🎲 Ever pretended to be a halfling bard in a lesson?
🧠Ever gamified a class and called it “learning design”?
✨ Ever desperately tried to make your teaching feel a bit more f***ing awesome?
Then you, dear listener, may already be casting spells inside what the cool pedagogues in town call The Magic Circle. You know they’re cool because they wear sunglasses indoors, and have leather mortarboards.
In this episode, we slip on our philosopher-educator robes and dive into the squishy, liminal, and occasionally heretical concept of the Magic Circle – that metaphorical chalk circle where the normal rules of life are banished and new rules for play, role, and learning take over.
We unpack its origins, play with what it means for safe failure in education, and wrestle with its awkward sibling: the liminal space. We also try to define it without sounding like we’re summoning Cthulhu.
This episode features the voices of Mike and Mark, and was edited by Rebecca Ferguson.