Research Bulletin

By Elan Leibner

Download the article: Contemplative Work in the College Meeting

Introduction

The possibility of developing a successful collaborative, spiritual-leadership model depends on the participants’
ability to become, collectively, a vessel for wisdom greater than their own. This wisdom may reveal itself in
fundamental insights (Moral Intuitions, in the language of Intuitive Thinking as a Spiritual Path ¹), creative visions
for addressing the ramifications of those insights (Moral Imaginations), or plans for incarnating the visions into the specific reality in which the school is operating (Moral Technique). While individuals may well be capable of
achieving some of those steps on their own, the fundamental idea of the collaborative model is that single
capacities can be enhanced through collaboration. Furthermore, collaboration may indeed allow individual
capacities to reach their full fruition by providing the listening attentiveness that often holds the key to sounding out one’s inherent potential.

A second facet of this model is the spiritual dimension: The group is engaged with spiritual beings, and this
engagement implies spiritual effort. This dimension is the one with which this essay is primarily concerned. The
third facet is the element of leadership; the model is meant to offer guidance that can be followed by the school.
Engaging in spiritual work, even in a collaborative fashion, is insufficient in itself; the group still needs to provide
leadership. The guiding imagination for this model, at least in Waldorf schools, is the so-called College
Imagination, delivered by Rudolf Steiner at the inception of the Study of Man course in 1919.² The fundamental idea of the collaborative model is that single capacities can be enhanced through collaboration.

Steiner describes a circle of teachers, with each member’s Angel standing behind him/ her, placing a hand on the
teacher’s head, and allowing strength to stream forth. Steiner later refers to this as “the spiritual meeting of each
individual with his angel.” This strength allows imaginations to stream into the pedagogical work. Above, Archangels are gathering the strength, which “has been enhanced through uniting with all the others,” and make “a chalice of courage” out of it. Into this chalice, Archai (angelic beings of a higher order than the Archangels) allow a drop of light to fall. Light is a spiritual term synonymous with wisdom, and the process of helping teachers become recipients of light in the manner indicated by the College Imagination is the main goal of this essay. For the full text of the College Imagination, see also the appendix to Roberto Trostli’s article in the previous issue of the Research Bulletin (Volume XVI Number 2).

By Martyn Rawson

Download the article: Contemplative Practice and Intuition in a Collegial Context:
An Action Research Project in a Waldorf School

Intuition is a form of knowing-in-practice. It means knowing the right thing at the right moment. It is obviously helpful in understanding children, classroom practice, lesson preparation, and so on, but it is also crucial to the challenges of collegial work in teachers’ meetings where intelligent decisions have to be made, problems have to be solved, complex issues resolved, prejudices overcome, and people with different backgrounds, views, and energies have to find ways of working together. This is a field that requires just as much inspiration and intuition as the classroom.

Guy Claxon¹ defines intuition in education as “immediate apprehension, without the intervention of any reasoning process.” Intuition belongs to the field of what Michael Eraut ² calls “ways to knowing” that involve recognizing previously unrecognized patterns, connections, and meaning, finding novel and creative solutions, grasping complexity, seeing things holistically, making quick decisions, and doing things that can be described as expertise that do not call for lengthy reflection, deliberation, or weighing up of options. Most theories of intuition assume that it draws on existing knowledge and perceptions that we are not aware of in the moment of intuition in a way that enables us to recognize new patterns. Over the past decade there has been an increasing number of studies on the nature of intuition in education,³ medicine and nursing^,4 psychology,⁵ and business.⁶ There seems little doubt that intuition as a basis for action, decision-making, and judgment is widely acknowledged as a valid counterpart to more rational and systematic forms of knowledge.

