The Studio for Playful Inquiry
Membership
Thanks for taking a look at The Studio for Playful Inquiry - an online community designed to help you find courage and community as you imagine new possibilities for your work with children in ways that reflect your values and your experience of the joys, challenges, and uncertainty you are living with.
Susan Harris MacKay and Matt Karlsen created The Studio in 2021 when our longtime home for playful inquiry, Opal School, was closed. We were committed to taking what we learned there into a post-Opal School world. The years since have been remarkable: We’ve uncovered so much about creating an online space for educators around the world and have had so much fun doing it.
We bet you have a bunch of questions before diving in. Living in questions is wonderful - we don’t want to stop any of that - but we can spark some new ones by answering a few below.
“The Studio really is what has brought joy and hope to me as an educator during a tough year.”
What is playful inquiry?
Playful inquiry is a pedagogical approach that centers curiosity, relationship, and empathy. It manifests in practices that prioritize play, the arts, story, imagination, and love. It strengthens the capacity of adults and children to participate in the meaningful construction of knowledge within diverse communities where uncertainty is a valued 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.
Why a studio?
Oftentimes, the “professional development” experiences educators are directed to are cold bureaucratic exercises that demand delivery of scripted curriculum that passes right through the unique adult human beings to the unique child human beings. That approach implies that answers to all of our challenges will be found in products we purchase and that once we buy them, they’ll “work”.
To engage in playful inquiry, we need a studio: A learning community rich with relationship and experimentation and provisional thinking with play and the arts right in the forefront. We also need time - something teachers are challenged to find. Our online Studio routines, which we’ll explain below, are designed for you to connect with flexibly and when you’re ready. Dive deep, or skim. Attend live meet ups or hang back. Join the current course or sit it out. Our memberships hand agency for your learning journey to you.
Who is this community?
The Studio is filled with adults who want to think deeply about their work with children (especially ages 3-9, but younger and older, too), their families, and colleagues - and the role that work plays in living the lives they want to live. Those adults live all around the world and work in a wide variety of settings. Their assignments are varied, including classroom teachers, specialists, coaches, administrators, and teacher educators - folks who are new to the field and deep into their paths, all enjoying learning from and with each other. And they grow rich relationships with each other, becoming trusted colleagues with a real sense of mutual concern; many now consider each other close friends.
Jenessa, Texas primary school teacher
“Teacher soulmates, pedagogical companions, thought partners. Our Studio community is one of the most nourishing and practice-propelling group of friends I’ve been part of. The Studio has been THE place to make these connections and has given me so much courage.”
Kailyn, Indonesia early childhood teacher
“The Studio is a safe and brave space, full of individuals challenging their own assumptions and nudging themselves towards growth.”
So… what happens in The Studio and how do I join?
The Studio experience
Every month begins with a Through Line - a big idea that we predict will hold meaning to you regardless of your context. Our monthly Guide Lines are one-hour conversations we think will catalyze all sorts of thinking about the Through Line. Weekly, we offer Jump Lines - texts that will inspire the community to be in dialogue and make connections to big ideas and to one another.
Depending on your membership level, The Studio experience also includes:
Thinking with materials
Each month, we collaborate with our Studio mentor, teaching artist Kathryn Ann Myers, to introduce a tool of the arts and offer opportunities for exploring the month’s big idea with that media.
Gathering string
Weekly, a poem or other artwork focuses attention and inspires the gathering of meaningful reflection. We close the week by Sharing Our Encounters, connecting our personal experiences (and growing new ideas) by sharing images, insights, picture books, and more.
Making time for meet ups
At these gatherings hosted each week by Matt and Susan, Studio members show up for each other, bringing forward tangles they are involved in and documentation that is puzzling them, and find other folks eager to puzzle alongside them. These meetings are truly incredible times of connection and transformation - they provide new perspectives on the topic and new insight into how colleagues might be with each other.
Courses
We host several limited time courses in The Studio each year. In addition to courses Susan and Matt lead, these include lots of opportunities to learn from others. Examples have included an inquiry into friendship with Kathy Collins, into humor with Shawna Coppola, into the arts and flourishing with Miriam Beloglovsky, Jesús Oviedo, Georgia Heard, and Sophie Ann Edwards, and into love and belonging with Nicole Marie and Valarie Kaur.
Why join The Studio?
-
Each week you’ll have the opportunity to participate in a responsive, personalized Meet Up facilitated by Matt and Susan. These unrecorded meetings are an ongoing opportunity to safely practice being in dialogue about big ideas that have the potential to change the way we understand and communicate the power and value of the work we do.
