From Reimagining School to a Galaxy Far, Far Away

Thomas presenting his solo session, The Reimagineering Education, at SXSW EDU 2026

Last March, I had the opportunity to speak at SXSW EDU in Austin about an idea I have been exploring for much of my career: what might happen if we approached the design of schools with the same kind of imagination and intentionality that Imagineers bring to the experiences they create?

I had twenty minutes.

Anyone who knows me probably knows that twenty minutes is not nearly enough time for me to talk about something I have been thinking about for years, but it was enough time to discover something I had hoped might be true. Educators were interested in this conversation.

The session reached capacity, and the audience brought an enthusiasm that stayed with me throughout the presentation. People were taking notes and photographs of slides, and when the session ended, there were questions I simply didn't have time to address. Several people stayed afterward to continue the conversation and wanted to know more about how these ideas could actually be applied in their classrooms and schools.

There was another indication of that interest during the conference. My book, Imagineering Education, sold out in the SXSW EDU bookstore and was one of only a small number of titles at the conference to do so.

I left Austin grateful for the response, but also thinking about everything we hadn't had time to explore.

That experience became the starting point for one of two proposals I have submitted for SXSW in 2027.

Going Deeper with The Imagineering Effect

My proposal for SXSW EDU 2027 is called The Imagineering Effect: A School Design Workshop, and it grows directly from the conversations that began in Austin last year.

This time, I am proposing a workshop because I want educators to have the time to move beyond hearing about these ideas and begin applying them to their own schools.

Imagineers are extraordinarily intentional about the experiences they create. They consider the story they are trying to tell, the spaces in which that story will unfold, and the people who will eventually enter those spaces. Every decision contributes to the experience, from the large architectural choices to details that visitors may barely notice consciously but still experience as part of the whole.

Schools are also collections of experiences, although we don't always think about them that way. Students encounter our values through far more than curriculum. They experience them through classrooms and hallways, through the way they arrive each morning, through traditions and routines, through the ways adults interact with them, and through hundreds of small decisions that gradually communicate what kind of place a school is.

The workshop would give educators an opportunity to examine those experiences through three questions that have become central to my own work: What is the story? How does the space help tell it? What experience are we creating for the people who enter it?

Participants would then use those questions to examine something from their own educational setting and begin redesigning it. For one person, that might be a classroom. For someone else, it could be a hallway, a school tradition, an arrival experience, a program, or a larger question about the identity of the school itself. The particular challenge will be different for everyone in the room, which is one of the reasons I am excited about the possibilities of doing this as a workshop.

My hope is that participants leave Austin with an idea they have already begun developing and a process they can continue using when they return home.

The response to last year's session convinced me that there is much more to explore here. The workshop is an opportunity to continue a conversation that twenty minutes allowed us to begin.

A Different Kind of Journey

My second proposal takes me back considerably farther than last March.

In the summer of 1977, when I was eight years old, I saw Star Wars for the first time at the Astro II theater in Greenville, South Carolina. I couldn't possibly have known then how deeply that movie would become woven into my life.

Like so many children of that generation, I didn't leave Star Wars behind when I walked out of the theater. I carried it home. My friends and I recreated the adventures ourselves, using whatever we could find to transform the familiar places around us into the worlds we had seen on the screen. The toys eventually extended those adventures even further because they gave us the characters, vehicles, and settings from which we could create stories of our own.

At eight years old, that was simply play.

Years later, Star Wars found its way into my classroom.

Eventually, I helped create Star Wars in the Classroom, an effort that brought together educators interested in using the films, mythology, storytelling, history, science, and popular culture as doorways into learning. That work opened doors I never could have imagined when I was that kid sitting in the theater in 1977, including opportunities to connect with Lucasfilm and with other educators around the world who understood that the stories our students love can become powerful invitations into learning.

Along the way, I also became increasingly interested in understanding why the original story had connected so powerfully with me in 1977 and why it continued to resonate with people decades later. That curiosity introduced me to the work of Joseph Campbell and the Hero's Journey, which gave me a different way of understanding a story I had known for most of my life.

I began to recognize something I certainly could not have articulated when I was eight. The journey that had captured my imagination as a child reflected experiences that eventually became familiar in my own life. There are moments when we sense that something beyond our familiar world is calling us, moments when we have to decide whether we are willing to leave what we know, and periods when the path we chose becomes far more difficult than we expected. Along the way we encounter people who guide us, people who travel beside us, failures that alter our direction, and experiences that change the way we understand ourselves.

That realization is at the heart of my second proposal, Finding Yourself in Star Wars: A Hero's Journey at 50, which I have submitted for SXSW 2027.

The timing feels particularly appropriate because 2027 marks fifty years since Star Wars first arrived in theaters. There will understandably be plenty of opportunities to celebrate the films, characters, toys, music, and cultural influence that grew from what George Lucas created in 1977. I am interested in exploring another part of that legacy by considering why this story has remained so deeply personal for so many people and what it can reveal when we use the Hero's Journey to examine the stories of our own lives.

For those of us who first encountered Star Wars in 1977, fifty years also gives us an extraordinary vantage point. We have lived a substantial portion of our own journeys alongside this story. We have answered calls we never expected to receive, crossed thresholds without knowing where they would lead, encountered mentors and companions, experienced success and disappointment, changed direction, lost people we loved, discovered new purposes, and occasionally found ourselves beginning again.

When I think about the eight-year-old who sat in the Astro II that summer and the man who would stand on a SXSW stage fifty years later talking about the story he encountered there, I can see a journey neither of us could have predicted.

That is the conversation I hope to have in Austin.

Two Ideas That Are More Connected Than They First Appear

When I tell people that I have submitted one proposal about Imagineering and school design and another about Star Wars and the Hero's Journey, I realize they can sound like two completely unrelated subjects. From where I stand, however, they have grown from many of the same questions.

I have spent much of my career thinking about the experiences we create for young people and how those experiences influence the way they understand learning, their communities, and themselves. I have also spent much of my life fascinated by stories and by the ways they give us a framework for making sense of experiences that can otherwise be difficult to understand.

The Imagineering workshop looks at that work from the perspective of the designer. It asks educators to become more intentional about the experiences they create and to consider what their schools communicate through story, space, and human interaction.

The Star Wars session approaches experience from the perspective of the person living through it. It asks us to consider our own lives as journeys and to recognize some of the patterns that stories have been helping human beings understand for thousands of years.

Both have emerged from work that has occupied a significant part of my life, and I would be grateful for the opportunity to continue both conversations at SXSW in 2027.

I Could Use Your Support

Both proposals are currently open for community voting through August 23. Community voting is part of the SXSW selection process, so support from people who would like to see these sessions in Austin can help.

If you attended my SXSW EDU session last year, have read Imagineering Education, or have followed my work around rethinking the experiences we create in schools, I hope you will consider voting for The Imagineering Effect: A School Design Workshop by clicking here.

If Star Wars has been part of your own story, or if the idea of using the Hero's Journey to better understand where we have been and where we may be headed connects with you, I hope you will consider supporting Finding Yourself in Star Wars: A Hero's Journey at 50 and cast your vote here.

And, of course, you are welcome to vote for both.

I am grateful to everyone who has already supported these proposals, shared them with others, or sent a note telling me why one of these ideas connected with them. One of the things I enjoyed most about SXSW EDU last year was discovering how quickly a twenty-minute presentation could turn into conversations that continued in hallways, over meals, and even after everyone had returned home.

I would love the opportunity to continue those conversations once more. Your continued support will help make it so.