Disney as Text
Reimagining learning and life with inspiration from “The Most Magical Place on Earth”
Editor’s Note: Disney as Text first appeared on this blog four years ago following my keynote at the National Collegiate Honors Council Annual Conference. I am returning to the series now with new and expanded essays exploring ideas that have continued to shape my work.
I once had the honor of serving as the opening keynote speaker for the National Collegiate Honors Council Annual Conference at the Swan and Dolphin Resort at Walt Disney World. NCHC supports undergraduate honors education at colleges and universities around the world, bringing together students and faculty who are interested in creating challenging, authentic, real-world learning experiences.
When I received the invitation to speak, I was unfamiliar with NCHC and much of its work. As I learned more about the organization, however, I quickly discovered that many of its ideas aligned closely with my own. I became particularly interested in its promotion of programs such as “City as Text” and “Place as Text,” study-away experiences that encourage students to explore a city or place as something to be studied rather than simply visited.
Students immerse themselves in the history, culture, people, environment, and stories of a place, allowing the place itself to become part of the learning experience.
The theme of the conference was “Reimagining Honors,” and my role as the opening speaker was to provide a little Imagineering-inspired encouragement as participants began the conference. I wanted to challenge students and faculty to tap into their imaginations, reconnect with some of the dreams and ideas that had inspired them in the first place, and think about the future they wanted to create, both for their programs and for themselves.
Borrowing from NCHC’s City as Text and Place as Text programs, I titled my keynote “Disney as Text.” I invited the audience to consider what we might discover if we approached Walt Disney World in much the same way, studying it not simply as a theme park or vacation destination, but as a place filled with lessons about creativity, storytelling, design, innovation, experience, and imagination.
The principles and practices developed by Walt Disney and generations of Imagineers offer useful ways to think about how we design places for learning and the experiences that occur within them. They can also challenge us to reconsider how we approach our own ideas, ambitions, and creative work.
What follows are a few of those thoughts.
Dreaming of What Could Be
As we considered what it means to reimagine something, I shared the story of one of the great dreamers and doers of the twentieth century, Walt Disney. By the years following World War II, Walt had begun thinking seriously about creating a new kind of amusement experience, something very different from many of the fairs and carnivals families encountered at the time.
He envisioned a clean, beautiful, exciting place where parents and children could enjoy experiences together, and over the years that followed, the idea continued to grow as Walt and his team developed the concepts that would eventually become Disneyland.
When Disneyland opened in 1955, something that had existed for years as an idea had finally become a place people could enter and experience for themselves. Its creation required imagination, certainly, but imagination was only the beginning. Walt surrounded himself with artists, engineers, architects, storytellers, designers, builders, and countless others who helped turn an ambitious idea into something tangible.
Along the way there were problems to solve, risks to take, concepts to abandon, and ideas to improve.
I have always been drawn to that part of the story because dreaming is easy when nothing is required of us. The more difficult work begins when we decide to do something with the idea. A dream starts becoming real when we begin asking what it will require, who might help us accomplish it, what obstacles stand in the way, and what first step we are willing to take. Disneyland grew from an idea because Walt was willing to keep developing it, even when many people around him could not yet see what he saw.
The success of Disneyland did not cause him to stop imagining. By the early 1960s, Walt was thinking about something much larger that would eventually take shape in the swamplands of Central Florida. His Florida Project would include another theme park, but the larger vision extended well beyond what would eventually become the Magic Kingdom. At the heart of Walt’s plans was an idea he called EPCOT, the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow.
A Living Blueprint of the Future
Walt envisioned EPCOT as an actual community where people would live and work while new technologies, transportation systems, materials, and ideas were continually introduced and tested. In describing the project, he called it a community that would never truly be completed because it would continue to respond to new ideas and discoveries. He envisioned it as a “living blueprint of the future.”
I have always found that phrase fascinating because embedded within it is the idea that improvement never really ends. Walt was imagining a place built around experimentation, one where people would continue testing possibilities rather than settling permanently for what already existed. The underlying question was not simply whether something worked, but whether it could work better.
