The Playground Approach · ALP
Practice
Cross-Sensory Communication.
Explore how listening, movement, voice, materials, and words participate in what unfolds between us. Discover The Playground Approach through its études, research, and professional learning.
Arriving from the Human Development article? Start here →
An invitation
Take a piece of paper.
OPEN YOUR EYES
CRUMPLE A PAPER
OPEN IT FLAT
What did you just do?
This is the first act of CRUMPLE IT, an étude composed by Keren Rosenbaum in 1988. Follow it through to the end at your own pace, with your hands and your ears.
Continue the étudeWhat it is
A practice of listening through participation.
The Playground Approach (ALP—Attune Listening Playground), developed by Keren Rosenbaum, practices Cross-Sensory Attunement through reflexive listening and shared play. Through composed études involving voice, movement, materials, images, and words, practitioners learn to notice what is unfolding between people and participate in shaping it. They practice how to join, sustain, and transform an encounter as it develops in real time.
Read about the approach →What people practice
Six movements of attention.
- Noticing
- Attending to timing, intensity, gesture, voice, and materials as an activity unfolds.
- Joining
- Finding a way into what is already happening, through a contribution of your own.
- Responding
- Letting what comes back through your participation guide what you do next.
- Varying
- Changing the form of a contribution while something recognizable continues.
- Sustaining
- Staying in relation with an encounter as it develops, including through noise.
- Re-entering
- Returning to shared activity after a pause, an interruption, or a shift in initiative.
Organizing process
FIND—PLAY—SHARE—CREATE
A recurring process. Participants find something, play with it, share it, and create with it — and then return, vary, and re-enter, as often as the encounter invites.
Perspectives
I—YOU—WE—WORLD
Positions of attention and participation. A person can move among them within a single étude; none is a stage to be passed through.
Research
What continues as the way an activity is expressed changes?
In Cross-Sensory Expressive Patterns: On the Continuity of Organization Across Its Changing Realizations, Keren Rosenbaum and Miriam Ben-Oz propose Cross-Sensory Expressive Patterns as a descriptive unit of analysis for following continuity across changing bodily, sensory, and material realizations.
Accepted for publication in Human Development.
Learn with us
Ways into the practice.
Symposium
Engage with the research questions of Cross-Sensory Expressive Patterns, the practice, and their implications for professional encounters.
Learn more →Professional course
An international course combining the études, conceptual study, and co-supervision of participants’ cases.
Learn more →Organizational inquiry
Learning for professional teams and networks, shaped together with your organization.
Learn more →People
Who is behind the work.
Keren Rosenbaum
Academic Director and Course Facilitator
Composer, conductor, and crossdisciplinary researcher. Keren developed The Playground Approach.
Miriam Ben-Oz, MSW
Academic and Therapeutic Consultant
Clinical social worker, psychotherapist, and senior supervisor; co-author of the Human Development manuscript.
Stay in touch with what develops.
Register interest in the symposium, the professional course, or learning for your organization.