Beyond Field Trips: How Travel Tuesdays Bring the Universe Story to Life

When Learning Returns to the Community

There’s a moment that happens on the second or third visit to a place that never happens on a single field trip. A child who walked past an exhibit last week suddenly stops, peers closer, and asks a question that changes everything. Another learner makes a connection between something they saw at the Nature and Science Museum two months ago and the butterfly emerging from its chrysalis today. The learning isn’t rushed. It’s relational. It’s alive. Some of my colleagues call it a Pedagogy of Time or Slow Pedagogy.

This is the heart of Travel Tuesdays at Grassland Gardens School—our weekly practice of moving beyond the traditional “field trip” model into something deeper: extended discovery through multiple visits to the same community partners. From the Nature and Science Museum to the Denver Zoo, from the Butterfly Pavilion to the Children’s Museum, from CSU Spur to neighborhood spaces, we’re building relationships with places, with experts, and with ideas that unfold over time.

The Universe Story: A Thread That Connects Everything

Our Travel Tuesdays aren’t random. They’re woven together by a central narrative—what we call the Universe Story. Inspired by the work of Brian Swimme, Mary Evelyn Tucker, and the Journey of the Universe curriculum, we’re exploring one of the most profound questions humans have ever asked: How did we get here?

But we’re not asking it in a textbook. We’re asking it in the places where the story comes alive.

At the Nature and Science Museum, we stood beneath the stars in the planetarium and traced the great flaring forth—the birth of the universe 13.8 billion years ago. We talked about how every atom in our bodies was forged in the heart of a star. We marveled at the formation of our solar system, the cooling of Earth, and the conditions that made life possible.

At the Denver Zoo, we followed the thread forward: the emergence and evolution of life. We watched elephants and red-tailed hawks, creatures whose eukaryotic cells—complex, nucleated, differentiated—are the result of billions of years of adaptation and creativity. We talked about how all life on Earth descended from those first simple cells that emerged three and a half to four billion years ago.

And now, at the Butterfly Pavilion, we’re meeting the often-overlooked members of this story: the invertebrates.

The Overlooked Majority

Here’s something most people don’t realize: invertebrates make up roughly 97% of all animal species on Earth. Yet they’re often invisible in scientific research, in zoo exhibits, and in our cultural imagination. As the Butterfly Pavilion team writes, “Because invertebrates are often overlooked in scientific research and animal exhibits, many of the species in The Butterfly Pavilion haven’t benefited from the same spotlight as more traditional zoo animals.”

This is our second of three days at the Butterfly Pavilion, and the learners are beginning to see what was invisible before. On our first visit, many of them were drawn to the butterflies—the colorful, the charismatic, the creatures that fit our expectations of beauty. But today, they’re lingering at the tarantula enclosure. They’re asking about the role of decomposers. They’re noticing the intricate architecture of a spider’s web and wondering aloud about silk, tensile strength, and patience.

One learner made a connection that stopped us all in our tracks: “If bacteria and invertebrates are most of life on Earth, then why do we only learn about the big animals?”

It’s a question worth sitting with.

To Commune: The Deepest Tendency of the Universe

In the Journey of the Universe curriculum, there’s a line that has become a  touchstone for our Travel Tuesdays: “To commune may be one of the deepest tendencies in the universe.”

What does it mean to commune? It means to be in relationship. To be responsive. To discern and choose.

Even the simplest cells—those first prokaryotes that emerged billions of years ago—had a kind of awareness. They had receptor proteins that allowed them to sense their environment and channel proteins that allowed them to choose what to let in and what to keep out. This wasn’t mechanical. It was intelligent. It was relational.

When we spend multiple days at the Butterfly Pavilion, we’re practicing this same tendency. We’re not rushing through. We’re not checking boxes. We’re communing—with the invertebrates, with the educators who share their expertise, with each other, and with the unfolding questions that emerge when we slow down enough to notice.

The stillness that our students cultivate and the power of their un-adulterated imaginations lead to a deep sense of what Mitchel Thomasow calls “Perceptual Reciprocity” a skill that he argues adults and society can and should cultivate to shift into a more regenerative paradigm.  You can read more about how we do that in our diverse programs at Mycelium Cooperative here.

How Travel Tuesdays Work: Emergent Curriculum in Action

Travel Tuesdays are built on the foundation of emergent curriculum—a pedagogical approach that honors the interests, questions, and developmental needs of our mixed-age group of learners (ages 5-11) while also weaving in the expertise of our community partners.

Here’s what makes it different from a traditional field trip:

1. We Visit the Same Place Multiple Times

Repetition isn’t boring—it’s where depth happens. On the first visit, learners are orienting. On the second, they’re noticing. By the third, they’re connecting, questioning, and leading the inquiry.

2. We Plan with Our Community Partners

Before each series of visits, we meet with educators at our partner sites to co-create the experience. We share what our learners are curious about, and they share what’s happening at their site—new exhibits, seasonal changes, behind-the-scenes opportunities. Together, we map out a “main lesson” much like the Montessori Great Stories, but responsive to the moment.

