“A New Impulse” meets expectations. See photos and videos of our conference. Read responses and summaries.
Christof Wiechert delivered three full lectures, and two shorter talks. He was inspiring! Group conversations were energetic.
Afternoon activities groups were diverse. The weather held. Snacks were delicious. Two hundred and fifty participants, mostly from the Bay Area but including six other states, representing over thirty institutions and initiatives, made for a motivated crowd of working teachers. Holding the conference at two sites was not ideal, but good will prevailed and logistics were manageable.
Our own Third Year students ran our bookstore, and were generally helpful wherever needed.
In addition to inspiring conference participants, Christof participated in a Pedagogical Section meeting; a gathering of Alumni; a meeting of teachers of the Bay Area Center for Waldorf Teacher Training; and the teacher training Town Meeting. And: he taught a session on lecture 13 of Study of Man to our Third Year students. It was a busy three days, and his energy and enthusiasm never flagged. Indeed, he astonished us by announcing that he would like to see “A New Impulse” continue in 2011. And so it will. Mark your calendars: February 24, 25, 26.
“Thank you for creating such an excellent conference. This morning when I woke up I felt unhappy that it was over already! I really took a great deal away from it and felt that the structure gave me more time to better absorb the ideas that Christof brought to us.”
“Thank you for giving us the possibility to hear Christof Wiechert speaking and thinking. This conference was very inspiring to me. The first two days I could follow Christof’s train of thought well. The third day was difficult. I went home and could not stop thinking. It is an interesting journey.”
“What a satisfying conference. Congratulations!”
“Thanks again for making the conference possible for so many teachers. It was wonderful and Lisa Anderson and her helpers made it appear seamless.”
Report on ‘A New Impulse’: Bay Area Center For Waldorf Teacher Training Teachers’ Conference, February 18-20, 2010
by Jeanie Elliott, Santa Cruz
Using references to contemporary research and autobiography, Schiller’s Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man, lively anecdotes, personal research, humor, straight talk, and insightful comparisons of familiar Waldorf verses and meditations, Christof Wiechert brought us an utterly fresh and refreshing way of seeing the human being, the world, our tasks as Waldorf educators and ourselves. Head of the Pedagogical Section in Dornach and main speaker at “A New Impulse”, Christof splendidly modeled the content of his lectures.
He reminded us that our task as educators is to ensure that the teacher and the pupils/students always form a unity. This unity develops out of our deep interest in our fellow human beings and out of enthusiasm born of love for everything that is in the world around us (love every subject you teach).
Christof said one way to find unity with our pupils and students is in realizing that, perhaps surprisingly, we are not here to educate the individualities before us. Individualities, the spiritual essences of human beings, come into physical existence to educate themselves. We teachers are here to educate the sheaths that are receiving those individualities. That is, Waldorf education addresses the physical body, the senses, purposeful movement, soul, heart, imagination, thinking, all with clarity and rigor – but not the unique individuality itself.
We learned that different capacities for judgment develop in different 7-year periods: aesthetic, with the physical body (1-7); intellectual, with development of the soul (7-14); idealistic, with the longing for identity and authenticity (14-21); personal when the full individuality is present (from 21 on).
Christof reminded us of what Rudolf Steiner said at the beginning of Study of Man: Unity that is born of interest (in each human being) and enthusiasm (for the whole world) begets a new moral relationship, for our task as Waldorf educators is not only intellectual and emotional, but also moral and spiritual.
In order to educate in a way that respects the sanctity of the child’s individuality, we have to develop moral techniques:
• Take each child/student as s/he is; do not label.
• With this as the starting point, find an individual way to work with each child. Note: There is no longer such a being as an “ideal child”. This may have existed fifty years ago, but conditions have now changed.
• Wholeheartedly accept the child/student as it s/he is.
• If the child/student is not “performing” as you would like (in meeting standards, in behavior), look within yourself, not at the child or student for the answer to the riddle of why. Note: No child or student wants to perform badly and every single one wants to learn.
Christof showed us ways to better understand the situation of the modern child or youth.
The physical body has two basic urges: the urge toward matter (physical necessities and all that we find in the physical world) and the striving toward organized life, form and structure. Out of this duality there develops a third realm: the urge to play. It is only in play (in the wider sense of the word) that we can find freedom. This is also the realm of imagination and initiative.
We can also look at the polarity between sensory ‘input’ and personal, active ‘output’. When we do not find individualized soul life developing between these two poles, we see that ‘input’ with no ‘output’ is what characterizes autism. ‘Input’ with unprocessed, immediate ‘output’ is what we find in hyperactivity.
Even more arresting is the realization that between ‘input’ and ‘output’ is the middle realm, the realm of images, stories, metaphors, and play. This is where there is human experience. It is just this human experience of perceiving, thinking and speaking that the spiritual beings we work with are looking for. Thus, our educational task takes us into a new paradigm, one that reaches across the threshold, beyond the intellectual and emotional to the moral and spiritual.
Soon we will be coming to the 100th anniversary (2019) of Waldorf education. Christof Wiechert suggested that we have some work to do before we can celebrate with all the enthusiasm such an event should engender in us. He mentioned the following focus points:
• Re-balance the material/organizational/structural and play/imagine/initiative forces in our schools.
• Eradicate from our schools habits unrelated to Study of Man (too many stories; Form Drawing in blocks; “Circle Time” (see his research soon to be published in the Pedagogical Section Journal); starting the day with movement because children no longer walk to school.)
He left us with several blackboard images of familiar verses and meditations to ponder in our hearts and enliven our inner work. He reminded us that the Second Teacher’s Meditation (“Geistiges blicken…”/“Spirit beholding…”) was given to the first Waldorf teachers after a crisis and was meant as an “energy boost”.
