Windows into Waldorf Dec 13, 2024
IN THIS EDITION
Director’s Note
Key dates
“Community” Open House
Pedagogical Pearls
Did you know?
DIRECTOR’s NOTE
It is hard to put the Waldorf Academy Parents Festival into words. The event itself is simple, and this may be the secret, it is authentic. Each class presents an aspect of their current work. These are not fully polished pieces; rather, they are glimpses into a moment of the students’ classroom experience on an average day.
This past Wednesday, in a packed gym, the parents experienced the Middle School orchestra playing Beethoven; Grade 2 students singing sweetly of the wonders of nature in both French and English; the Grade 3 class explaining the relationship of hours to minutes, moving in sequence to become ticking clocks; Grades 4 and 5 demonstrating yoga poses from games class before picking up ukuleles to accompany their own singing; Grade 6 dramatizing a French poem on the days of the week before ripping into a show-stopping version of an Abba song rewritten as a public announcement of their upcoming Business Fair. The Grade 7 and 8 students closed the event with “I’ll Be Back” from the musical, Hamilton, an expression of their History Block on rebellions.
With laughter and joy, the students brought this exceptional breadth of subject matter to life all in under an hour. It is a warm, inviting celebration of community, creativity, and connection. It engages parents in the rich traditions of Waldorf education through performances that showcase the curriculum through imagination, rhythm, and artistry. Parents immerse themselves in their child’s singular experience framed in the work of the whole.
Well-deserved rounds of applause transform into song as parents and faculty sing for the students as they file out of the auditorium, class by class, “Go now in peace, Let the spirit of love surround you, Everywhere you may go.”
The Parent Festival is simple and sweet and charming and lovely, and it is a shining example of our school when we are at our best.
Conor
KEY DATES
Dec 18 - Grade 6 Business Fair (Gr 1-8 students, please bring $5-$20)
Dec 19 - Grade 3 Herb Fair (Gr 1-8 students, please bring $5-$20)
Dec 20 -Last day of Term 1, usual dismissal & aftercare
Jan 6 - NO SCHOOL for K-8 and Childcare (PD day at for entire school)
Jan 7 - First day of school for Childcare and K-8
Jan 9 - 7pm - Community Council Meeting (all parents welcome)
Jan 13 - 7pm - Knitting Circle (at 250 Madison, Elm Room)
Jan 14 - 6pm - Info Night for SK families moving into Grade 1
Jan 19 - 11am-3pm - Community Skate Day @ Greenwood Park
Jan 28
6-8pm - Grade 4-8 Parent Evening
6:30-8pm - Stargarden & Sungarden Parent Evenings
Jan 30 - 6pm - Grade 1-3 Parent Evening
Feb 8 - 10am - Gr 1-8 “COMMUNITY” OPEN HOUSE - save the date!
Feb 13 & 14 - NO SCHOOL for K-8 (Camps Available) - PT Conferences
Feb 17 - NO SCHOOL or CHILDCARE (Family Day; No Camps)
COMMUNITY OPEN HOUSE
At the Community Council Meeting on Thursday, we shared our hope and vision for our next Open House, which is scheduled for Saturday, February 8, 10am to 12pm: rather than hosting a typical open house for new families, we are planning a hybrid event that doubles as a community and educational opportunity for our currently-enrolled families. At every step of your child’s Waldorf journey, there are new things to learn and different things to look forward to; and as your children move through the grades, you may have new questions to ask and evolving perspectives to communicate. We strive to make opportunities to listen and to share, and to bring our community together in multiple ways. This will be one of them!
We will also be reaching out to ask for parent and student ambassadors to assist at the Community Open House. Stay tuned, and please save the date!
PEDAGOGICAL PEARLS
Last week, we wrote that some of Waldorf education is tangible but invisible, and that other aspects are visible in person but not easily relayed to a third party. Parent Festivals, such as the one that took place this week, is one way we bring a glimpse of the magic of the classroom directly to our parents and community.
