Research Bulletin

Download the article: Being on Earth

This book was conceived as a phenomeno­logical approach to knowledge, that is, a study of the world in terms of its immedi­ate phenomena. Since the sciences, as they are presently constituted, are moving further and further away from sensible perception-chemistry, for example, may now be taught by computer without a laboratory component-our interest in phenomena brought us to the question: What is lost when knowing is separated from experience? In the academic classroom the answer to this question can sometimes appear to be “nothing,” but in actual practice, particularly in the field, researchers will often stress the need for a hands-on apprentice­ship before the new member of the team can even read the field manual properly. Practice, as opposed to theory, still demands perceptual experience, but in stated theory there is no account of the compo­nent that only experience can provide.

Download the article: “Let’s quickly go over that again....” Recapitulation and the Waldorf Curriculum

The idea of recapitulation has always seemed to me such a natural and fundamental part of teaching. As a matter of course teachers review what has already been covered before introducing the next step. Waldorf pedagogy has made an art of this methodology and it is found in Waldorf school classrooms from kindergarten to twelfth grade, in the practice of rhythmical repeti­tion and enhancement. We also find the idea of recapitulation in Steiner’s descriptions of the processes and rhythms of child development, the cultural epochs and, ultimately, in the anthropo­sophical perspective of the evolution of the Earth itself.₁

Download the article: Educating the Will—Part II Developing Feeling Will in Contrast to Sense/Nerve Will

In the first part of this article, which appeared in the January 2002 issue of the Research Bulletin, we established the perspective that every outer and inner challenge is an opportunity to develop spirit will, which in turn, develops our true individuality. The development of authentic individuality is the pole star that can guide all aspects of culture, especially education. We may accept as given that education strives to develop children’s bodily and soul potentials. In mastering their life/bodily and soul constitution children also can develop their spirit will. Spirit will is the charioteer; life will and soul will are the horses which the charioteer holds in rein.

Download the article: Organizations as Living Organisms-Developing a Seven-fold View

Introduction
In this essay I would like to develop a view of Waldorf Schools and other organizations that profess to honor the reality of human beings as beings of body, soul, and spirit. I must make it clear that while I am not a management or organi­zational expert, I have life-long experience in working in the Camphill movement and in a number of Waldorf schools throughout the world. My viewpoint is therefore that of a person dealing with growing and adult human beings.

Download the article: On Forgetting to Wear Boots

“I have no doubt that Camphill is an expression of a great intuitive thrust out of the deep heart of nature which has us in its keeping and knows that both we and it are in mortal peril.”
—Sir Laurens van der Post

Whenever friends visit my wife Phyllis and me, one of our favorite places to take them is the nearby Camphill Village in Copake, New York. The village is part of a thriving, worldwide movement for the care of people with special needs. You will find here villagers with Down Syndrome and a great variety of other mental handicaps-all pursuing their lives in a beautiful, restful, productive, socially supportive, and artisti­cally rich setting. If there is a place that can bring healing to a high-tech society, surely this is it.

By Stephen Sagarin

Download the article: No Such Thing: Recovering the Quality of Rudolf Steiner's Educational Work

Introduction

Waldorf Education does not exist. It is not a "thing" and it cannot necessarily be distinguished from good education anywhere. Because it docs not exist, it cannot be found in the boxes we call Waldorf schools. To narrow its definition to identify it with schools named Waldorf or Steiner schools, or to identify it with a particular curriculum or technique is to reify Waldorf education in a way that may describe part of what is but necessarily ignores what may also be. What we call Waldorf education may perhaps be found in any school, or anywhere that teachers teach and students learn. There is no characteristic nor quality that is unique to what we call Waldorf education that cannot potentially be found some­where else.