You’ll also have an open invitation to share your documentation in progress within a community that wants you to share your stories.
No pressure (but we really love it when you show up, and it seems like everyone else does, too - so you should give it a shot!)
-
Our professional, intellectual, and creative capacities are inspired and transformed when we engage with others who work in diverse settings but who share similar values about the relationship we want to build between childhood and adulthood. Our communities benefit when we reach beyond the isolation of our classroom and school towards others who are working against standardization and compliance and towards care, listening, love, beauty, and justice.
-
In 2024 alone, our Guide Line conversations featured Fiona Zinn, Darryl Redick, Michelle Ramirez, Mara Krechevsky, Miriam Beloglovsky, Jesús Oviedo, Sophie Ann Edwards, Georgia Heard, Kirsty Liljigren, Kelly Goodsir, Cindy Foley, Xitlali Zárate, Alicia Bustamente, Vanessa Esquivel Martinez, Shawna Coppola, Amanda Jewart, Jenna Barruga, and Donna Indrakumaran.
You can take a look at the books we’re reading together here.
And support for growing your relationship with the arts! And poetry! And and and!
-
The Studio for Playful Inquiry is hosted by Mighty Networks which allows us to create a private, fully customized online community. We think that this beautiful platform - which is accessible 24/7/365 through your browser and through an app - is intuitive and friendly to access, but we will be there to support you, and, if you’d like, we’ll invite you to join us in a personal meeting to tour you through the Studio to get to know you and to make sure you get to know it (and us!).
-
For this year of “slow pd”, we’ve set the price to mirror the rough cost of a single workshop: US$375. Because we know that it’s hard to picture what the feel of The Studio will be just from reading these words, our annual plans start with a no cost trial period: If you decide it’s not for you, just cancel and no charges will be made to your credit card.
We’ve established rates that reflect the offering’s value, cover costs, and hope to result in sustainable revenues. We know that people’s resources vary widely and don’t want costs to be an obstacle to participation. If you see something you’d like to join that would overly strain your current budget, don’t hesitate to reach out and let us know what you are able to pay and we’ll strive to accommodate your situation.
Subscriptions auto-renew unless cancelled.
Accidents happen - if you need to cancel, we will work with you but need to deduct costs we cannot recoup.
Membership levels - You’ve got choices! (and free trials)
-
Transform - US$375 annual
Our standard annual membership is designed for folks hungry to transform their practice. It includes everything, but we want you to resist your urge to be a completist and be ok participating in what you want to dive into when you want to dive into it. We offer this annual membership at the cost of a weekend workshop and, each week, we offer just a little more than we think any one person will choose to keep up with on their own. This slow drip professional development program supports members to turn towards one another and it reinforces your reliance on the sense of agency we want to strengthen.
-
Inspire - US$175 annual/$20 monthly
To inspire new possibilities without going all in, we provide access to everything in our standard membership except the live meetings and courses. You can choose whether to pay for this at a monthly rate or with a steeply discounted annual rate. We offer this discount because we believe that giving yourself the annual experience invites you to take your time with the content. We don’t want you to feel pressured - we want you to feel welcome and supported. And like the Transform Plan, we want to you to strengthen the sense of agency that engaging with professional development on your own terms brings.
Other options:
If you’re looking to engage with The Studio at a less intensive level, we offer access to the current month’s Through Line, Jump Line, and Guide Line.
Transform, Inspire, and Engage are for individuals. Because we know that The Studio for Playful Inquiry can also strengthen relationships and attention in a learning community, we offer an Institutional Membership. Included in this plan are the Through Lines, Jump Lines, Guide Lines, Material Work, and weekly prompts for reflection. These materials provide excellent ongoing content for PLCs, team meetings, and other kinds of regular staff development. Administrators appreciate the evolving, carefully curated resources of The Studio to take the pressure off responsibilities for pedagogical development. Because these resources are intentionally designed to be open to the particularities of unique contexts, they invite school leaders to think with teachers and families allowing everyone to develop new ideas, inquiries, and shared reference points.
We’ll set up a self-hosted private space for your community within The Studio platform to chat about connections you’re making and share documentation. At a mutually agreeable time, Susan and Matt will join two 75-minute conversations with your team to explore those connections with you.
Note that this package maxes out at 20 participants: If your group is larger, we’ll be happy to work with you to set up something to meet your needs.
US$1950 annually
“I have had so many aha moments, more than a few tears, and had a real shift in my thinking as I reflected on the questions you asked, and engaged in the tasks you presented. I feel a lot of your work with children and colleagues stems from a place of deep respect, and, as you said, dignity. That's powerful.”
Studio member, South Africa