As Ms. Carrady shared at the Parent Festival, the Waldorf curriculum is guided by the arc of child development as understood by Rudolf Steiner. The larger themes in which daily skills and learning milestones are embedded, reflect where children find themselves on their journey of increasing consciousness, individuation, and autonomy. Multicultural origin stories, for example, are integral to Grades 3 and 4 when children become keenly aware of their distinctness and separation from their parents (their original “paradise”), and rebellions are taught at the same time young adolescents experience a sense of antipathy towards the way things are, and start contemplating how they could be different. And so on.
In addition to a distinct curriculum, Waldorf methodology also distinguishes itself by following the arc of child development from fundamentally experiential learning, to increasingly conceptual abstraction.
One form of experiential learning was on clear display at the Parent Festival in the clock exercises: the children physically became, and experienced in some form, what they were studying.
“Embodied learning” - which is a form of experiential learning - is ubiquitous at Waldorf schools. Sometimes it is as obvious and representational as it was at the Parent Festival, with children’s circling arms denoting the movements of an analogue clock. Often, it is metaphorical, such as arms outstretched in the form of the sound “ah” or “ee”. At other times, it is as subtle and quotidian as daily work in a Main Lesson book, speaking a verse, or singing a song.
According to one formal definition,
Embodied learning is grounded in the recognition that experience, perception, and knowledge are shaped through the activity of our body in relation to the world (Dewey 1997; Goldin-Meadow 2009; Lakoff & Johnson 2020).
Rudolf Steiner understood the value of embodied learning 100 years ago, yet it has only more recently become a hot topic in educational fields:
Embodied learning has established itself as a significant field of research and practice in recent decades (Lindgren and Johnson-Glenberg, 2013) as scholars adopt an expanded understanding of cognition and acknowledge the limitations of traditional education models. The body has historically been dismissed in education due to its subjective nature and perceived irrelevance in processes of knowledge construction (Dewey 1997; Henriksen et al. 2015; Johnson 1987)....
Embodied cognition acknowledges that “the brain is not disconnected from the rest of the body and solely responsible for cognition, but an organ occupied with processing perceptions experienced in the body” (Branscombe, 2019). Embodied learning offers a holistic approach to education in which the learner’s physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual development is supported….
As the body is put back inside the mind (Johnson 1987), learners are supported to engage their felt and bodily experiences as a means to make sense of knowledge and the world in new ways. Embodied learning has a natural affinity with the goals of transdisciplinary education in striving for an “equilibrium between analytic intelligence, feelings, and the body” (Nicolescu, 2012).
— Embodied Learning in Handbook for Transdisciplinary Learning, Dec 2023.
AKA, “head, heart and hands.”
Understanding ourselves as integrated beings with a complex balance of attributes, all of which contribute to our learning and who we are becoming, is essential to the Waldorf approach, and core to our teachers’ daily, deeply caring, and thoughtful lesson planning:
Waldorf education does not regard the learning process exclusively as a transfer of information where students, using their properly functioning senses, incorporate pieces of information in their inner world, however imagined. At this point, Waldorf education breaks with the legacy of Descartes and views the embodied existence of the student in its immediacy. Students … experience their conduct of life, their moods and processes of consciousness as embodied beings.
This is the backdrop against which teaching and learning processes are observed. In doing so, it is often taken that teaching creates a realm of experience within which students may change as embodied beings….
[T]eaching could be called an experience, a venture, new ground, which, when lived through, finely transforms a student into someone new, someone who has progressed in their development. One special attribute of the core business of teaching at Waldorf schools is … to enable them to exercise the full spectrum of participation available to them as embodied beings.
— Wilfred Sommer, RoSE - Research on Steiner Education Vol.1 No.1 2010.
Thank you to our faculty for the time and effort, the constant creativity, reflection, and depth of commitment that is required to bring the essence of Waldorf education to light in our students!
DID YOU KNOW?
In case you haven’t yet guessed, one of our second-generation Waldorf parents is Jessica Moore. Her twins, with Degan Davis, are currently in Grade 2 at Waldorf Academy. The twins started in our Childcare Centre as toddlers while their big half-sister was still in our Elementary School (she is now a 2023 graduate), and are following the trajectory of a Waldorf education in their mother’s and sister’s footsteps. Jessica will be sharing her reflections on this double rainbow in the New Year!
HAVE A WONDERFUL WEEKEND!
