Seeding Tomorrow: Schools as Urban Origins

What if we stopped thinking of schools as institutions that simply exist within communities, and began imagining them as places from which healthier, more connected and ecologically aware communities could grow?

Schools are often described as hubs of community life, yet in practice they can remain relatively separate from the neighbourhoods, people and ecosystems surrounding them. In this facilitated conversation, educator Tijana Ilic invites us to reconsider the school as a vital social institution — one that is inseparable from the wider ecology of a city or community.

Drawing on Australian and international examples, alongside ideas from educational thinkers including John Dewey and Maria Montessori, we’ll explore what becomes possible when schools develop deeper relationships with their local communities and natural environments.

Could schools foster stronger intergenerational networks? Could children have genuine opportunities to participate in community life, think ecologically and contribute their creativity to the places where they live? And what might education look like if children were recognised not simply as future citizens, but as active participants in their communities today?

Rather than treating education as preparation for participating in society sometime in the future, this session invites us to explore the school as a place of gestation and origin — somewhere we can begin seeding the relationships, ecological awareness and ways of living that healthier, more humane habitats will require.

Come ready to question some of our assumptions about where education happens, who participates in it, and the role schools might play in creating the communities of tomorrow.

This session is part of Healthy Humane Habitats Month: Reimagining how we live, together.

Tijana Ilic is an educator with experience across mainstream schooling, Montessori education and home education. Her work and interests explore holistic education, the human spirit and how education can preserve and nurture the spiritual aliveness of the child.

Tijana is particularly interested in applying principles of localisation to education and exploring how greater autonomy, community and self-responsibility might be restored to children, families and educators. Her work challenges the separation between schools and the wider communities in which they exist, asking how education might become more deeply connected to local people, places and ecosystems.

Through her exploration of alternative educational philosophies and practices, Tijana seeks to expand the ways we understand children, learning and the role education can play in shaping the communities of the future.