By Langdon Winner

Download the article: Beyond Innovation- Education and Ethos in an Era of Ceaseless Change

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By Gertrude Reif Hughes

Download the article: How Poems Teach us to Think

The Twentieth-century poet, Marianne Moore, began her poem called "Poetry" with the line, "I too dislike it." Her dis­arming opener implies that many people dislike poetry and I think they do. It is intimidating and off-putting to be confronted with a poem that is hard to understand, as many poems arc. Perversely enough, when you do finally perceive a poem's meaning, you'll find that you can't convey it to any­one else except by repeating the poem, because poems tend to elude restatement and translation. All this unpleasantness can be useful, however. By resisting our understanding poems make us pay attention to how we make sense of things; by resisting paraphrase, they force us to acknowledge the nature of their originality.

By Michael Howard

Download the article: Educating the Will, Part 3 - Common Will and Comprehensive Will

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By Susan Kotansky

Download the article: Whom are We Teaching?

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By Joan Almon

Download the article: The Vital Role of Play in Early Childhood Education

“The ability to play is one of the principal criteria of mental health.”
Ashley Montagu

Over thirty years of working with children, families, and teachers in Waldorf kindergartens all over the world, I have observed one overwhelming similarity: creative play is a central activity in the lives of healthy young children. It helps children weave together all the elements of life as they experience it. It allows them to digest life and make it their own. It is an outlet for the fullness of their creativity, and it is an absolutely critical part of their childhood. With creative play, children blossom and flourish; without it, they suffer a serious decline.

These articles are a part of a Special Section: The Push for Early Childhood Literacy, Taking a Careful Look
Download the articles

Included are:

Editorial Note
Moving in Slow Motion by Barry Sanders
The Push for Early Childhood Literacy: A Risk Factor in Child Psychopathology by Sharna Olfman
The Push for Early Childhood Literacy: Critical Issues and Concerns by Nancy Carlson-Paige
The Push for Early Childhood Literacy: The Loss of Nature by William Crain
The Push for Early Childhood Literacy: A View from Europe by Christopher Clouder

Keywords: oral tradition, reading, media, technology, play, testing, school readiness

By Georg Kühlewind

Download the article:In What Respect are Star Children Different?

Studies concerning the extension of childhood*

People from different cultures often experi­ence difficulties understanding one another; they are often intolerant or hostile toward one another. We can hardly stand it when people are different. Many exterminated groups of people were not inferior to their executioners, just differ­ent and, above all — less egotistical.

By Christof Wiechert

Download the article: Rudolf Steiner and the New Educational Paradigm

I read the article by Stephen Keith Sagarin, “No Such Thing: Recovering the Quality of Rudolf Steiner’s Educational Work” {Research Bulletin, January 2003,Volume VIII, Number 1) with great interest. I would like to make a few comments about it, as Stephen Sagarin’s work raises an important issue. Isn’t it true that every active teacher confronts again and again the questions, “What is truly authentic in my work?” “ What is original and new?” Often these questions manifest only as a feeling that our own work is not authentic and original enough, because we know that authenticity and honesty are needed in teaching. I can understand Stephen Sagarin wanting to call our attention to this, because Waldorf schools as institutions do not provide a guarantee for quality; for quality is found only in teachers.

By Christopher Clouder

Download the article: Teaching as Learning in a Steiner Waldorf Setting

“The importance of the role of the teacher as an agent of change, promoting understanding and tolerance, has never been more obvious than today. It is likely to become even more critical in the twenty-first century.”

This bold statement from the 1996 UNESCO report underlines the crucial role of the teacher in our contemporary societies and also its formidable professional responsibilities_^.1 To be able to live up to such a task, it is clear that on-going professional development is a sine qua non, and that schools themselves have to be valued and constructed as learning institutions for all involved in them. This perception has also been a basic principle of Waldorf education since the founding of the first Steiner school in Stuttgart in 1919 and it is integrated in various forms in all the present 870 schools worldwide. As a whole, the report is based on the moral values explicitly stated in the authors’ introduction as their perspective of education as “an indispensable asset in its attempt to attain ideals of peace, freedom and social justice.”_² The teacher’s role is delineated within a cultural context where:

