On education landscapes and learning commons

This piece is a response to Germinaro's (2026) ‘Reclaiming public space as educational space’ commentary, which prompted a return to my article, ‘Infrastructures of social reproduction’ (McFadden, 2025). Germinaro's call to reclaim public space as a learning space sparked a rereading of that article and encouraged me to more explicitly theorize my use of ‘education landscapes’, a term I have mobilized frequently but largely as shorthand rather than as a fully articulated concept. In what follows, I work with Germinaro's generative intervention to conceptualize geographies of education and learning beyond schools. I then offer education landscapes as a spatial-political vocabulary for staying with his expansive vision while remaining attentive to the tensions between social reproduction and infrastructure that animate this exchange. I conclude by asking what sorts of political questions these capacious understandings of learning ecosystems, learning commons, and education landscapes raise for education justice struggles.

In the commentary, Germinaro makes an argument against seeing schools and public education as the privileged center of learning systems, instead insisting that schools are just one node within broader learning ecosystems, which he defines as ‘networlds of spaces, people, and practices that collectively nurture growth and resistance’, including porches, sidewalks, green spaces, libraries, community centers, and intergenerational sites of knowledge exchange, all of which he theorizes as education infrastructure. Germinaro draws attention to the importance of learning for the appropriation of public space and the potential for space to be mobilized towards liberatory and generative ends rather than domination, calling for close engagement with ‘historical mechanisms of resistance: studying under candlelight, organizing under threat, teaching while on the move’ that have been ‘foundational to Black, Indigenous, and migrant educational traditions’. In addition to expanding the sites where learning takes place, Germinaro expands who is recognized as educators, foregrounding youth, elders, artists, and other community members as central producers and transmitters of knowledge. In particular, Germinaro writes against those who would see youth as passive receivers of both education and sociospatial relations, instead positioning youth as producers of space and theory who reshape the conditions of social reproduction through the process of learning. Taken together, Germinaro's intervention pushes us to imagine education not as an institutional system but as a dispersed, intergenerational, and insurgent practice embedded throughout public space.

Germinaro's commentary is compelling precisely because it refuses to treat schools as the natural container of education. This move decenters schools without dismissing their importance, instead centering learning as a relational practice of spatial production and regrounding learning in ‘fugitive models of learning’ and other community-based practices rather than in institutional forms. Yet, I read his ‘public learning commons’ as both descriptive and aspirational: a demand that we recognize fugitive, historically grounded practices of learning and make them durable through public investment and shared stewardship. As Germinaro writes, ‘the need for investment in education infrastructure extends past the walls of a school and into the ways transformative investments build ecosystems and geographies of learning that disrupt racial capitalism’. Working with this intervention, I use the language of ‘education landscapes’ not as a correction but as a companion analytic to track how the learning commons Germinaro calls for is unevenly produced, contested, and defended across space under racial capitalism and austerity.

In my earlier work, I frequently used the term ‘education landscapes’ to signal that education unfolds across multiple sites, scales, and actors embedded within the urban fabric, and to underscore the impossibility of understanding educational processes without close attention to their spatial production (McFadden, 2023; 2025). Thinking in terms of landscape draws on long-standing geographic concerns with terrain, power, and contestation, foregrounding unevenness and struggle rather than equilibrium (Cosgrove and Daniels, 1988; Mitchell, 1994; Mitchell, 1996). The language of landscape thus emphasizes spatial production, holding together material infrastructures, embodied practices, and political claims over public space. While I was and remain, admittedly, more focused on urban political economy than Germinaro's focus on pedagogy and resistance, the language of ‘educational landscapes’ has enabled me to conceptualize a wide range of urban processes – housing development, fiscal instruments, political organizing, and protest – as constitutive of education in the city, understood as a key terrain of social reproduction. This has been especially important for thinking about the tensions between competing visions of education at work within the city, and the different arrangements of people, power, infrastructures, and meanings mobilized to enact those visions. Yet, this language has functioned largely as a shorthand that gestured beyond schools without fully theorizing the political-economic implications of that expansion. Germinaro's insistence that learning percolates throughout public space has prompted a return to that concept, not to replace his vocabulary of learning ecosystems but to clarify what political work the language of landscape can still do.

