justice, which centers intersectionality, collective care, and self-definition.

Marginalized voices are not afterthoughts. They are co-architects of culture. Governance, rituals, and learning designs are revised in response to their insight. This not only expands access but expands the imagination of what education can be.

Inclusivity also reshapes how time and rhythm are held. In many traditional systems, learners who cannot match the standardized pace are labeled behind or in need of remediation. The Grove rejects this framing. Instead of treating time as a fixed commodity, it treats it as relational. Some learners move quickly, others slowly, and both patterns are seen as valuable. When a learner needs more time for sensory processing, recovery, or deep focus, the community adjusts. This might mean slowing the group pace, offering parallel threads, or extending a season of inquiry until everyone feels complete. Rather than punishing divergence, the Grove uses it as a signal to adapt, cultivating a culture where the tempo of learning reflects the needs of the living beings within it.

This approach also cultivates resilience in the face of difference. In a space where multiple bodies, minds, and modes of communication coexist, friction is inevitable. But friction is not treated as a failure. It is treated as an opportunity to deepen understanding. When conflicts arise, learners are supported in naming their needs, expressing their emotions, and co-creating agreements that honor everyone’s dignity. Over time, this practice builds collective muscles for negotiation and repair. It also helps learners internalize that difference is not something to fear or erase, but something to engage with. Inclusivity, then, becomes a way of learning how to live together in a plural world.

Embedded in the More-than-Human World

Modern schooling treats nature as curriculum content, something to study at a distance. The Grove reverses this. The land is teacher. Soil, wind, fungi, birds, and weather become signals to be read. Learners keep weather diaries, map watersheds, and follow seasonal cycles. They trace the colonial history of the land and understand whose territory they occupy. This is not extracurricular. It is a practice of repair. Reconnection without justice is incomplete, because the land itself carries memories of extraction, enclosure, and resistance, and must be approached with respect.

Seasonal rituals mark solstices, migrations, and harvests, replacing bells and semesters with a more organic calendar. Learning does not float above life. It pulses within it. A frost may shift the day’s plan toward studying soil insulation. A sudden storm may become a lesson in hydrology, resilience, or even poetry. This anchoring in the cycles of place creates a sense that knowledge is not static, but alive, changing with each season, much like the learners themselves.

This pedagogy invites learners to cultivate intimacy with the living systems around them. They do not merely observe but participate: planting native species, building pollinator habitats, testing local waterways, and contributing to ecological restoration efforts. These actions build a sense of responsibility and reciprocity. They show that learning is not just about extracting knowledge but about giving back, about leaving a place healthier and more vibrant than when you found it.

Such work also creates a counterweight to the abstraction and disembodiment that dominate much of contemporary education. When children feel the soil under their nails, taste the first fruit of a tree they tended, or hear frogs return to a once-silent pond, they are learning with their whole bodies. These experiences build emotional resonance and long-term memory in ways no worksheet ever could. They also provide learners with a sense of continuity: that they are part of something older and larger than themselves.

Equally important, this embeddedness builds resilience in the face of ecological crisis. Climate volatility is no longer theoretical when learners have watched a creek run dry or witnessed an early bloom disrupted by frost. Instead of despair, they are guided toward collective response. Together they plant windbreaks, design water catchment systems, and advocate for local policy change. In this way, the Grove transforms eco-anxiety into eco-agency, helping learners metabolize grief and translate it into action.

Finally, embeddedness in the more-than-human world is not just about survival. It is about joy. It is about rediscovering wonder as a serious mode of learning. A sunrise becomes a classroom. The song of a migrating bird becomes a data point and a poem. The decay of a fallen log becomes a meditation on transformation and renewal. These moments remind learners that education is not simply preparation for life. It is life. The Grove does not teach nature as content. It teaches relationship as practice, helping learners remember that they belong to a world that is wider, deeper, and more alive than they have been told.

The Network of Groves

No single Grove stands alone. Together they form a rhizomatic network of mutual recognition and peer learning. There is no central authority, no headquarters. Knowledge flows laterally through exchanges, digital storytelling, traveling exhibitions, and mentorship across continents. This distributed design prevents capture by state or market forces. It also allows Groves to evolve while remaining true to shared values: Power Within, Power With, Power To, and Power Through.

What emerges is not a school system, but a living culture. Learners carry their threads from place to place, scattering seeds of insight wherever they go. This is not scalability in the corporate sense. It is growth in the ecological sense, adaptive and relational.

In the end, the Learning Grove is not a utopian dream. It is a reclamation of what learning has always been when it was most alive: communal, place-based, cyclical, and attuned to the rhythms of life. It teaches that knowledge is not scarce, that intelligence is not owned, and that education can be a site of regeneration rather than extraction.

Leave a comment