EXPERIENTIAL EDUCATION DESIGNER
LEARNING BEYOND THE CLASSROOM
For much of the past decade, I raised and educated my three daughters while we lived and learned across more than twenty-five countries.
Worldschooling made education inseparable from life. Learning happened through the people, places, cultures, challenges, and questions we encountered along the way.
We also visited and spent time in innovative learning communities, including Green School Bali, The Hive School in Cabrera, Dominican Republic, and Learnlife in Barcelona. Experiencing different approaches to self-directed, place-based, and experiential learning expanded my understanding of how environment, culture, community, and learner agency can shape education.
What stayed with me most was seeing learning move beyond the classroom and into the world: young people engaging with environmental challenges, collaborating across disciplines, and discovering that they could help shape the future they would inherit.
Education was not simply preparation for life. It was a way of participating in it—with curiosity, responsibility, and care.
That experience changed how I understand learning—and how I design it. I saw how deeply people learn when they have agency, when a question matters to them, and when knowledge is connected to something real.
WHERE WE LEARNED
A WAY OF PARTICIPATING
SELF-DIRECTED LEARNING
I also helped found Rock Tree Sky, a self-directed learning community, and served on its founding board.
Through years of teaching, facilitating, and helping shape learning environments, I explored what becomes possible when young people are trusted to follow questions, work across disciplines, learn through making, and take real responsibility for their education.
That experience taught me that education design is not only about curriculum. It is about creating the conditions in which curiosity, confidence, belonging, and meaningful work can grow.
WHAT I DESIGN
Experiential learning programs
Learning journeys, workshops, and facilitated experiences
Self-directed and alternative learning models
Cross-cultural and place-based education
Curriculum and program development
Environmental and real-world learning experiences
Learning products and documentation systems
Collaboration with educators, schools, and mission-driven organizations
FROM LIVED LEARNING TO FORMAL RECOGNITION
My current work includes developing an education platform that turns documented real-world and alternative learning into portfolios, credits, evidence, and formal transcripts—without stripping out the context that made the learning real.
Not reduce it. Translate it.
After years outside the conventional education system, my daughters began approaching adulthood—and transcripts became an entry gate again.
Transcripts are the language our current system uses to recognize learning. But that language is usually built from courses, tests, and grades. Our learning had been built through research, projects, experts, fieldwork, historical sites, lived experience, and questions that kept opening into larger ones.
I wasn’t going to invent a test after the fact and pretend that was the learning. I needed to translate the depth of what had happened into a language the system could understand: portfolios, subjects, credits, evidence, and formal transcripts.
That gap became the platform I’m building now. It began with three learners. I’m building it for many more.
STATUS
ROLE
PURPOSE
WHAT I BELIEVE
COLLABORATE
Laura is available for experiential education design, learning strategy, workshops, panels, facilitation, advisory roles, and collaborations with schools, conferences, nonprofits, and mission-driven education organizations internationally.