There are a number of ways in which intuition can be enhanced. Noddings and Shore⁷ speak of the importance of acknowledging the validity of intuition as a form of knowledge, and Gill Gregory⁸ speaks of developing trust in one’s ability. McMahon⁹ reports on two other factors: reflection on practice and finding periods of inner calm. Peter Lutzker¹⁰ has shown empirically that artistic activities such as clowning and improvisation have helped Waldorf teachers gain “enhanced openness and attentiveness, a heightened sense of empathy, a larger degree of presence.. .and played an important role in helping teachers learn to address their own uncertainties, anxieties and mistakes in a constructive and creative manner.” Rudolf Steiner’s approach, discussed below, adds to these elements the activity of meditation and the notion that the human mind has access to spiritual knowledge in intuition.

By Holly Koteen-Soulé

Download the article: The Artistic Meeting: Creating Space for Spirit

When Rudolf Steiner brought together the individuals who would become the teachers of the first Waldorf school,
he asked them to work in a new way, not only with the children, but also with one another. He asked them to work together in such as way as to invite the interest and guidance of spiritual beings into their endeavor.

The challenge of creating and maintaining a connection with the spiritual world, as difficult as it was then, may be
even more intense in the present time. Materialism has grown considerably stronger in the 21st century, and with it has come an increasing need to bring a balancing, healing, and renewing element to daily life.

The Waldorf classroom is a place where this renewing spiritual element can be found. It arises from the children
themselves and from how we work with them. It can also be found in the meeting life of the school, in how the
teachers and other adults work together. There are many resources available today on conducting effective meetings in the workplace. This article will focus on how we can create a space for spirit in meetings and how this endeavor can support us in our individual development, in our encounters with colleagues, and in strengthening our groups and communities.

By Liz Beaven

Download the article: “Spirit Is Never without Matter, Matter Never without Spirit”¹ A Narrative Examination of a College of Teachers

What makes a school a Waldorf school? This apparently straightforward question evokes a range of responses that embraces both physical aspects of our schools and the less tangible forces that frame and shape our work. A College of Teachers is often identified as one core characteristic that makes a school “Waldorf.” Standing at the center of many of our schools, the College forms an essential part of the organizational structure, assuming a wide range of practical and less visible responsibilities and tasks. A College of Teachers is thereby continuously confronted with the challenge of balancing the spiritual and practical life of the school, a challenge that individual schools have met in a variety of ways. An examination of the function and role of a College can shed considerable light on the history and development of a school, its values, and the method by which it meets the challenges of mission, time, and place.

What follows is an attempt to focus attention in some depth on the College of Teachers of a particular school. This study grew out of discussions with colleagues from a number of schools as we all confronted organizational and governance challenges, and my resulting belief that it could be instructive to examine the inception and evolution of one College. Despite the influences of geography, biography, and personality on each school and the necessity for each one to develop its own unique form of organization and governance, Waldorf schools, like other institutions, display lawfulness and commonalities in their development. They pass through predictable phases as they move from fledgling impulse to mature, established schools. Therefore, although there is no standard model or template for the creation or development of a school’s governance and College, it is likely that most will encounter shared issues and challenges and therefore the lessons of one may help clarify process for another. It is hoped that readers of this study will find both helpful insights and cautionary tales in threads that are instantly recognizable to them, as well as aspects that are truly unique to the biography and destiny of one particular school. In this way, both commonalities and differences will allow schools to reflect on their own evolution and form.

By Roberto Trostli

Download the Article: On Earth as It Is in Heaven
The Tasks of the College of Teachers in Light of the Founding Impulse of Waldorf Education, Part 2

[Editor’s note: This is the second part of Roberto Trostli’s article, following the first installment which was published in the Research Bulletin, Volume XVI Number 2. Both parts will be included in a new collection of essays on the College of Teachers being prepared by the Pedagogical Section Council.]

II.Who Serves on the College of Teachers?

The College is composed of members of the school staff who are committed to working collegially on behalf of the school. In order to serve on a College, a person will typically have been confirmed in his or her work in the school, intends to work at the school into the foreseeable future, is willing to commit him or herself to upholding the College’s processes, and works with anthroposophy as his or her spiritual path.

