Learning Beyond Walls: A Vision that Continues to Unfold

GDS’s founders and early faculty believed that much of learning takes place beyond the classroom, and from the start, they focused on creating this idea of a school without walls. This solidified when GDS moved to Grasslands, an old mansion on ten acres where they reestablished in the Fall of 1945. The new locale provided many opportunities for outdoor exploration and creative learning activities just outside the building.

 

“We’d follow a path and continue down to a little stream. There was a vine which we used to swing from one side of the stream over to the other side. The bank became a claybank, it was real clay. Every day when I took the boys on this walking tour, one hour was spent digging tunnels and catacombs into that bank, until we actually made a cave. The clay that was dug out of the bank was brought back and I used it to teach ceramics.”

–Shizu Coles, GDS Arts and Crafts Teacher

Students and teachers utilized the land in every way they could imagine. They constructed maps and made art projects, they even built little towns out of decommissioned army footlockers. 

“Aggie got 100 footlockers for something like $10. The [students] used them for a whole year as building blocks,” said Second Head of School Edith Nash. “They lived out there most of the winter.” 

While the innercity wilderness around Grasslands was put to good use, the city itself provided endless opportunities for field trips and further exploration. 

A captivating account of one of the school’s early extended field trips is of an excursion to the segregated south taken not long after the Supreme Court’s 1954 ruling in the Brown v Board of Education case, when Prince Edward County, Virginia closed schools rather than integrate them. 

In 1961, at the suggestion of one of the students, 9th Grade teacher Edyth Rich accompanied a group of GDS students to Farmville, a town in Prince Edward County where educators had created classrooms for Black students wherever they could find the room, in church basements and meeting halls. The students made friends, and GDS families hosted the Farmville students during a trip to Washington where they joined GDS students on a visit to the U.S. Supreme Court and a tour of the city.

This belief that education must extend beyond classroom walls, that much of learning and understanding come from doing, is alive and well today at GDS. Field trips around Washington and beyond are a regular part of the curriculum, and new trips are created with relative frequency as faculty find new ways to extend and enhance classroom study, while established trips are regularly tweaked and advanced to provide the most fruitful learning experience.

From Hill Day, the 8th graders’ annual field trip to Capitol Hill where they interview policymakers and experts on prominent constitutional issues, to the 3rd grade teachers extending their students' study of the Great Migration and immigration with a visit to the University of Maryland’s Driskell Center, a creative incubator focused on Black artists, to the 7th-grade study of the Chesapeake Bay ecosystem through a combination of fieldwork, classroom study, and research, to High School History teacher Anthony Belber’s 9th grade class touring Washington’s Southwest neighborhood in order to directly connect the landscape to DC historical events, to The Impact Lab @ GDS, where community action projects for students of every grade are a primary focus, GDS is committed to reaching beyond classroom study to give students the most well-rounded, in-depth, and meaningful educational experience as possible–as its founders intended. 
 

Read more details about a few of the programs and field trips mentioned and others here:

The Impact Lab

A Not so Mini-Mester

Learning Both Sides of the Debate on Hill Day

Reflecting on Joyfulness and Art from the Great Migration

Our Community and Change: Fully Embracing Field Study

Life Lessons from our Estuary Neighbor

An Art Excursion that Leaves an Impression

Lessons from the Land