There is a lesson in that approach that extends far beyond Disney. Schools, classrooms, organizations, programs, and even our own work can become living prototypes when we remain willing to examine what we have created and continue improving it. Innovation does not require us to discard everything that came before or constantly chase the newest idea. It requires curiosity, reflection, and enough humility to recognize that what works today may still have room to grow tomorrow.
The challenge is resisting complacency. Once something becomes familiar, it is easy to accept it simply because it is the way we have always done it. Reimagining asks something different of us. It asks us to look again, to consider possibilities we may have overlooked, and to remain open to the idea that something good can still become better.
Walt never had the opportunity to see his Florida Project completed. He died in 1966, five years before Walt Disney World opened in 1971. When the resort was dedicated, his brother and longtime business partner, Roy O. Disney, made certain that Walt remained at the center of what had been created.
In the dedication, Roy expressed the hope that Walt Disney World would bring “joy and inspiration and new knowledge” to those who visited, creating a place where people of all ages could “laugh and play and learn together.”
More than fifty years later, I remain struck by the combination of those ideas: joy, inspiration, knowledge, laughter, play, and learning. We often separate them, especially in education, as though serious learning must somehow exist apart from wonder, play, or enjoyment. Disney’s best experiences demonstrate that they can exist together, and that when they do, the result can become much more memorable.
My own understanding of that began when I was nine years old.
Entering the Story
During Spring Break in 1978, my parents took me to Walt Disney World for the first time. Like most kids, I already knew Mickey Mouse and many of the familiar Disney characters. I watched The Mickey Mouse Club and knew stories such as Snow White, Peter Pan, and Dumbo. Until that trip, however, those stories had existed primarily on a television or movie screen.
Walking into the Magic Kingdom changed the experience completely because I was no longer simply watching the story, I was part of it.
I could walk through a frontier town, climb aboard an attraction that carried me into another world, explore Tom Sawyer Island, encounter pirates and ghosts, travel through a jungle, and move through environments where the architecture, music, landscaping, characters, props, and smallest details all seemed to belong to the same story. I certainly did not understand any of that from a design perspective at nine years old.
I simply knew that the experience felt different from anything I had encountered before.
Years later, I returned to Walt Disney World as a parent with my own children and had the opportunity to watch them encounter many of those experiences for themselves. Over the next several years, our family visited numerous times, and somewhere along the way I began paying attention differently. I became increasingly interested in why these places worked.
I noticed the details that helped establish a setting, the stories that gave meaning to an environment, the ways Imagineers guided people through an experience, and the countless decisions that allowed guests to feel as though they were participants rather than observers.
Then, during one of those trips in 2010, I watched my boys playing on Tom Sawyer Island and began thinking about everything we had experienced during our visits. I thought about how much they had discovered simply because they were curious about the places around them, and I began considering what any of this might mean for the work I had spent my career doing in schools.
A question came to mind that would eventually send me in an entirely new direction:
What if we designed schools the way Disney designs its theme parks?
I was not suggesting that schools should become amusement parks, nor was I interested in making education more entertaining simply for the sake of entertainment. I was thinking about something much deeper. Disney’s Imagineers design environments around the people who will experience them.
They use story to create meaning, pay extraordinary attention to detail, anticipate how people will move through a space, build opportunities for discovery, and understand that the environment itself shapes the experience.
What might happen if we brought some of that same thinking into education?
I began reading everything I could find about Walt Disney and the Imagineers. I studied their creative processes, their approach to storytelling, the way they designed environments, and the methods they used to transform ideas into experiences. The more I learned, the more connections I began finding between their work and the work of educators.
What began as a question while watching my children play eventually grew into Imagineering Education and started a journey of discovery that continues to shape my work today.
Perhaps that is why the idea of Disney as Text continues to resonate with me. When we look beyond the attractions themselves and begin studying how these places and experiences were imagined, designed, built, and continually reinvented, there is much to discover. Disney becomes more than a destination. It becomes a laboratory for studying story, creativity, design, imagination, innovation, and the human experience.
And for educators, it offers another question worth exploring: What might we discover there that could help us reimagine the places where our own students learn?
The Disney as Text series continues by exploring one of the most important tools Disney and its Imagineers use to create meaningful experiences: the power of story.
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