Growing Across Generations: The Great Campus

Homogeneity Increases with School Size (Not inclusivity or real diversity)

Whaa? Does that subtitle sound counterintuitive or even impossible? Well, in most high schools today, students spend nearly all of their time with peers their own age. Modern schooling is built around age-graded cohorts, and the chance to interact meaningfully across generations — or even across different age levels — is relatively rare. Researchers have noted that in larger schools this effect is intensified: the sheer size leads students to sort themselves into even more homogeneous groups, narrowing the diversity of their interactions. Social cliques form around grade level, extracurriculars, and academic tracks, so that instead of broadening their social world, many adolescents experience a kind of narrowing.

By contrast, in smaller settings, the lines are looser, and permeable — students interact across grades, across roles, and even across generations. That wider circle of connection has been shown to strengthen identity, increase resilience, and give adolescents a sense of belonging beyond their immediate peer group 1

1 see Barker & Gump, Big School, Small School, 1964
Eccles, J. S., & Roeser, R. W. (2011). Journal of Research on Adolescence, 21(1), 225–241.

So. With respect to gardening.

Intergenerational Campuses?

With our garden and gardening teacher (we’ve now had four over the years), we created a kind of practice field for planting ideas and seeing what grows. How might growing edible plants and beautiful flowers impact our school as a whole? We have invited everyone to try: parents, alumni, scout troops, classes, grandparents, retirees in the community. Unlike chemistry class or English 10, everyone in every class can engage. No boundaries! We wanted it to keep adapting, shifting, finding its own purposes, season by season. It’s an adaptive program.

The garden is shared across ages. It has become an intergenerational site where any and all can learn and create together. Studies show that adolescents who participate in intergenerational programs benefit in profound ways — they gain confidence, stronger identity, and social skills,
while stereotypes across age groups decrease. In other words, the adolescent brain — so attuned to social connection and belonging — flourishes when those connections span generations.

Let’s ask: why are teens so cut off from the rest of their communities in so many ways? Is this necessary?

Emergence in Action

The garden is never predictable, which may be why it teaches so well. It is gaining in energy, not just at The Grauer School, but nationwide, even in cities. We sometimes call this emergence: something is gathering, we can sense it, patterns are forming. We are engaged, challenged, and creating together.

I love this kind of gathering — I can sense it whenever I travel to unfamiliar places. I see quite little when I arrive, whether it is a garden, a tidepool, a basketball game, or any complex system. I stand there if I have the patience, seeing not much. Gradually, I see action that was there all
along: flow patterns, little networks, maybe fractals or swirls: structure I had not noticed, life I had not sensed. While a garden moves slow, it is permanently self-organizing and the simple act of patience enables the teacher or student to observe this organizing, to put it into some focus,
which is science. Sometimes, in good time, we feel a part of this network. Teachers experience this same thing all the time, the great ones, as their classes are forming connected systems or networks that have been compared to child’s gardens (“kindergarten”). Learning in natural
environments tends to slow down teaching and learning enough to remind us that they can be at least as much about assimilation of knowledge as about the standard accumulation of knowledge.

Over the seasons, our garden has included:

• Parents and students making grape soda from our vines.
• Alumni, parents, and students planting bulbs and pruning things on beautification day.
• Volunteers squeezing oranges for morning drop-off.
• Bouquets delivered to families when someone was sick.
• A health class harvesting herbs for cooking.
• A math class charting plant growth and graphing results.
• Scouts building boxes for the orchard.
• An art class painting with natural dyes from the beets.

I don’t need to mention the spontaneous, natural learning in botany, ecology, and art that occurs in gardens, orchards, forests and other natural ecosystems. it’s the most obvious aspect of growing. Each season brings new, unplanned surprises to observe and engage. Those surprises are often the most lasting lessons, if we can manage to simply take the time to connect from time to time.

Adolescent Growth, Naturally

The research on gardening and adolescent development affirms what we see on many days. In middle schools, garden-based programs have been shown to increase students’ willingness to try new foods, improve their attitudes toward school, and even boost nutrition and physical health.
In other studies, gardens improved students’ cooperation, communication, and self-esteem — particularly when older volunteers or mentors worked alongside them.

Psychologists studying intergenerational programs report that young people who interact with adults outside their immediate families gain confidence, broaden their sense of identity, and experience lower stress. They are literally practicing what it means to grow up in community. Drop your student off at the garden one Saturday!

It Matters

This is what intergenerational education can look like. It is mutual thriving. A kind of reciprocity that spreads outward and becomes more inclusive over time. Without it, school risks becoming more of a clinical space where teachers and students file in and out each day.

In an adaptive school, garden at the heart, new patterns form. Unimagined possibilities keep emerging:

• A middle school class hosts a medieval herb fair.
• An American history class bakes apple pie from a colonial recipe.
• A student who forgets his lunch finds fruit and vegetables in the garden.
• Music students fashion bamboo flutes from stalks in the grove.
• American studies students plant a “three sisters” garden — corn, beans, squash — after learning about Indigenous farming traditions.

What is the meaning of all this? What is the meaning of a “program” with no set goals or ends other than discovery. We sometimes call this emergence: something is gathering, we can sense it and find patterns to identify this gathering, and we believe it is good. We are engaged, challenged, creating, and we don’t know where the end is. We are removing ourselves and our students from the potent “rules of the drill” where school becomes an unthinking pattern — we form new networks, and we marvel as they organize before our eyes, unplanned, and they grow.

The garden has no syllabus, but if you stay there long enough, you’ll have one of your own. It has no end, just seasons. It keeps teaching. In that openness — in the gathering, the emergence — our students, parents, alumni, and elders all find something they didn’t expect: discovery, belonging, and community across generations. To me, it can signal a great campus.

If you are willing and drawn to it, we want you in our garden, and you don’t even need to know good dirt from bad. It’s a place to solve problems you didn’t even know you had! To find people who are entirely outside your regular crew: unimagined possibility, always emerging.