Fresh thoughts prompted by protests
The protests connected with the Black Lives Matter have prompted us all to reflect on our work and especially curriculum. I have been working on questions of curriculum development for many years and especially on adapting Waldorf curriculum understandings of different cultural contexts and over the course of time. This has led me to develop the notion of generative principles of Waldorf education (explained in detail in my forthcoming book Waldorf Education Today: A critical introduction, and also in an article in German that I have attached). It has also prompted me to re-think how we choose material for the curriculum. An earlier paper I attached to this blog offered some guidelines for curriculum development.
My experiences during the recent Corona lockdown and the Black Lives Matter protests heightened my awareness of the processes involved. I have been recently working with Kath Bransby and colleagues at the Steiner Waldorf Schools Fellowship in the UK and Ireland on a ‘re-branding’ exercise to re-frame the Waldorf approach and curriculum to meet the requirements of school inspectors, but also to use the situation to revise a number of aspects of Waldorf education. This cooperation has been extraordinarily fruitful for me and I hope for them. One of the outcomes is the article attached that poses some questions for a review of curriculum from a de-colonizing perspective. The other article is a more personal reflection on the theme by taking the experience of Germany’s first black philosopher, Anthony Amo, whose story I briefly re-tell.
Following an intensive period of online teacher education (for Taiwanese and Chinese colleagues) and writing – both enabled by the enforced lockdown period – I now have quite a list of articles on teacher education, curriculum and reflection (some of which are available as preprints on Research Gate (https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Martyn_Rawson) . Ulrike too has been very busy writing – she is working on a book and has been re-vamping the (https://www.e-learningwaldorf.de) Elewa website. Stay healthy.
Martyn 2. August 2020
In dem folgenden Artikel gibt Martyn einen Überblick über die generativen Prinzipien der Unterrichtsgestaltung.
