Supported by Anthroposophy
by Sophia van der Harst, Class of 2007
A s an experienced teacher I know how to handle a class. And I could have picked up the details of the Waldorf curriculum at the week-long, grade-specific courses offered at various venues throughout the country. But when I found myself surrounded by the thirty-two bright dewdrops of the Summerfield Waldorf School second grade, all eager to burst into prisms of colors, it was all the aspects of anthroposophy that we have covered in the teacher training that really illuminated this experience for me.
With my still rudimentary knowledge of anthroposophy, I experimented through observation, wanting to welcome all the possibilities each soul carries within.
The slow but steady progression of anthroposophical studies in the training has brought me to a place of heightened consciousness in my teaching, and has increased my interest in the students. Whereas before I would love my students in some instinctive way (“He’s just so cute!”), I now have tools to consciously address each individual.
As a Waldorf teacher, I view a three-fold human being through a three-fold perspective. I try to practice Goethean observation of the child’s physical body, with raised awareness of his feeling life, and his cognitive activities, while at the same time observing myself. My will is activated by the compelling mental pictures of the developing human being that Steiner gives. When I meditate on the child’s spirit life, what challenges and gifts this soul has chosen to incarnate with, and why, I feel a spiritual connection to this other soul, which then imbues my feeling and teaching with love. This time it is conscious, and not subject to my unconscious sympathies or antipathies. I can approach each and every child with love.
This practicum showed me that only through a deep understanding of anthroposophy will I be able to awaken my students’ full potential. The rest is just technical details.