The need for change, from narrow nationalism to universalism, from ethnic and cultural prejudice to tolerance, understanding and pluralism, from autocracy to democracy in its various manifestations, and from a technologically divided world where high technology is the privilege of the few to a technologically united world, places enormous responsibilities on teachers who participate in the molding of the characters and minds of the new generation,_³

By Johannes Denger

Download the article: Education Towards Health Is Education Towards Freedom: Salutogenesis as A Measure for the Quality of Our Work

Editor’s Note: In this article, Johannes Denger reflects on the concept of “salutogenesis” as providing a grounding and guide for a truly human and health giving education. As we discuss in the section “From the Editor” in this issue, the concept of salutogenesis has begun to emerge in Europe as a new foundational paradigm in both medicine and education. The combination of two words-Latin salus or salis. meaning health, and the Greek genesis, meaning origin or beginning-directs primary attention to that which promotes health. Johannes Denger reflects on the concept in its significance for education.

This lecture is an edited version of a lecture held at die international kindergarten conference in Hannover, Germany, on the 11th of June 2003. It was connected to the author’s article “Sinn macht Gesund” (Meaning Makes Healthy) which appeared in the magazine Erziehungskunst [The Art of Education] of May 2003.

Is freedom still a topic of discussion today?

Is education towards freedom still a meaningful aim in our time, an aim from which we can derive much-needed motivation and strength for the daily practice of our profession as educators? As teachers, we find ourselves faced with an interesting challenge: in all areas-in science, politics and the social sphere-meaning is increasingly being eroded in all possible ways, yet the teacher is supposed to transmit to the children that learning is good, makes sense and leads to success! Norbert Bolz pointedly puts it as follows: “Searching for meaning is in fact an attempt to escape from complexity. Hence looking for meaning is the same as turning away from postmodern society.”

By Jaimen McMillan

Download the article: The Stranger in the Mirror: Reflections on Adolescence in the Light of Movement Education

Lethargic, languid, lackluster. .. Excited, explosive, electrified ... Ill at ease, embarrassed, mortified ... Secure, confident, cocksure... 

These qualities will be familiar to anyone who has lived or worked with teenagers. The teenage years can be bewildering and trying times for adolescents and for the parents and teachers who accompany them through this challenging juncture of their
lives. Finding the proper relationship between the individual's growing inner self-awareness and his or her ability to be consciously active in the outer world is a daunting task. Creating a healthy rela­tionship between consciousness and movement will affect every thought, feeling, and action in every stage of life to come. Movement Education (M.E.) can playa vital role in the formation of the adoles­cent's self-image and social identity.

In The Marionette Theater, a little-known short story by Heinrich von Kleist (1777-1811) written at the turn of the nineteenth century, Kleist identi­fies consciousness as a key factor in the mystery of human movement. Kleist's imaginations ofa mari­onette, a mirror, and a bear will be explored here using the discipline of Spacial Dynamics® in an attempt to view the adolescent predicament in a new way. It is my hope that decoding the spatial components of Kleist's narrative may supply parents and educators with hints towards solving the age ­old puzzle of puberty and the riddle of the relation­ship between self-awareness and action.

Keywords: planes of space, movement programs

By Gerald Huether

Download the article: Pulling the Grass Doesn't Make it Grow any Faster

“Will our children become smarter when we start to increase the pressure in kindergartens and schools by introducing more evaluations, learning programs and reforms? asks Gerald Huether, brain researcher at the University of Gottingen.

Editor’s Note: Early this year the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development announced the results of its Program for International Student Assessment, known as PISA. The results of PISA were particularly upsetting to the German public, for in the assessment German students placed well-below the OECD average in the three subjects studied-reading, mathematics, and science-and only 21 among the 32 leading industrial nations studied. Predictably, German politicians began to propose legislation aimed at reforming German education. Much of this proposed educational reform bears a strong resemblance to educational policies now in vogue in this country-among them, earlier and more academics and more standardized testing.

