Thank you for your interest! Our 2024-2025 group is full. We hope to offer this opportunity again in future years: if you’re interested, please drop us a line and we’ll make sure you are the first to know.
You are invited to join a small global cohort dedicated to constructing pathways for playful inquiry to grow joy, meaning, and courage.
Playful Inquiry is a pedagogical approach that we developed and researched throughout our 20 year collaboration with colleagues, children, and families at Opal School. It is an approach that centers curiosity, relationship, and empathy. It manifests in practices that prioritize play, the arts, story, imagination, and love. It strengthens our capacity to participate in the meaningful construction of knowledge within diverse communities where uncertainty is an expected part of growth and change. Playful inquiry invites us to re-ignite the unique gifts of childhood that are our human birthright and to sustain those gifts in those who are children now as we take responsibility for a more loving relationship between childhood and adulthood. Adults must engage in playful inquiry in their own knowledge building contexts in order to practice an approach of playful inquiry with children. It is the role of pedagogical leadership to ensure opportunities for this practice.
What is playful inquiry?
We have had the privilege of working with thousands of educators who, like you, are committed to developing the highest quality organizations and schools alongside teachers and other staff, children, and families. This privilege has afforded an opportunity to notice common challenges among often isolated leaders who have little chance to collaborate with peers. The stressors inherent to the work are - a lot. For the first time this fall, we are convening a small, structured cohort of professional peers who are seeking to nurture the ecologies that sustain their unique communities - to ensure they are flourishing and full of joy - and who are committed to supporting one another in doing so.
After many years of designing and facilitating professional development programs that engaged participants in playful inquiry, including the programs of the Studio for Playful Inquiry, we are thrilled to offer this program to you.
Create a small (4-10 participants) stable group of individuals who are eager to collaborate and define what it means to lead with playful inquiry in an effort to nurture ecologies of joyful learning, who will share stories from their own practice, and who will be generous, vulnerable, and compassionate accountability partners. Matt and Susan will lead with playful inquiry so that every participant has the opportunity for their own first hand experience with the approach.
Meet live every month (Sept - Jun) to engage in facilitated dialogue, reflection, ask questions, share stories, and make connections - all critical practices that strengthen playful inquiry
Support the articulation of values and guiding principles that sustain individual contexts and reflect on practices, tools, and strategies that bring them alive
Support communication tools, strategies, and practices that express beliefs and values to the wider community (as defined by each participant)
Practice using the arts as tools for communication, expression, and reflection
Strengthen capacities for documentation and storytelling as we work to build strong relationships between theory and practice
Facilitate the use of the Studio for Playful Inquiry assets to support understanding and commitment from the caregivers and educators in each member’s unique context. These assets include ongoing readings, poetry and other art, support for thinking with materials, live conversations with valued guests and mentors, support for writing and publication, live meetings with the wider Studio community, extensive opportunities to share and collaborate with committed professionals around the world, a variety of courses on specific topics relevant to the practice of playful inquiry
Our Intentions
What will we read?
Over 10 months, we’ll use these texts to support our dialogue and find meaningful connections between theory and our leadership practices.
In addition, we’ll have access to all of the resources that are growing in the Studio for Playful Inquiry. A sampling of topics (we call them Through Lines) we’ll explore in 2024-25 includes curiosity, imagination, abundance, resilience, plurality, refuge, and moving beyond the binary.
Details
A cohort of 4-10 leaders will meet online with Susan and Matt October - June. Monthly meetings will be held for 1.5 hours each month on October 3, 2024; November 14, 2024; December 12, 2024; January 23, 2025; February 20, 2025; March 20, 2025; April 17, 2025; May 15, 2025; and (Wed) June 4, 2025. In order to maximize privacy, these meetings will not be recorded but notes will be available. For all meetings, participants will choose 1 of 2 groups. Group 1 will meet from 10 - 11:30 am Pacific Time, OR Group 2 which will meet from 4-5:30 pm Pacific Time. (Please be sure to check your local time and date.)
October 19, March 8, and May 31, we’ll meet for extended online retreats (Group 1: 8:30 - 11:30 am Pacific Time; Group 2: 4:00 - 7:00 pm Pacific Time.) These meetings will not be recorded but notes will be available.
We’ll create a private, dedicated space inside the Studio for Playful Inquiry for ongoing connection and building relationship.
The cost for the inaugural program is US$2500. Continuing cohort membership will be sustained at this price. Payment plans are available.
There is an option to add monthly individual coaching with Susan. Cost for monthly coaching is $1000 for 10 months and bi-weekly coaching is $2000 for 10 months. Payment plans are available.
Benefits include annual Transform Plan membership to all Studio for Playful Inquiry content for participants; staff members receive 50% discount for Studio Transform Plan memberships.
If there is strong interest, we may add an in-person retreat during July or August of 2025. All information about that possibility, costs, logistics, etc… are TBA. (We think that would be FUN!)
As participants, we expect results like these:
Develop clarity around your vision, intentions and supporting values that have the potential to sustain playful inquiry in your context
Increase your capacity to facilitate dialog and reflection rooted in guiding principles and care
Grow courage as a collaborator and leader who bridges theory and practice
Reflect and communicate through story in ways that reveal your own growth as a leader and listener
Nurture compassion for diverse perspectives and self-compassion for tensions and tangles
Strengthen dispositional muscles required to embrace and engage with uncertainty and complexity
Build relationships with colleagues to imagine and create more possibilities
About Us
Matt Karlsen co-founder, director, teacher, writer, facilitator, dad
Susan Harris MacKay co-founder, director, teacher, writer, coach, mom
Matt and Susan have been partners in this work for more than 20 years. First as teacher researchers and family friends with growing children, then as colleagues at Opal School who gave leadership to the pedagogical direction of the school and the professional development program which served thousands of educators around the world each year. When Opal School closed due to the pandemic, Matt and Susan founded The Center for Playful Inquiry and its Studio. The success of the Studio over the past three years has lead to their decision to create this offering.
The problem with the straight line is simply this: once it has reached its end, what then?
— Tim Ingold