mfridley@eastsideinstitute.org
Author name
GPB and Linking Circles Academy Collaborate on Project TECI
We love a good partnership. And we really love a partnership that puts play where it belongs, in a classroom. So when Linking Circles Academy came with a vision to transform how teachers in Nigeria show up for their diverse learners, we opened the door.
Fewer than half of teachers in Nigeria do not receive any training on inclusive education, and there are a lot of learners with diverse learning needs and abilities. Founded by Elizabeth Adams, a brigadier, Linking Circles is an education-focused organization on a mission to improve learning outcomes in African schools through teacher development. They've already trained over 50 teachers through virtual and in-person workshops. Project TECI (The Equitable Classroom Initiative) is their boldest move yet, aimed at training and mentoring at least 1,000 primary and secondary school teachers to design and sustain inclusive, equitable, student-centred classrooms.
It's ambitious. It's necessary. And it has GPB's name all over it.
Inclusive classrooms need teachers who know how to meet a room full of different minds, different stories, and make every single one of them feel like they belong. And play is one of the most powerful tools for developing exactly that.
That's why GPB is stepping in as a curriculum partner for Project TECI. Through our Educators Ensemble, we're bringing our play-based and experiential learning methodologies directly into the teacher training design. GPB will be providing play-based learning resources and frameworks to shape the TECI curriculum, offering advisory and technical input, and delivering a virtual training session for TECI facilitators on how to integrate play and performance-based approaches into their work. We'll also introduce GPB's work to the educators coming through the TECI programme — because once a teacher catches the play bug, there's no telling where it spreads.
We're happy to be walking this road with Linking Circles Academy. We're bringing play into spaces where it has been absent for too long. And we can't wait to see the classrooms and the children that TECI helps transform.
Let's play it forward!
Playing with Social Construction: GPB at the Taos Institute Symposium In late February, GPB Founder Cathy Salit and I traveled to New York City for the Co-Creating Social Worlds 2026 symposium. About 75 people gathered at Mercy University for two days of conversation about how we might reimagine our personal, public, and political lives. The symposium was hosted by the Taos Institute , a global community of scholars and practitioners (therapists, educators, organizational consultants, community leaders) who study and practice social constructionism . If that term sounds academic, here's the simple version: social constructionism says that meaning, knowledge, and even our sense of self aren't fixed truths we discover sitting alone. Instead, we create them together through our conversations and relationships. The way we talk actually shapes what becomes possible. Many Taos folks have participated in GPB programs over the years, so there's already a natural connection between our communities. The symposium was co-organized by Dr. Saliha Bava , a Taos Institute Associate and Board member, and a Professor at Mercy University who runs the Relational Play Lab. Her work explores relational play , which is the creative, improvisational process through which we co-create ourselves, each other, and the world around us. Our Contribution Before the conference, participants submitted short papers called "Food for Thought" that others could read in advance. Cathy and I wrote about something central to GPB's work: the idea that play isn't just a tool we use to have better conversations . When we introduce playful structures into how we relate, the playful interaction itself becomes the transformation we're seeking. The how and the what are the same thing. You can read our paper here. We put this into practice by facilitating a dialogue session where we used simple playful invitations: starting every sentence with “What I like about what you said…”, pausing for 5-10 seconds of silence after someone spoke, responding with an enthusiastic "WOWWWWWW!" to ideas we heard, and other small constraints. These tiny shifts changed how the whole conversation unfolded. The conference wrapped up with Cathy and me leading the final plenary session for everyone still gathered. Since many of us in GPB speak in the language of play, I thought I could help illustrate some of the ideas of social constructionism through a description of the games we led participants through: 👽 Alien Anthropologists: We Construct Meaning Together Pairs walked around the room as aliens visiting Earth for the first time, making wild guesses about what human objects were for. A microphone stand became a nose-picker for giants. The TV screen was a strange 2D landscape where humans could somehow interact. The constructionist connection: Much of what we take for granted as an obvious "fact" was once just a meaning that humans created together. And if we created it “then”, we can continue to create it anew. 🙃 Upside Down Introductions: Identity Emerges Through Others Participants paired up and shared an important story: a childhood memory, a risk they'd taken, or a meaningful relationship. Then each partner performed the other person's story for a small group. Specifically, we performed each other's story in the first person – we performed as “the other”, which is a very different experience! The constructionist connection: We don't figure out who we are in isolation. Our self-understanding emerges through relationships. Seeing your own story reflected back through someone else's performance reminds you that identity is something we co-create. 🎭 Directed Performances: Breaking Habitual Ways of Being Finally, people shared a meaningful takeaway from the symposium, but with playful constraints. Some had to deliver their insights as if sharing top-secret intelligence. Others could only use one-syllable words. One person told theirs as a fairytale beginning with "Once upon a time." The constructionist connection: How we show up in conversation is partly habits built up over a long time. These playful invitations disrupted those habits, creating space for new meaning and connection to emerge. What I Learned For me, this experience reinforced something I already knew but got to feel in a new way: social constructionism is more than a theory to study. It's something we can play with. When we change how we converse, we change what becomes possible. The room was filled with brilliant scholars, therapists, and change-makers from around the world. Through these simple games, we experienced together how play can transform both our ideas about co-creating new worlds AND our actual practice of doing it. We left feeling more connected, inspired, and ready to bring play into our own work.