By Renate Long-Breipohl

Download the article: A New Generation of Children

This article arose from a lecture given at the Vital Years Conference in Sydney in July 2003. The conference dealt with the qualities of the young child and how educators can meet them and nurture them. This lecture marked the end of the conference with a look at issues of the debate on the modern child.

There has been a new phenomenon of change in children recently documented in several books.
These books include: The Indigo Children by Jan Tober and Lee Carroll, Millennial Child by Eugene Schwartz, Star Children by Georg Kuhlewind., Did Michel of Loenneberga have Attention Disturbance? The ADD Myth by Henning Koehler, and Siegfried Woitinas’s book Who are the Indigo Children ? All of these publications deal with the question of whether there is an observable evolutionary change in this new generation of children, or are we observing the result of damage caused by growing up under the conditions of our time?

By Scott Olmsted

Download the Book Review: Mysteries of the Social Encounter

Mysteries of the Social Encounter by Dieter Brüll
Published by AWSNA Publications, 2002
Reviewed by Scott Olmstead

By Lowell Monke

Download the Book Review: Extraordinary Lives: Disability and Destiny in a Technological Age

Extraordinary Lives: Disability and Destiny in a Technological Age
By Steve Talbott, Published by The Nature Institute, 2003
Reviewed by Lowell Monke

By Douglas Sloan

Download the article: From the Editor

Nearly every article in this issue of the Research Bulletin deals with central aspects of Waldorf education as embodying what is referred to by some of the authors as a “new educational paradigm.” Christof Wiechert, leader of the Pedagogical Section of the Anthroposophical Society in Dornach, addresses the nature of this new paradigm directly in the first article, “Rudolf Steiner and the New Educational Paradigm.” A year ago in the January, 2003, issue of the Bulletin, an article by Stephen Sagarin explored the question of what is, if anything, the unique nature and substance of Waldorf education.

Download the Book Review: All Work and No Play...How Educational Reforms Are Harming Our Preschoolers

All Work and No Play...How Educational Reforms Are Harming Our Preschoolers
By Sharna Olfman
Published by Praeger, 2003

Download the article: Evolution of Consciousness, Rites of Passage, and the Waldorf Curriculum

I would like to broaden the context in which "rites of passage" may be discussed and, in this article, will approach an exploration from two perspectives: the developments in human conscious­ness over long periods and a relevant approach for gaining spiritual knowledge today. I believe that a discussion of rites of passage will be more fruitful if considered in the light of longer-term evolutionary developments and their recapitulation in each indi­vidual’s biography.

Firstly, I want to recall Rudolf Steiner’s view that developments in the post-Atlantean epochs have resulted in the diminution of people’s awareness of the spiritual world. He points out, further, that this gradual loss has occurred in parallel with both an increased capacity to perceive the sensory world and the development of intellectual thought.1 Initiation training in the Mystery centers in different cultures aimed to re-establish awareness of the spirit.2 A distinction must be made between initiation and rites of passage. The former refers to an experiential relation to the spiritual world, while the latter refers to one of many developmental passages in one’s lifetime, of which one could be an initiation into the Mysteries.

Download the article: The Teaching of Science

Stimulation of the Senses
Astute Observation
Rigorous Training in Thinking
Phenomenological Thinking

Waldorf education works with the develop mental stages of growth in children. The harmonious unfolding of the personality depends on the healthy maturation of each developmental stage, and each progression builds upon the one before it. Strengthening a child’s later cognition in science begins with the building of a strong foundation in the early years, initially by parents and family and later by teachers.

Preschool children are informed about the world through their bodily or sense impressions. The wonder in the world passes directly into their physi­cal, sensory organization through every experience they encounter. Impressions are stored as cellular memory as the organs of the body are being sculpt­ed. Young children have a feeling of "oneness" with the world, and the world is their teacher.  These sensory engravings later become the basis upon which scientific cognition is founded.