A community that supports transformation

Are you dedicated to growing your practice of playful inquiry?

Are you seeking an antidote to the isolation so often felt by practitioners who believe play, meaning-making, and the rights of children should be prioritized in school?

Are you an educator committed to re-imagining environments and experiences for learning that promote joy, creativity, and the wonder of learning?

Are you a school leader hoping to support colleagues as they reimagine their work?

You've found a global community dedicated to mutual mentorship towards responding to those questions in your unique context.

Contact Susan and Matt here.

Join the Studio

Studios are places where people come together to experiment: to imagine greater possibilities, try out new ideas, and share experiences investigating pathways that include immersion in the arts, investment in play, and sharing stories.

The Studio for Playful Inquiry is an online community filled with colleagues eager to grow with you. Here, you’ll find inspiring, provocative invitations that spur meaningful conversation and exchange, catalyze reflection, and encourage innovation. It's slow pd: for the price of a workshop, you get a year of evolving and deepening connection. 

Members come from all parts of the world, teaching and leading in a wide range of schools for children (usually ages 3 to 11, but sometimes younger and sometimes older.) We share images and stories, read, watch, and listen to a range of texts, and connect with each other through an inviting platform and realtime meet-ups. Together, we support each other to create the kinds of learning communities upon which healthy living depends.

Learn about membership plans here.

What do members say?

This month in The Studio

In the coming months, we'll explore:

What informs your image of the child and the work you do alongside them?

What is the body learning?

What makes learning come alive?

In Bodies of Learning, Emily Poel and Guy Claxton write: “School’s obsession with learning about things, rather than learning to do things, does not sit well with our pre-wired priorities.” This year in The Studio we’ll be focusing our attention on strategies, theories, research, and practices that better support our pre-wired biological priorities when it comes to learning. In his famous poem, The 100 Languages of Children, Loris Malaguzzi laments the way that schools traditionally separate the head from the rest of the body. We look forward to a year of exploring this topic within the Studio community as we consider ways to sustain the “patterns that connect” that Gregory Bateson warned us against breaking.

Weekly live meet ups, explorations with materials, curated texts, poetry, rich sharing and conversation with colleagues, interviews and original documentation stories from a wide variety of teacher researchers and authors make The Studio a special place. Learn more about membership here.

Not ready to join? Get on the list!

Click here to be added to our mailing list. We send frequent newsletters with essays, links to relevant articles and other interesting things, and keep you updated on ways to get involved with the Center for Playful Inquiry and its Studio.

Who is behind this project?

Learn more about Susan Harris MacKay, Matt Karlsen, and ways to engage with the Center for Playful Inquiry here. Matt and Susan joined Studio Member Cathy Belgrave for a discussion of the project: Listen to the podcast episode here.

Susan and Matt are dedicated to removing barriers to participation. If you'd like to discuss group registration discounts, pay-over-time plans, need-based discounts, or anything else, don't hesitate to drop us a line.