The Mental Health Ensemble is Back India has roughly 9,000 psychiatrists for a population of over a billion people — fewer than one per 100,000. Between 70 and 92% of people living with mental health conditions on the subcontinent receive no professional treatment. The gap between need and available care is not a policy failure at the margins; it is structural abandonment. People like psychologist Ishita Sanyal are creating revolutionary approaches to mental health using social therapeutic tools of play, performance, and group-building. The Turning Point Community, founded by Ishita Sanyal and working in partnership with the Global Play Brigade, is a powerful example of grassroots creativity flourishing in the face of profound institutional shortcomings. Over the past three years, their Open the Door initiative has evolved through this collaboration into a truly global developmental and cultural space. What began as a local effort now regularly brings together performers, audience members, family members, educators, artists, and community builders from multiple countries, creating new opportunities for specially abled performers in India to share their artistic work and developmental journeys with an international community. Propelled by the need to help her brother, who had been diagnosed with schizophrenia as a young adult, Ishita organized the beginnings of a community program to help him. She enlisted the support of educators and clinicians and found the East Side Institute, where she studied the performance methodologies of social therapeutics. Over 30 years of campaigning across India to demand humane treatment for thousands of profoundly mentally ill that would otherwise languish in the streets, Ishita recruited academic, research, and public health allies. I recently attended an Open the Door event. On display for an enthusiastic Zoom and in-the-room audience were supporters of people with special abilities from different parts of India who took the stage that day. The audience itself reflected the evolving partnership between Turning Point and the Global Play Brigade. Participants from around the world were not simply observing performances but helping to create an environment in which performance, appreciation, and play could become developmental activities shared across cultures and continents. We witnessed a community of transformation , built from relationship, performance, play, and the radical insistence that everyone takes the stage that they themselves have built. Here was a community of people who were struggling with profound limitations, stretching, growing, singing, dancing, being appreciated, and bathing in the fun. The room was a love fest. There is much talk in developmental and mental health circles about inclusion, i.e., making room for those who've been left out, welcoming them in. It's a generous impulse. But it rests on an architecture built by and for others . The Turning Point community far transcends that architecture. Inclusion implies a center and a margin, a normative space and those who need to be managed into it. It’s built around creativity, play, the willingness to try something difficult in front of other people, and the irreplaceable experience of being seen when you do. When professional infrastructure is absent, what communities can build through art, performance, and sustained relational work is not a stop-gap, but its own form of wellness and development. One of the things that struck me most deeply was something one of the young performers, Omkar, shared. He said that for him, coming to enjoy performance is not natural or automatic. It's something that you have to grow into as you perform with and for others. For many of the Turning Point participants with disabilities, neurodivergence, or psychiatric diagnoses, performing in front of others is risky and bold. Omkar said, "We as performers," says Omkar, "can come to enjoy that we did it! We can appreciate our hard work and effort. But it’s not natural. It’s foreign; it’s not me.” Dr. Samip Sinchuri of Jadavpur University observed that the participants were performing a profound emotional and relational act — one in which the effort of every person on stage was appreciated. The community collectively appreciated in their laughter, shouts of affirmation, applause, and smiles of loving enjoyment. Enjoyment is development. It’s a developmental and relational achievement. The enjoyment is something experienced through the relationship with other performers, with oneself, and with the audience. And we, the audience (who were clearly enjoying ourselves !), were participants in the performers' capacity to enjoy themselves . The environment that was created was not judgmental or critical, but appreciative and collaborative. Turning Point’s deeply moving “zone of development” confronts us with assumptions most of us bring into the room; who counts as a performer? Who has the right to occupy a stage? Those assumptions are built upon a system of comparison and judgments. Judgments about performers with dyslexia? Maybe, but not left unchallenged. Matthew, performing from Nigeria, chanted and danced defiantly, "I write differently, but I think BOLD!" The stigmas never go away… But together, participants and audience members performed other than stigma. That doesn’t mean that the stigmas go away. Nobody at Open the Door was pretending that the world outside is kind, or that disability and difference are easily metabolized by a society that prefers its people legible and efficient. But together GPB participants and audience members, performers and appreciators performed other than stigma . Dr. Sinchuri noted that pretense and play make falling flat less catastrophic, and thus make performing for others within reach. The stakes are real but minimal. You can try, fall short, and try again. The magic, he said, is not in winning medals. It's in the activity of stepping out of saying "let me try." This spirit is also evident in GPB workshops such as Heart and Power , developed in partnership with Ishita Sanyal, in which participants explore the relationship between play, performance, and collective development. Rita Ezenwa Okoro, Executive Director Emeritus of the GPB, spoke to the way this work radiates outward. Turning Point isn't just performing for itself. It's demonstrating, publicly and joyfully, that a pro-health, pro-development, fully inclusive, cultural and artistic approach to mental health is not only possible– but alive and thriving in their community.