Narrated by a "researcher"-teacher, drawing from an interactional ethnographic and sociolinguistics perspective, he re-examines his previous teaching practices as a teacher-researcher in order to build a conceptual model for communities-based learning. This article reveals the discursive ways that linguistically and culturally diverse second and third graders, and their teacher, learned to navigate the complex social spaces within their classroom and into the larger community as interdisciplinary literacy learners of reading, writing, art and science. The students, in a public school in South Coastal California, navigated cultural landscapes of school and the larger community as "texts to be read". The space where their social worlds overlap is conceived of a place for struggling with complex ideas where change can happen and all emerge transformed. Students became young members of disciplines by learning from each other and learning from California landscape painter, centenarian Ray Strong and other accomplished artists. Students learned to view ordinary life and places as locations to learn from the people who make these places spaces for learning. (Contains 3 figures.)