education

Exploring the role of care in educational systems

| Marc Santolini
Team-based problem framing with Bloombox tools during the gathering.

Over the past weeks, I found myself moving between two different and deeply connected spaces in the UK.

At the University of Cambridge, I gave a talk at the THRiVE research group on participatory and embodied approaches to learning. A few days later, I joined the Bloombox gathering, a small retreat bringing together educators, researchers, and theologians to explore care and the deeper purposes of education.

One space was structured around research, methods, and conceptual clarity. The other unfolded through dialogue, presence, and shared inquiry. Beneath these differences, both seemed to circle the same question:

How do we learn — and design systems — not only to solve problems, but to remain together in the face of difference, uncertainty, and conflict?

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Drawing the Field: Art, Embodiment, and the Science of Group Dynamics

| Marc Santolini

Over several days, I joined a group of approximately thirty educators, artists, and researchers for the Crafting Pedagogies of Togetherness residency—a prototype initiative investigating how embodied awareness practices can inform both educational pedagogy and collaborative methodologies. The residency was designed and facilitated by Studio Atelierista as part of a project co-funded by Erasmus+, and took place in a rural studio context, functioning as a site of transdisciplinary experimentation. Together, we articulated and tested new forms of learning that are relational, affectively attuned, and somatically grounded.

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Teams That Thrive: AI-Driven Collaboration for Youth Participation

| Marc Santolini

Team success isn’t just about outcomes—it’s also about how people feel, relate, and engage along the way. Understanding and improving this human dimension of participation is key to building teams that flourish. That’s the question we set out to answer in our latest study in the journal Computers and education: Artificial Intelligence, a collaboration between the Artificial Intelligence Research Institute in Spain and our team at the Learning Planet Institute in Paris. Together, we explored how artificial intelligence can help compose better teams in Challenge-Based Learning (CBL) environments, with a special focus on participants’ experiences—what we call participation quality.

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