In most schools, the College is composed primarily of teachers. This makes sense because they are most directly involved in the education of students and can keep the education as the central focus of all of the school’s functions. Over the years it has been suggested that College membership should be restricted to teachers because they develop special qualities through their work with the children and because the spiritual world expresses itself so directly through children, which helps the teacher perceive what may be needed for the future. I do not think that College membership should be restricted to teachers. While working with the children certainly demands that we grow and develop ourselves, every vocation offers opportunities for growth and self development. Someone who does not work with children develops other qualities and perspectives, and the College can benefit from these. Even the first Waldorf school included members who were not teachers because they had a special reason for participating.

By David Mitchell and Douglas Gerwin

Download the article: Report from the Co-Directors

A Special Focus for This Issue
Because of intense interest across North America concerning the inner working of a Waldorf school, we have dedicated this issue of the Research Bulletin to topics related to this theme. We hope these articles will both inspire and encourage teachers in the deepening of their work.

With the next issue we will return to more global concerns and articles on preschool, kindergarten, elementary school, and high school students, as well as observations on the life of Waldorf graduates. Readers who have researched and written about experiences or observations specific to these areas are invited to submit their manuscript to the Research Institute for consideration by the editorial board of this journal.

By Ernst Schuberth

Download the article: Letter to the Editor

What do we have to do in order to spiritualize being on the way to become a Waldorf teacher?

To the Editor:

As David Mitchell described in the last issue of the Research Bulletin, 16 (2), the anthroposophical basis of our work as Waldorf teachers consists primarily of spiritual work. There are four different emphases that this work can take.

The first and most important one is self education. The many indications that Rudolf Steiner gave to us are signposts along a path we may follow out of our own initiative. This path will never end, but its pursuit develops new forces in us that are prerequisite for the next steps.

Besides self-education we can study the human being in his relationship with the cosmos. Steiner’s Study of Man lectures are a path of learning to know our human nature ever more deeply. Following this path the human being appears more and more as a wonderful temple, as a picture of the hierarchies and the divine Trinity. Developing our consciousness of human nature helps us increasingly to understand the nature of the individual child. It helps us to find individual answers to the questions that the riddle of each single child poses. Love and a healing impulse may have their sources in this spiritualized knowledge.

By Elan Leibner

Download the article: From the Editor

This issue of the Research Bulletin focuses on a single theme. The challenge of providing collaborative, spiritual leadership is one of the hallmarks of independent Waldorf schools in North America. We have gathered reflections that provide context, advice, and experience-based know-how for those who seek either to improve their school’s practice or to understand the rationale for this unusual leadership model. The contributions are broadly divided into three types: theory, biography, and a combination of ideas and practices.

Roberto Trostli provides the historical and philosophical groundwork. In this second installment of his thorough research into the founding of the first Waldorf school, he establishes two additional fundamental dimensions of a College of Teachers. In the first part (printed in the previous issue of the Research Bulletin) he described the essential tasks of a College. In the current installment he adds a discussion of both the membership and the rationale for having a College of Teachers at all. He concludes with a moving meditation on the spiritual forces at the heart of the Waldorf endeavor.

By Michael D'Aleo

Download the article: Higgs Field and a View of the Material World that Makes Sense

For centuries no concept has been as misunderstood or the subject of so much speculation and investigation as the concept of matter. In earlier times, people drew their views on the nature of matter from ancient religious texts and oral traditions, whether they were indigenous, Eastern, or Western in origin. In the West, the eclipse of these traditional views and their replacement by the dawning of the empirical scientific era began already at the time of the Ancient Greeks but gained momentum only with the advent of mechanics and the science of Galileo.

Further steps along this path came during the early nineteenth century with the ideas of John Dalton—father of the concept of the atom in the form many of us learned in high school—and during the century that followed with the work of a host of scientists and mathematicians. Finally, we arrive at our present century, during which the ideas of the Higgs Field and Boson have made their debut in the popular press. While many people are enamored with the idea of the “smallest particle” (sometimes referred to as “the God-particle”), others read these descriptions and dismiss them as nonsense.