Education landscapes can serve as a spatial-political analysis that foregrounds the uneven terrain structuring learning ecosystems. Where the concept of learning ecosystems expands our field of vision beyond schools by illuminating the relational practices through which learning circulates across community life, the concept of education landscapes draws attention to the uneven terrains on which those practices are structured, governed, contested, and resourced. In this context, education landscapes are not inherently liberatory. This framing helps guard against a romanticization of learning commons by foregrounding the political work required to sustain them. In this sense, an analytical focus on education landscapes directs our attention to how learning geographies become unevenly public, durable, or marginalized across urban space, and how efforts to build a public learning commons hinge on appropriation, resourcing, and defense in the face of privatization and austerity.

While my use of education landscapes was meant to draw analytical attention beyond schools, the empirical and political gravity of schools as public infrastructures under constant attack (Lipman, 2011; Nguyen et al., 2017; Rodriguez, 2025) often pulled my analysis back toward them. This tension is structural rather than accidental, and when thinking about education and learning, schools frequently emerge as indispensable even as Germinaro reminds us of their insufficiency. The concept of education landscapes allows us to hold together the fact that schools remain central nodes in the political economy of learning, even when learning exceeds them, and to understand the messy, interwoven relationship between schools, fugitive learning, and our aspirational-but-yet-unrealized defense of public learning commons.

This dialogue surfaces a political dilemma at the heart of education justice: how do we organize for a public learning commons without privileging and recentering schools? If we decenter schools analytically, we risk abandoning one of the most materially resourced and politically contested infrastructures of learning. Yet if we recenter them, we risk reproducing institutional hierarchies that constrain more liberatory learning practices. If public learning commons are the goal, the question becomes which actors within and beyond schools is positioned to fight for them and how schools and other public institutions might be transformed in that struggle. For those engaged in education justice through educator labor organizing (Bocking, 2020; Dyke and Muckian Bates, 2023; Maton and Stark, 2023), this tension takes on a particular edge: How can teachers’ and educator unions defend schools as critical infrastructures while refusing to reinstate them as the privileged site of education justice? What would it mean for unions to act as connective infrastructure within education landscapes, rather than as their center?

In practice, this infrastructural role is already visible in many contemporary struggles where schools often function as strategic nodes within broader landscapes of social reproduction rather than as the object of struggle itself. For example, when educators conduct Know Your Rights trainings within schools, often framed as professional development, this institutional learning can circulate outward, enabling teachers to act beyond the school and as rapid responders during moments of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) presence, while drawing on and reinforcing wider immigrant organizing and mutual aid networks. In these moments, teachers are at once educators, learners, defenders, and community members. These broader organizing practices can, in turn, reenter the school, as schools remain essential nodes through which mutual aid is organized and distributed. This example underscores that learning commons and schools are not easily or neatly separable, and that fugitive and community-based learning practices often move through schools as contested sites of publicness, rather than existing only beyond them.

Education landscapes offer one way of staying with Germinaro's call to reclaim public space as learning space while foregrounding the political work required to make schools and other public institutions sites of collective learning, care, and life-making rather than extraction. Read together, Germinaro's intervention and this exchange around infrastructures of social reproduction suggest that the central issue is no longer whether learning exceeds schools, but how those expansive learning geographies are politically sustained and defended. While learning clearly exceeds schools, schools remain a crucial and contested site of publicness, places where learning commons can be undermined or reoriented. Thinking in terms of education landscapes alongside learning ecosystems thus reframes education justice not as a struggle over institutions alone but as a struggle over the spatial, social, and infrastructural conditions under which learning becomes public. Schools, in this sense, must be defended not as ends in themselves but as nodes within broader landscapes of organizing.