After a long and moderately intentional pause, a new “season” of The Playful Podcast has launched. As part of a commitment to forming structures for openness, this season is less linear, more expansive, less edited, more spontaneous, less contained to the format of “episodes”, and more reflective of authentic learning. Grounded in an ethos towards mutual flourishing, healing, learning, and living well, join me cultivating curiousity about humanity, both within and beyond being mentors to others in the human experience.
Transcript:
Welcome to the Playful podcast where we discuss lifelong learning and leisure by lingering at the intersection of recreation, education and occupation. I’m your host, Kim Barton. Welcome to the journey. I’m excited to play and learn along with you.
So a lot has happened in the time since my last episode has aired. It’s probably been about 8 months. I’ve changed jobs twice. I’ve started and ended relationships, I’ve met new mentors, I’ve made huge mistakes, and I’ve learned more in one year than I thought I would in a lifetime. Um, and I don’t really know how to rekindle this podcast. My whole journey with reflective practice has evolved and expanded in ways that I almost feel too contained by this process, but I also feel like I’m where I am. I am where I am because of being able to hear myself back, being able to hear my thoughts. So rather than this continuing to be a platform of, you know, sharing refined knowledge or bringing in experts. This is going to live on as a as ideas that may take us in some interesting places and are certainly not complete and are not meant to be polished works to reference. Rather, they’re an invitation into some of what I’m thinking about and grappling with and tripping up over, rumbling with um. Well, that’s the the smallest hope from this process. The biggest one being that the ideas shared here provoke, provoke something in you. This is not meant to be a soapbox. This is actually meant to be a conversation. Um. And so in saying that, I wanted to share that this next season of this podcast is probably going to look a bit different. I thought about the fact that essentially I’m trying to launch a season 2, but I’m really not introducing anything new. In fact, I’m going a lot deeper with some ideas that have already been playing with in the 1st 9 or 10 episodes. Revisiting some of those topics and I’m I’m actually going to be releasing episodes that I’ve been voice recording over the past little bit, but that I just haven’t felt confident in putting into the world, I wanted to sit with them for a little bit, massage them, and I wasn’t even sure where I wanted to go with some of these ideas. So. Rather than season two, I’ve actually decided to launch several seasons at once, and I’m calling this seasons of inquiry.
It’s a series of ongoing curiosities about several topics, ranging from everything from relationships with music, relationships with water, relationships with time wondering about. Being human, the human experience and our senses. The culture of winter. Wondering about pedagogy as a relational experience and a relational rationale. And really focusing on the process of rumbling with these ideas rather than the outcome of where they bring us to. So right now my thinking is that there’s probably going to be about, I don’t know, seven or eight seasons launched at once where? As my thinking wonders, in each of these areas I can actually add to kind of that topic. On my podcast so. This might be a messy. This might be a messy process, and this might not be one that, as a listener, is as fun to listen to. I’m not really sure, but it’s one that is authentic to the ways in which I’m curious and that I inquire and that I learn and that I grow. It’s by revisiting ideas, so. My thinking right now is that these topics will include unraveling pedagogy and my revisiting of the definition of pedagogy. It will also include studying the culture of music in childhood and how I have been on a quest to learn about sound and listening and musicality in young children’s lives. It’ll also be about playing with routines and thinking about time and spiralized experiences. And how I truly believe this is. This is the human experience and action. It’ll also be about play, of course. My ongoing curiosity about play and my own playfulness moving towards fostering playful dispositions as adults. This will also include some reflective practice. As a facilitator, I’m in a role now where I do some weekly lecturing, and as someone who’s still so early in her journey, I just have so much to say. About this. Another topic will be the pursuit of human wellbeing and mutual flourishing. I get emotional even saying those words out loud. There’s so much that I have to say about this topic, so much that I’ve learned that I’m learning always, and that I’m so humbled by. And then finally. I’m thinking about a topic being knowledge as a conversation. Which will include some reflections on science, learning, research..kind of taking this meta view of what it means to learn and generate knowledge, consume knowledge, and share knowledge.
So if you’re with me still, thank you so much for being curious with me, for being playful with our ideas, and for being willing to linger in generative space, as Anne Pelo and Margie Carter say. Welcome to seasons of inquiry. I’m so excited to share these thoughts with you, and I’m even more excited to hear what you have to say about some of these ideas.
So, as always. Please feel invited to reach out to me. My Instagram is playful pedagogies. I think that’s the same handle across Twitter, and you could search either playful pedagogies or the playful podcast across most social media platforms, as well as platforms that host podcasts. I’d love to know how your thoughts on some of these topics, how these topics intersect with your practice and your. The questions that you are holding, the lived experience you have and the identities you hold. Thanks for being on this journey with me. And as always, stay playful.
Pursuing Questions 