Watch, Read, Listen
Discovering a New Path: Gawinoh Parker’s Journey with Waldorf and Mohawk Education
Gawinoh Parker, a proud member of the Mohawk Turtle Clan, embarked on a transformative journey nearly eight years ago. Moving to the Six Nations community, her mission was clear: to learn the Cayuga language, having grown up speaking Mohawk. Today, she stands as a dedicated educator at the Everlasting Tree School, a Waldorf-inspired Mohawk immersion…
The Tin Man and the Human Heart – Teaching into our Digital Age: Part 2
I believe that the heart of humanity is to be found through natural rhythms of human development. Our dependence on screens makes online education gravitate towards fostering abstract and technical concepts that lack a deeper connection with our humanness. A level of technical proficiency and access to technology is required to access information which is…
The Tin Man and the Human Heart – Teaching into our Digital Age: Part 1
In an age we are calling The Digital Revolution; Waldorf education, among others, continues to hold core human values related to human development at its heart. We are seeing technologies rapidly grow in the world, moving to realign its systems of governance, education and economy in this deep change, the age-old question of what it…
The Classroom as a Theatre
I was fortunate enough to teach the same class of children in a Waldorf school for many years. At the end of grade 8, I posed a question to the students about their education experience thus far: “What will stay with you?” When the students responded, I was knocked off my feet! The answers were…
The Red Thread
How do we hold the wealth of curriculum? We need to relate on a personal and a communal level to emerge the invisible; to emerge what we have already taught which has gone into the background in order to activate future lessons by deepening the present moment. Teachers ultimately work with the concepts of time…
Holding Space For the Students
I have been brainstorming what it means to hold space for students in a way that is authentic and real. We hold space for others when we hold space for ourselves would always have to come from our own inner authenticity and our own ability to work in our lives. On that note, when I…
Letting Go and Letting come
Ideas have a life force that manifest in the love between teachers and students. Palmer specifically identifies this love as the practice of continuous respect for the great things of the world. Cultivating creative moral intuition supports such relationships. Intuition, like a compass, navigates us past the limits of our personality toward deeper guidance into…
Radical Unknowing
In the field of education, one assumes that the delivery of knowledge is the highest endeavor for the teacher. Students are called learners, but we can also think of them as teachers as well. Learning is a cyclical relationship between students and teachers. According to John Dewey, good education should have both a societal purpose…
Light and Warmth
The play of a younger child is esteemed to be of great value in Waldorf schools, but the question turns to how the element of play affects middle school students in learning strategies. Futurist Daniel Pink celebrates play as a fundamental human trait which, when actively engaged in, promotes and fosters empathy, joy, well-being and…
Playful, Active Minds
When I explored the constructivist approach to learning, I really began to find direction in my inquiry. What is participation but a kind of play? The constructivist model calls attention to the role of individual experience in knowing and learning. Three constructs emerge from the literature regarding constructivism and have implications for the learning environment.…