Finding Gold
Health and Vitality in Class Teaching!
Each summer, Waldorf class teachers gather for a weeklong course that allows them to look ahead and prepare for the upcoming year of teaching, orient themselves to the curriculum, and understand the developmental changes their students will be moving through. This year in our Grades 1-5 teacher rejuvenation week, we turn our focus toward the need to reassess what we can do to keep both the children and ourselves healthy. In a world of distraction, overwhelm, and burnout, where do we find our own source of strength and abundance to support the needs of today’s children? What are the tools and practices that lie forgotten at the bottom of our Waldorf backpacks that we can draw upon?
The summer intensives are a quick but deep dive into this work—they are a staple of the Waldorf teacher’s professional life and yearly rhythm. Every year, there are more publications and online resources available to Waldorf teachers. Never before have there been as many good teaching resources that are so easily accessible. As such, it might be reasonable to ask why we still need these summer intensives. What is the purpose of these programs? Of course, there is a steady stream of new teachers who need good summer courses, and even experienced class teachers benefit from a refresher. But the summer intensives are not just about grasping the curriculum. They are a place where the curriculum receives an informal review, where new ideas and impulses and experiments are shared, and where teachers come together to articulate their experiences and concerns across different regions and schools. There are many areas where there is a need to grow and change as the times change. Finding ways to make the curriculum less dependent on its European cultural origin, as well as becoming more diverse and racially aware, continues to be of vital importance.
Today, it is also essential for teachers to have opportunities to discuss how they are experiencing the changes that are taking place in child development. How are the physical, emotional, and cognitive stages that are both written deeply in our DNA and upheld by guiding, spiritual forces changing? Are children finding it easy to step into life and move through their developmental milestones with grace? It doesn’t seem so! One of the cornerstones of Waldorf education upon which the curriculum is built—the archetypal pathway of child development—is being challenged on a daily basis. Our contemporary way of life is impacting the physiology of children and disrupting the natural, organic pace of their development. As a result, even more pressure is coming to bear upon the Waldorf teacher as the provider of an education that strives to serve the archetypal childhood pathway. There is wisdom in this path of development and its long and winding journey that has the complex, subtle, reflective, contemplative, creative, empathetic, and responsible human adult at its end. Waldorf teachers have the practical task of maintaining this path and supporting the child as they navigate it, ensuring that enough time is taken to live fully into each stage, allowing the child to gather the many treasures along the way, and carefully traversing the discouraging swamps, confusing forests, and paralyzing cliffs that are inseparable from human experience. How to be such a caretaker of this path and a gatherer of the treasures of childhood in the 21st century requires our attention.
Is it getting easier to be a Waldorf teacher? It probably never was easy! But today we see an increasing tension between what is considered normal, everyday life and what the teacher is asked to create in the classroom. Waldorf education is not a static entity or formula—it continues to evolve and adjust in response to the needs of those coming to it. Waldorf teachers are the ones who make this happen by manifesting the education and finding ways to make what is found in books and online come to life. It is on their shoulders that the task of sensing, interpreting, and adjusting the education rests so that it can function for the children who are present here and now.
Is the work of the Waldorf teacher with the parents of their students getting easier? Or is there an increasing distance and disconnect between the adult experience of life and the life that is being cultivated for children at a Waldorf school? Adults are fully engaged and embedded in contemporary culture—as the culture shifts, the adults/parents are carried with it. The increased use of screens as part of normal work life and leisure time is having an unprecedented impact on the human constitution and while adults may have some resistance to this due to maturity in body, mind, and soul, children do not. This is just one of the areas where some separation between the adult’s world and the child’s world is required. Waldorf teachers find themselves as mediators of this transition zone between adult and children’s experiences and are called upon to develop a deeper understanding of contemporary life and to possess communication skills that are quite different from those needed for teaching children.
These are just a few thoughts, a few aspects of the realities of Waldorf teaching. When we spend time unpacking the full range of capacities that are expected of a Waldorf teacher in a typical Waldorf setting today, the task may quickly appear daunting, overwhelming, and even unhealthy. We are currently in a situation where we must reassess what is possible and sustainable. What will generate well-being? What are the aspects of Waldorf education that are “generative” for the children and simultaneously “regenerative” for the teacher? These need to take up a central position in our understanding of what we are trying to do today. Implicitly built into the imagination of Waldorf teaching is the possibility for the teacher to be healthy and vibrant, to also grow, embody learning, and be filled with interest and enthusiasm that can only come from their own genuine exploration and discovery. This is an essential character that allows the Waldorf educational method to function. Pull this piece of wood out of the tower and the whole structure begins to tumble. Tending to this generative/regenerative character of Waldorf teaching cannot be ignored in a time when stress and burnout, an indicator of the strain being placed upon all our life bodies, is commonplace.
For Waldorf teachers, knowledge of and a capacity to care for the life body is of great importance, as it is this body of growth and forming forces that provides the healthy impetus and structuring of child development. It is one of the most precious aspects of childhood that must be guarded by teachers and caregivers so that the child may grow and, layer by layer, unfold their bodily, emotional, and cognitive capacities. Waldorf teachers are tasked with protecting and caring for the life forces of the children they are teaching, but in order to do this, they must also care for themselves—this is one of the subtle arts of Waldorf teaching!
Supporting the idea of the healthily engaged Waldorf teacher is the guiding theme that shapes the Grades 1-5 Teacher Rejuvenation course this year.
Warren Lee Cohen will lead the week along with experienced class teachers, Ganga Sivasankaran, Kristine Deason, and Ken Smith as well as our arts teachers, Christiaan Boele
(Singing), Christine Burke (Speech), Karen Gallagher (Eurythmy), and Andrea Pronto (Music) Carolina Allen (Painting).
Please connect with us to attend:
https://events.humanitix.com/grades-1-5-teacher-rejuvenation
For registration information, email tiffany@bacwtt.org.
For questions about the program, email ken@bacwtt.org.
