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Center for Playful Inquiry

Your Stories Matter

Published 11 months ago • 1 min read

New Offerings!

Your stories offer an essential corrective to misleading images of who children and educators are and what is happening in our schools and centers. In this intensive short course, we'll work together to develop and share stories that you value.

Over the last year, 19 educators and administrators from around the world have strengthened their capacity to lead with and for playful inquiry. Their enthusiasm for the experience leads us to offer the experience to a small group of additional leaders.

Uncertainty challenges us - but it is also a gift. This month, we'll consider how we might develop practices that welcome uncertainty and cultivate conditions that strengthen comfort with uncertainty.

“[Embodying uncertainty] brings with it the capacity and the striving toward the kind of intuitive, empathic, welcoming, and non-prejudicial thinking that is necessary when one is engaged in educational contexts.”

— Maddalena Tedeschi

3950 NW St. Helens Rd. , Portland, OR 97210
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Center for Playful Inquiry

Pedagogical partnership inspiring courage, community, change.

Susan Harris MacKay and Matt Karlsen provide consulting, coaching, and mentorship to educators who are seeking companionship and community in creating and sustaining inquiry-based, aesthetically rich, democratic learning environments and experiences for young children and themselves. Former directors of Opal School in Portland, Oregon. Author: Story Workshop: New Possibilities for Young Writers (Heinemann, 2021). Membership is open at the Studio for Playful Inquiry.

Read more from Center for Playful Inquiry

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17 days ago • 1 min read

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2 months ago • 4 min read

Dear Reader, The Studio community this month has been engaged in inquiries around our relationship with time and so my awareness of the off-beat rhythm of this newsletter has been heightened. Matt and I try to offer something of value to your inbox, predictably, a couple of times a month - but I don't seem to struggle any less with deadlines now than I ever have at any point in my life. Maybe that's why I find the topic so interesting, and the world beyond the linear ways we typically use...

4 months ago • 3 min read