Your Stories Matter


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

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

I'm hearing it constantly: In these wild times, it's really important for everyone to write. Maybe that's a message you're hearing, too. But you might be wondering where to start - or what that call has to do with your work with young people. We've designed an antidote to that: a short series to get you started. Over just four meetings - each designed to attend live or at your convenience - we'll help you put pen to paper in a way that you'll find meaningful. And it's cheap - we've got pick...

"'Dialogue' comes from the Greek word dialogos. Logos means 'the word' or in our case we would think of the 'meaning of the word'. And dia means 'through' - it doesn't mean two. A dialogue can be among any number of people, not just two. Even one person can have a sense of dialogue within himself, if the spirit of the dialogue is present. The picture of image that this derivation suggests is of a stream of meaning flowing among and through us and between us. This will make possible a flow of...

Dear Reader, It is clear that if we are to live in harmony with ourselves and with nature, we need to be able to communicate freely in a creative movement in which no one permanently holds to or otherwise defends his own ideas. Why then is it so difficult actually to bring about such communication? David Bohm, On Dialogue This month we've been thinking about dialogue as we've been finishing our reading of See No Stranger - we've asked: What is love without dialogue? Below is an excerpt from a...