By Irene Jung

Download the article: Anything But Children's Play: What Play in School Means for Learning

A research project at the Rudolf Steiner School in Hamburg-Bergstedt, Germany, on what play in the school means for learning, as part of a larger research project with the theme “Independent [self-reliant] Learning,” was conducted under the supervision of the Academy for Developmental Mentoring and supported financially by Software AG-Stiftung. The participating teachers carried out individual projects that they hoped would encourage individual work and learning; they evaluated the results and incorporated them into their lessons. The author of this article conducted the following investigation into the effects of play on a child's ability to learn.

Eight-thirty in the morning, outside in the schoolyard
The class teacher of Grade Four, Knut Krodel, observes the boys in his class standing by the garden plot next to a side wing of the school building. There are two groups pelting each other with the bark mulch that is scattered in the garden. There is also quite a bit of mulch scattered all over the pavement next to the garden. Immediately the teacher hurries over to the boys. But before he can begin his admonition, one of the boys comes over to him to say: “Everything is all right. We have set up rules. Afterwards we will sweep it all up.” And in fact, a half hour later the bark mulch has disappeared from the pavement and is neatly distributed in the garden. For three days the children play this game, and on each day they clean up after the game.

A few weeks later, at the same time, in an abandoned corner behind the gym, the children of Class Four want to build a climbing structure. To begin they dig out the earth one meter deep in four locations. The first thirty centimeters is pretty easy to dig, but the rest is very difficult work. After that, four posts are cemented in place. Then, suddenly, they are no longer interested. The four posts satisfy them. The class teacher encourages them to keeping going with the project, but without success. They are already heading for another corner of the schoolyard.

Shouldn’t these children already be in the classroom? What do playing with mulch and building a climbing structure have to do with school?

Download the article: Modeling Clay - for All Ages?

We continue this [artistic working in the early grades] by moving on to three- dimensional, plastic forms, using plasticine if it is available and whatever else we can get if it isn’t—even if it’s mud from the street, it doesn’t matter! The point is to develop the ability to see forms [Formanschauen] and feel forms [Formgefuehl = Form-Feeling]¹

Invigorating street mud
In the quote cited above, Rudolf Steiner points out that the main purpose of pedagogical modeling is for teachers to make a start and have their students activate their hands regularly in creating forms. The forming and form-sensing activity is paramount, regardless of the malleable material used—“even street mud if it is the only thing available, it doesn’t matter!” Elsewhere he calls street mud “a very good material” for this important purpose.²

Observation of young children playing for lengthy times shaping cool, wet mud or sand or cold snow shows us what a primal impulse sculptural activity is for human beings. Our hands want to reshape and transform the earth.

Plentiful earth materials like sand, dirt, and clay lend themselves naturally and readily to modeling activity outdoors and indoors. Hella Loewe, a long-time Waldorf class teacher, found that clay is a wonderfully malleable material and ideal for engaging and invigorating children in the early grades. Her boisterous class developed a passion for their weekly modeling lessons and was harmonized by them. Following each session, she saw “with pleasure how my children developed healthy, ruddy cheeks; even the delicate, pale ones appeared rosy and stimulated.”³

Download the article: The Concept of Learning in Waldorf Education

Introductory case study: A ninth grade farm trip
Thirty-five students are spending two weeks at an organic farm in northern Germany. This is a ninth grade, with almost equal numbers of boys and girls. The farm is responsible for providing these young people with accommodation, meals, and educational instruction. Every day there are tasks to be done in the following areas: work with animals (pigs and cows), the cheese dairy, vegetable garden and orchard, field work, and forestry.
In groups of five the students work in each of these areas in turn. In addition there are daily mini-lessons on various aspects of farming and forestry.

For the first three to five days the students struggle to embrace the challenges. Removed from their familiar surroundings, tied to a demanding, though not overly strenuous, work process, they feel it is all too much. Getting up early (at 6:30am), which is actually not much different from a normal school day, proves very laborious. Since many parents have supplied their children with large amounts of sweets and snacks, the healthy and nourishing meals provided by the farm at first go largely uneaten. Tasks that are simple but require some staying power—like digging a vegetable bed—lead many students, after a very short time, to imagine they are exhausted. The working atmosphere at this early stage is thus rather strained.