At the Butterfly Pavilion, our community partners helped us understand how invertebrates fit into the larger Universe Story. They shared resources like their blog posts on presenting invertebrates and spider facts, which deepened our understanding of how to make these often-overlooked creatures visible and compelling.

3. We Reflect and Adapt

After each visit, we gather as a teaching team and reflect: What questions emerged? What connections did learners make? What do we want to explore more deeply next time? This reflection shapes our next visit, creating a feedback loop that keeps the curriculum alive and responsive.

4. We Center Relationship, Not Performance

There are no worksheets. No quizzes. No pressure to “cover” material. Instead, we’re building relationships—with the place, with the ideas, with the community experts who generously share their knowledge. Learning becomes an act of communion, not consumption.

What This Looks Like in Practice

Let me take you inside a recent moment at the Butterfly Pavilion.

We’re standing in front of the invertebrate touch tank. One of our learners, a 7-year-old who has been fascinated by the concept of adaptation since our zoo visits, is gently holding a hermit crab. She’s been quiet for several minutes, just observing.

Finally, she looks up at our community partner educator and asks: “If this crab needed a bigger shell, how does it know which one to pick?”

The educator smiles. “That’s such a good question. What do you think?”

The learner pauses. “Maybe it tries them on? Like shoes?”

“Exactly,” the educator says. “Hermit crabs will test out shells—they’ll climb in, back out, try another. They’re making a choice based on what feels right for their body.”

Another learner, age 9, jumps in: “So they have awareness? Like the cells we learned about?”

And just like that, we’re back to the Universe Story. We’re talking about discernment, about how even the simplest organisms make intelligent choices, about how adaptation isn’t just a biological process—it’s a creative act of relationship with the environment.

This is emergent curriculum. This is what happens when we slow down, return, and commune.

Why Invertebrates Matter (And Why We’re Spending Three Days Here)

Invertebrates are easy to overlook. They’re small. They’re often hidden. They don’t have the charisma of a lion or the majesty of an elephant. But they are the foundation of nearly every ecosystem on Earth.

As the Butterfly Pavilion’s work reminds us, invertebrates are pollinators, decomposers, prey, predators, and ecosystem engineers. Without them, life as we know it would collapse.

And yet, they’re underrepresented in research, in exhibits, in our collective imagination.

By spending three days here, we’re saying: These lives matter. These stories matter. The small and overlooked are worth our attention and care.

It’s a lesson that extends far beyond biology. It’s a lesson in justice, in humility, in seeing the world more completely.

Bringing Learning Back to the Community

One of the core beliefs behind Travel Tuesdays is that learning doesn’t belong only in schools. It belongs in the community—in museums, zoos, nature centers, libraries, farms, and neighborhoods. These are the places where knowledge lives, where experts practice their craft, where the Universe Story is unfolding in real time.

When we partner with community organizations, we’re not asking them to perform for us. We’re asking them to be in relationship with us. We’re honoring their expertise, their passion, and their role as educators in the largest sense of the word.

And we’re modeling for our learners that learning is everywhere—that curiosity and connection are more powerful than any curriculum we could design in isolation.

An Invitation to Reimagine Field Trips

If you’re a family, a homeschooling community, or an educator reading this, we invite you to reimagine what a “field trip” could be.

What if, instead of one rushed visit, you returned to the same place three times? What if you built a relationship with a community partner and co-created the learning experience? What if you let the questions that emerge guide where you go next?

What if learning returned to being traditional and became what it was before industrialized conventional schools less about coverage and more about communion? What if what we are doing IS a "traditional" school and not an alternative program?

Travel Tuesdays aren’t just a program—they’re a practice. A practice of slowing down, paying attention, and trusting that when we create the conditions for deep relationship, learning will emerge in ways we could never predict or control.

And that, we believe, is how the Universe Story becomes not just something we study, but something we live.

Grassland Gardens School meets Tuesdays for extended community-based discovery and on Wednesdays for a full day of “Forest School” in the riparian zone of the urban grasslands at Bear Creek Park.  We are a mixed-age homeschool enrichment program rooted in emergent curriculum, regenerative pedagogy, and the belief that learning belongs in relationship with the world. Learn more about our approach at grasslandgardenschool.org.

My blog posts serve diverse audiences—families, guardians, parents, practitioners, graduate students, and community adults—covering the "Tangled Bank" (Darwin's enduring metaphor) of interests, initiatives, and networks weaving together when we center justice, relationships, and regeneration.

Through Outdoor Nature Based Preschools, K-8 Forest Schools, and Emergent Strategy Wildcraft Workshops for Adults, we explore perception, observation, interpretation, and reciprocity from human and more-than-human perspectives. Central to all age groups remains this understanding: Early Childhood is "not just cute, but powerful and incredibly important."