From Critical to Imaginative Thinking

Explore interdisciplinary approaches to understanding, and the related shift in how we think about coming to understanding.

Who: Jon McAlice

When: February 22, 2023

Where: San Francisco Waldorf High School

Meaning, Imagination and the Art of Teaching

In February, all Waldorf teachers are invited to a two-day intensive with Jon McAlice, focused on the art of the teacher.

Who: Jon McAlice

When: February 20-21, 2023

Where: San Francisco Waldorf High School

by Jon McAlice

The first teacher’s course consisted of three series of lectures or seminars. In the course of the first series (Study of Man), held in the early morning, Rudolf Steiner developed the anthropological foundations of a new understanding of the role education plays in the process of human development. The second series (Practical Advice to Teachers) that took place in the late morning focused on how through teaching we can support the developmental path sketched out in the early morning lectures. Here Steiner addresses the question of method. The first series help us learn to see the child anew; the second helps us understand how better to place ourselves in relationship to the child becoming.

by Jon McAlice

I think that one of the biggest challenges with living into Steiner’s way of thinking is that we first meet it as words on a page. That is, we meet it through a medium that is linear and two-dimensional. Pages have no depth and reading would be quite a different undertaking if the lines of type were to dance and weave before our eyes. Yet Steiner’s thinking is both mobile and evocatively deep. When he speaks of the process of embodiment, the bringing of the soul/spiritual into a sculpturally reciprocal relationship with the bodily organism, he is describing a process that takes place in time and space, yet is defined by neither. The rhythm of breathing goes hand in hand, for instance, with the experience of meaning. Meaning cannot be measured nor can it be generalized. It arises in the way I place myself in relation to what I meet. It is individual and intangible.

by Jon McAlice

Our life on Earth begins with an in-breath and ends with an out-breath. Breathing frames our earthly lives in their entirety. From our first breath to our last the continuously changing flux of rhythms continues. We never grow tired of breathing; our breathing never ceases to respond rhythmically to the changing nature of our relatedness with the world we live in.

By Jon McAlice

Another thread that weaves through Steiner’s entire approach to education also appears in his first introductory lecture. This has to do with the riddle that arises when we attempt to think through the details of the way soul and spirit interact with and permeate the physical/etheric organization. The initial picture that Steiner gives us is that at conception the soul/spiritual essence of the human individual “clothes themself with earthly existence”. Soul and spirit enter into relationship with a life-imbued physical body. The bodily organism belongs to the earth. It provides the context the soul/spiritual organism needs to enter into relationship with what the earth brings to meet us. It is only thanks to the fact that we are bodied beings that we are able to participate with and thus learn from what being on earth has to teach us. The primary task of education is to help the child to body well. In Steiner’s words: “to bring the soul/spiritual into harmony with the life-imbued physical organism”.

by Jon McAlice

The art of enacting a soul/spiritual pedagogical relationship rests on an understanding of being human that is not unduly limited by modern materialism. The human being as a whole is present in the world in what Steiner describes as three different ways. Each is the expression of a quality of relatedness. These three ways of being in the world – thinking, feeling and willing – weave through the 14 early morning lectures revealing different aspects of themselves as Steiner looks at them from different perspectives.

By Jon McAlice

It has only been three months since the first cases of respiratory illness caused by what has since proven to be a new strain of coronavirus were treated in Wuhan, China. Since then the virus has travelled around the world infecting some 740,000 people. To date, 35,000 people have died. In a mere 90 days, the spread of this virus has brought travel and much of the social interaction we are accustomed to to a standstill. Millions of people worldwide are living in various forms of isolation. Schools and businesses are closed; we are all wrestling with what has suddenly become the new reality.

As the outer structures shift and fall away, more existential questions of meaning move into the foreground. What does this moment in time ask of us?

This question is perhaps most pressing for teachers. Much of our work rests on the experienced presence of the students, the intangible nature of the space of warmth and interest that develops in a classroom, a studio or a practice room. It is difficult to find this through a digital interface. Is it possible to inhabit this virtual space in a way that our students can find their own source of inner warmth and interest?

Register now for the upcoming workshop for Upper Grades and High School teachers in Santa Rosa at www.findingcontext.org. Conference reading materials have been added to the workshop page.

February 17-19 at Summerfield Waldorf School

with San Francisco Waldorf School and the Waldorf School of the Penninsula

From Jon McAlice on the conference theme:

Only at the end of the first teachers’ course did Rudolf Steiner offer some thoughts concerning adolescent education. He refers obliquely to the challenges arising in education following puberty and makes it clear that as teachers we face a new challenge to “bring into the child’s soul life what comes from the nature of the limbs”. He points out that “just as the soul-teeth appear as a capacity to learn to read and write, an activity of imagination and a permeation of inner warmth announces what the soul develops” following puberty. The task of the teacher is to “emphasize particularly anything that depends on the soul’s capacity to fill things with inner love, that is, everything expressed by imagination.” And he concludes by saying that “[w]e are more justified in requiring the seven-year-old child to develop intellectuality through reading and writing than we are in neglecting to bring imagination continually into the power of judgment” that awakens in the young adolescent.

What is imagination? And what role does it play in adolescent development? How do we as teachers strengthen this new capacity in our students?

There is a good deal of controversy concerning the effects of digital technology (and the media it makes possible) on child development and health. Although pediatricians around the world recommend severely limiting young children’s’ access to digital devices, software companies continue to develop and market so-called “educational apps” for young children. How young? There are many apps aimed at 2-year old children, the so-called “toddler”. These are children who have learned to walk and are in the most vital period of language development. The relation of the development of language to the way we think has been the focus of a number of studies. In German idealism, the three capacities of uprightness, language and thought and their relation to one another were viewed as the primary signature of the human being, what set humans apart from their animal and plant brothers and sisters. Rudolf Steiner took this thought a step further describing how in the process of acquiring these capacities a child lays the foundation for future qualities of relatedness. The way a child comes to experience himself or herself in relation to the world is colored by the way they learned to walk, by the quality of authenticity in the language they imitate and by the clarity and steadiness of thought expressed in their surroundings.