Newsletter September 2022

Greetings for Christmas and the New Year!

All of us at the Pedagoical Section at the Goetheanum would like to send our warmest greetings and good wishes for the end of the year and the beginning of a New Year to all of you,
colleagues in Steiner Waldorf schools and kindergartens, friends and followers of Rudolf Steiner’s pedagogical impulses, parents and all those in this world committed to an humanistic education.

The year is nearing its end. It has challenged us in many ways, both in our daily pedagogical work and in the way we have gone about our daily lives.
Some people have managed, almost in spite of the current situation, to take a stand for education with extraordinary energy. Refugee children were welcomed, new pedagogical concepts developed, progress made in achieving a greater public acceptance of Waldorf pedagogy, schools in financial difficulties were supported – a lot was achieved in every kindergarten and in the classrooms of the many different schools – even if not all of it was made public. One enclosed article from Brasil bear witness to this exemplary pedagogical engagement. There is also a short summary giving an insight into the work of the Pedagogical Section (here in pdf).

Our warmest greetings for Christmas and best wishes for 2023!

Philipp Reubke and Constanza Kaliks
with Dorothee Prange, Robin Schmidt, Ioana Viscrianu and Carmen Gloria Godoy

Faculdade Rudolf Steiner in São Paulo

In November the Hague Circle - International Council for Steiner Waldorf Education – met at Goetheanum. The reality of this educational movement became tangible through reports, contributions, and in conversations.

There are both successful and complex developments, there is openness and there are challenges around public perception – but what unites us worldwide despite all the differences is the decisive commitment to the child and the young human being.

We would like to present briefly one of the many establishments. The Faculdade Rudolf Steiner in São Paulo, Brazil, has been offering a new degree course in Pedagogy, and their first cohort completed the course in 2021. The process of accreditation took place this year, with very high grades, and the feedback was that this is an exemplary pedagogical course.

Melanie Mangels, faculty member of the Rudolf Steiner College, São Paulo:

The «Faculdade Rudolf Steiner» (Rudolf Steiner College) has received a Five with its Course Programme. Only four other institutions in the capital have the same indicator.

The Bachelor Education Course at the Faculdade Rudolf Steiner (FRS) in the South Zone of São Paulo was awarded the rating of 5, the highest in the assessment scale, by the Education ministry (MEC). The indicator was determined after an analysis that was carried out by a committee of experts set up by the Federal Authority in December.

In São Paulo, according to the available data from the e-MEC system, only five other university establishments, which offer an Education Degree, received the top rating with their course programmes.

This indicator proves that all the requirements set by the MEC are strictly fulfilled to a standard of excellence. This is the result of a combined effort made through qualified teaching staff, investments in infrastructure and an educational project which prepares teachers for the challenges of Brazilian education. In the words of the expert,

«Thus, it has been possible to establish that the PDI (Institutional Development Project) of the faculty has institutional guidelines at its disposal which can be turned into measures for holding diversity, the environment, cultural remembrance, artistic production, cultural heritage in regard and in positive measures towards the defence and furthering of human rights. Ethnic-racial equal rights, whether with regard to the subjects in the syllabus or in the overall study choices, the extending of areas of competence of the graduates and the range of mechanisms for the passing on of the results to the community are put into practice by the faculty, whether through teaching practice, projects for action, the School of Resilience (area of practical experience – Escola de Resiliencia do Horizonte Azul) as well as putting on their own events or else the academic journal Jatai».

At present the university faculty is using spaces of the Escola Waldorf Rudolf Steiner (Steiner School). This year building work was started on a building of 2,700 M2 that will have several sustainable characteristics, including the preservation of a huge mango tree on the grounds. The building will be completed in the first half of 2023 and will become a new place in the city of São Paulo for adult education.

The university education study course at the Rudolf Steiner Faculty (FRS), which was created in 2018, takes 8 semesters and in 2021 the first cohort of students completed their studies. The establishment prepares its teachers-to-be with the requisite abilities to work in an integrated and humane way in various fields of school and other teaching situations, in private and state schools, prisons and hospitals. The FRS wants to do justice to the increasingly demanding challenges of modern life, which present us with existential, human, economic, social and ecological dead ends. Through its seminars and lectures it seeks to ensure that the students are able to make the traditions of their field of study their own, however, without neglecting the potential for searching for responsible innovations. Art and self-knowledge form part of the disciplines of the Education Degree. Furthermore, the urgently needed research in Waldorf schools and anthroposophical centres is carried out by the professors and students.

In the Master’s courses specialists in Waldorf education are educated and trained, who are able to work in, among other places, the areas of early years, lower school and upper school, art and music education.

Translated by John Weedon and Martyn Rawson