Embracing Creativity: A New Approach to Education at Play Full Ground

“Art is two things: a search for a road and a search for freedom.”

This quote by Alice Neel resonates deeply with my journey as both an educator and an artist. From my experimental projects in Japan and the U.S. to the development of Play Full Ground microschool, I have witnessed the transformative power of creativity. Recently, during a Word & Image workshop with Pablo Helguera, another insightful line struck me: “There’s only freedom in structure,” from Branford Marshalls. This idea helped me understand how artistic freedom and a solid framework must coexist in creative education. Reflecting on these concepts has shaped my teaching philosophy and socially engaged art practice.

What If Students Learned the Way Artists Create?

When I opened Play Full Ground in August 2025, my vision was clear: provide students with as much freedom as possible to pursue their ideas, dreams, and creative questions. After over 15 years of teaching, I had seen how rigid structures often stifled students’ curiosity. I aimed to create an environment where students could lead their own creative journeys.

However, I quickly learned something crucial: freedom isn’t synonymous with “do whatever you want.” At Play Full Ground, students are encouraged to explore and create, but without a framework, that freedom can feel overwhelming rather than empowering.

Many young people are still discovering their direction, while others are actively searching for it. Even with encouragement and support, a loose structure may not provide enough scaffolding for most students to fully exercise their freedom. True creative freedom requires responsibility, agency, and the ability to sit with uncertainty—skills that must be nurtured over time. Conversely, some students are ready for autonomy and thrive when given space.

This realization affirmed what my teaching and art practice had hinted at for years: freedom must be paired with structure that helps ideas emerge, not disappear.

Microschool as Socially Engaged Art Practice

Play Full Ground as a living artwork: learning through community engagement and collaboration.

My understanding of structure, freedom, and creative agency has been shaped not only by teaching experiences but also by my practice as a socially engaged artist. Participating in Pablo Helguera’s Word & Image workshop and reading his book Education for Socially Engaged Art reinforced this perspective. Socially engaged art emphasizes dialogue, experimentation, and creating meaning through collaboration—principles that directly inform how I designed Play Full Ground.

In many ways, Play Full Ground itself is a living artwork: a microschool where students, like participants in a socially engaged art project, navigate uncertainty, experiment with ideas, and collaboratively shape their learning environment. Just as socially engaged art balances freedom with structure to create meaningful outcomes, Play Full Ground balances autonomy with scaffolding. This approach empowers students to explore, discover, and take responsibility for their learning while engaging with a broader community.

Learning From Chaos: OECD Tohoku School

My first teaching experience in this vein was with the OECD Tohoku School, an ambitious two-and-a-half-year project launched after the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami. About 100 junior and high school students from the hardest-hit prefectures came together, not just to reflect on recovery, but to create a public event in Paris to present their findings. The project began with relatively little structure and was chaotic—sometimes overwhelmingly so—but the group gradually developed shared systems, roles, and rhythms through collaboration. The chaos wasn’t a problem; it was part of the pedagogy. Students learned to organize disorder, navigate uncertainty, and build something meaningful together.

Design charrettes foster productive chaos, experimentation, and collaborative problem-solving.

Y-PLAN and Community of Practice

Between 2015 and 2024, I taught Y-PLAN (Youth – Plan, Learn, Act Now!) at UC Berkeley’s Center for Cities + Schools, working with high school students from Tohoku. Some alumni from the OECD Tohoku School returned as adult allies, bridging generations.

In Y-PLAN, plans constantly evolved, allowing students the freedom and time to explore unfamiliar communities in the San Francisco Bay Area. They thought creatively and developed ideas to address real local challenges. To support this freedom, we intentionally embraced productive chaos—for example, through design charrettes, where students collaborated intensively, experimented with ideas, and navigated constraints to develop actionable community-based proposals.

This program also taught me the value of a Community of Practice—students, mentors, and educators learning together, sharing expertise, and collectively shaping knowledge and culture. Students were encouraged to take what they learned back to their own communities in Tohoku and apply it in real-life contexts. This reinforced autonomy, responsibility, and collaborative problem-solving. Many went on to implement creative community-improvement projects after returning home, extending their Y-PLAN learning into real-world impact.

Reflection, dialogue, and mentorship help students navigate uncertainty and develop agency.

The Next Chapter of Play Full Ground

Building on these insights, by the new year, Play Full Ground will offer more intentional structure while preserving creative autonomy:

• Morning Co-Learning Space-Share and Academic Support

A supportive environment for personal learning and academics, used as fuel for creative projects.

• Afternoon Creative Art & Design Classes

2D, 3D, lens-based, community art and design, and AI × Creativity. We approach mediums through monthly themes, starting with ideas and exploring how each medium can (or can't) serve students’ intentions.

• Friday Sharing Days

A weekly community presentation where students share their work, reflect on their process, and practice collaborative critique.

• Afterschool: Speak Not So Easy 2.0

A continuation of our community art initiative, where students create socially engaged projects together.

This redesigned structure reflects my ongoing experiment: a framework where students can navigate chaos, discover their own passions, and exercise freedom with purpose.

Excited to see where creative learning leads?

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