Dear Colleagues,
Please join us to discuss questions that concern us as Waldorf educators. The themes we select are based on questions we hear during our visits to schools and from conversations with colleagues. We hope that the research of the Pedagogical Section Council will support your work and encourage you to take up your own research questions together with colleagues sharing similar interests.
This year our primary study focus is on breathing. This theme will echo through each of the diverse presentations and discussions. These seminars do give us an opportunity to listen and learn from your experiences in the classrooms and communities where you live and work and help inform the context for our ongoing research. We will follow the
sleep book we recently published with a companion volume of short essays on breathing in a year or so.
The online gatherings will take place on five Saturdays during the school year beginning on November 8 and will be from 11:00-12:30 CT. Typically each session will include an orientation to the theme, questions to consider, breakout groups and/or an artistic exercise, and general discussion. Please have plain paper, a pen and colored pencils available. Each session will end with closing thoughts from the presenter.
While these sessions are a free gift, registration is required. The Waldorf Teacher Institute of Chicago is currently hosting this series, and registration is available through their website at waldorfteacherinstitute@gmail.com.
Frances Vig
Themes and Presenters
November 8 The Arc of Becoming: Medical and Pedagogical Collaboration in Support of
In August a group of people from around the world gathered at the Threefold Community Spring Valley to inaugurate the first Care conference in North America. The Care conferences in Europe focus on different aspects of collaboration between teachers and medical professionals. Jointly hosted by the Pedagogical and Medical Sections in Dornach, this collaborative effort shone light on riches gleaned from working together, sharing insights and expertise in service to children and youth. While the focus was pregnancy, birth and early childhood, the content serves those who teach in the grade school, high school and teacher preparation programs.
In this hour and a half we will share aspects of the co-working we found to be particularly stimulating, some resulting initiatives arising and research material that you may be able to access in the coming weeks.
Hosts: Heather Church and Frances Vig
January 10 Matter is never without spirit, spirit is never without matter
Steiner asked us to keep in mind that the practical and the spiritual walk hand in
hand: both are essential in our lives and work. How do we balance practical needs and concerns in our classrooms and schools without becoming numb to the spiritual impulse of Waldorf education? How do we selflessly apply the “light of the spirit” while we work with the practical matters of school life? How do we hold both, breathing between what can appear as opposite poles?
As we move from apparent polarities pf spirit and practice, we seek to find rhythm and harmony in both. Through this interplay, the principles of spirit and practical material life provides a useful lens for our understanding of breathing, which Steiner identified as the primary task of the teacher.
Join Liz Beaven to explore these apparent polarities and the lessons they offer, with examples drawn from our schools’ mission and purpose, and our work with colleagues, students and
parents.
Host: Liz Beaven
February 7 Art as Spiritual Pedagogy
Join me in exploring how Rudolf Steiner’s aesthetic rigor has come to shape Waldorf practice from the foundations of color theory and its deep connection with Steiner’s human development model, tp how this translates in diverse cultural world views. We will explore how art can create a living path of growth and transformation.
Host: Victoria Reyes
March 7 Laughing and crying
Laugh long and hard enough and you may find yourself inexplicably weeping. And the reverse may happen, even in moments of tragedy. Both involve an interrupted flow of breathing, whether on the outbreath of exuberant merriment or the inbreath of uncontrolled sobbing. Why does this happen? And why does Rudolf Steiner stress the importance in every lesson of stirring these two complementary styles of breathing––albeit in modified form––as a precondition for the health of both children and their teachers?
Host: Douglas Gerwin
April 4 Working with the Two Teacher’s Meditations.
Rudolf Steiner gave these two verses for teachers to use as a practical support to lesson planning and review. In our time together, Holly will share experiences of working with the first meditation and Frances will focus on the second, followed by artistic activity and an open conversation.
Hosts: Holly Koteen-Soulé and Frances Vig