Download the article: The Philosophical Roots of Waldorf Education, Part One....The Revolution

Kicking away the ladder
This first rubric might be puzzling, but readers who are very well-schooled in Western intellectual history will recognize the allusion right away. It comes from the end of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, from the early twentieth century, which is— or at least seems to be—a severe, very abstract treatise on symbolic logic. At the end of this brief treatise comes an astonishing statement by Wittgenstein: “My propositions are elucidatory in this way: He who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must, so to speak, kick away the ladder after he has climbed up on it.) He must surmount these propositions; then he sees the world rightly.”

Download the article: Learning for Life - Learning from Life

Schools are always faced with new challenges. It is part of the teacher’s task to become aware of the spirit of the times and learn to understand it. Awareness can start with the most simple of events, possibly with the following daily occurrence: Young people enter the school and leave it again.

This is an interesting area of observation. We may experience their coming in and going out like a deep breath which complements every school day. It is a movement without which school could not happen, and it is a movement that continues throughout the school day, because breathing in and out is an underlying concept of teaching. We welcome the pupils in the morning and we say goodbye to them at the end of the day. Every lesson lives between these two—the beginning and the end—and between them unfolds a variety of learning processes. Here we already see a crucial feature of teaching: teaching is not only about the teaching of knowledge. “Correct” breathing implies another quality, a quality that echoes in our daily teaching routines. Even if we do not consciously shape this breathing process, it is nonetheless influenced by the activities we do with the pupils. If we carefully observe how the pupils enter and leave the school, we may be able to perceive whether breathing is nurtured at a particular school.

Download the article: The Three Castles and the Esoteric Life of the Teacher

We live in a time when human beings are called upon to wake up and develop a new consciousness. Before the fifteenth century, prior to the birth of the consciousness soul, one could live out of one’s natural development. There was still a feeling that beyond the physical world, spiritual beings were active and working with human beings. That has not been the case for the last five hundred years. More and more individuals have felt cut off and isolated from spiritual connections. In the nineteenth century Friedrich Nietzsche described it well with the expression “God is Dead.” Spiritual beings have not disappeared, but they no longer take an active interest in the human being’s physical development. Their work has been completed. Now, in the freedom we so value, we have the task of offering spiritual beings moral impulses that come out of our own efforts. Only then will they be interested. It is not destined that this will happen. It is up to us.

Download the article: In Memoriam, David Spears Mitchell

In what turned out to be a final contribution to his voluminous set of writings on Waldorf education, David Mitchell posed a fundamental question, followed by a characteristically bold reply. “What Stands Behind a Waldorf School?” he asked in an article that appeared in this journal just a year ago. To which his first response was: “I contend there is no such thing as a Waldorf school—there are only schools striving to become Waldorf schools.”

He went on to explain:
A true Waldorf school is always in the state of becoming. This involves human striving and self development during which teachers remain open, constantly observing, and focused on Waldorf ideals while being centered in the world.¹

In retrospect, we may say that this passage could just as well be a description not only of a Waldorf school but also of David himself, in that he devoted his life—with a will that was at once mighty and gentle—to a program of ceaseless becoming. With bounding energy and boundless enthusiasm, he shouldered one building project after another with a potent mixture of knowledge, courage, and dedication, while remaining “constantly observing and focused on Waldorf ideals.”

Download the article: From the Editor

This is the first issue of the Research Bulletin since the passing of David Mitchell, Co-Director of the Research Institute for Waldorf Education, colleague, mentor, friend, and a general inspiration to so many of us. David’s ardent wish was that the Bulletin be a place where practicing teachers as well as a wide circle of readers interested in Waldorf education would find content and inspiration in a language adequate to current standards of research and discourse. He did not want “Waldorf navel-gazing,” as he called it, nor a dry academic journal, but rather a bridge that would facilitate the movement of ideas back and forth between academia and the Waldorf classroom.