Learning from Migration: What Nature Teaches Us About Meaningful Movement

There’s something profound about witnessing the Nxai Pan migration in person. Thousands of zebras moving together across vast landscapes, accompanied by wildebeest, all drawn forward by instinct, survival, and shared momentum. For our team at THINK Global School, this wasn’t just a spectacular wildlife viewing. It became a profound lesson in how we approach education.

A Different Kind of Classroom

Botswana is a place that invites attention. From the dusty streets of Maun to the vast Kalahari, there’s a quietness in the details. A place where nature speaks with remarkable clarity, and these landscapes will serve as their community’s teachers over the next seven weeks.

As we begin our 2025-26 academic year in Maun, Botswana, our students just returned from what we call a Rite of Passage. Rather than sitting in lecture halls, they slept under the stars on salt pans, gathered around fires, and immersed themselves in one of the world’s most extraordinary natural classrooms. For students accustomed to traditional learning environments, this represents a fundamental shift: education that happens not just in your head, but in your whole being.

Photos by Educator Kelsey Gray

What Our Staff Learned from Their Own Rite of Passage

Recently, our staff experienced their own Rite of Passage: a week of professional development unlike what most schools experience. We put away our devices and spent our days exploring shared agreements, school culture, and how we show up for one another and our students.

Educators Saila and Heidi take a selfie with Content Manager & Technologist Matt Rogers

One night, we rolled out sleeping bags on the vast Makgadikgadi salt pan and slept under nothing but stars. We woke not only to a beautiful sunrise, but to a deeper sense of connection to each other, to place, and to our work.

Most remarkably, we witnessed the Nxai Pan migration ourselves. Long lines of animals swept across the landscape, some moving purposefully, others pausing to rest or graze. It was deeply grounding, reminding us that real movement (the kind that matters) is often hard, often quiet, and always better when shared.

Moving Together, Learning Together

Upon return, we realized that the migration had become our metaphor. Just as wildebeest and zebra traverse challenging terrain together, relying on each other’s strengths and instincts, we move as a learning community: never alone, always together, always learning.

This isn’t movement for adventure’s sake. It’s purposeful migration toward growth and understanding. Every location in our program, every project, every connection becomes part of something larger. Like the herds that return year after year to ancient paths, we follow rhythms that shape our community and our educational purpose.

Venturing Beyond the To-Do List

Our students’ Rite of Passage didn’t involve tests or rubrics. Instead, they walked, camped, connected with nature, journaled, and listened. They began to understand more fully who they are and how they want to engage with their learning this year.

It’s about presence and purpose; the opportunity to begin not from a to-do list, but from a place of alignment and clarity.

Learning in the Wild

In traditional classrooms, we often talk about “covering material.” But what if education could be about uncovering? Discovering ourselves, our connections to others, and our place in the larger world? What if learning looked like paying attention to the language of landscape, the wisdom of migration patterns, the lessons embedded in shared experience under vast skies?

This is education as transformation rather than transaction. Learning that happens not just through books and lectures, but through immersion, reflection, and genuine community.

Photo by Content Manager & Technologist Matt Rogers

As our students participate on their own journey in this transformative setting, we’re reminded that the most meaningful learning often happens when we step outside our comfort zones and into spaces that humble us, challenge us, and invite us to see with new eyes.

The Nxai Pan migration continues, and this time, we’re honored to be part of it.