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Upper Grades and High School Teachers are invited to join us for a working colloquium to explore questions around teaching Math today and to share our work-in-progress towards meeting our students in health-giving ways.
Who: Marisha Plotnik, Jon McAlice, Beth Weisburn
When: February 17-19, 2024
Where: San Francisco Waldorf High School
Read morePlease note that we have changed the event to be 5 full days, Monday through Friday, with a possible field trip to Filigreen Farm in the Anderson Valley depending on participant interest.
Dates: July 3-7, 2023
Location: San Francisco Waldorf High School
Cost: $400
Read moreIn July, both new and experienced high school teachers are invited to a 6-day intensive with Jon McAlice, where we delve into aspects of the anthropology of the human being and engage in artistic activity. You will have the opportunity to work collaboratively in forming an interdisciplinary course on a topic of your choosing.
When: July 3-8, 2023
Where: San Francisco Waldorf High School
Save the Date!
Read moreNote the updated times for the two workshops in San Francisco next week:
Timing: 9:00 - 3:30 arrive at 8:45 for coffee!
Reading: excerpts from “The Younger Generation”
February 20-21 - Meaning, Imagination, and the Art of Teaching for all teachers
February 22 - From Critical to Imaginative Thinking for upper grades and high school teachers
Register: CCS Website
Read moreExplore 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
Read moreIn 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
Read moreIn July, both new and experienced high school teachers are invited to an intensive with Jon McAlice, where we delve into aspects of adolescent development and engage in artistic activity. You will have the opportunity to work collaboratively in forming an age-appropriate course on a topic of your choosing.
Who: Jon McAlice, BACWTT Faculty
When: July 4-8, 2022
Where: Marin Waldorf School
Read moreRegister now for our in-person gathering this Saturday!
In Search of the Ineffable
Saturday, November 6, 2021
9:00 - 4:00 Pacific Standard Time
San Francisco Waldorf High School
Waldorf teachers in grades 6-12, as well as students in teacher education programs, are warmly invited to join this collaborative event for Bay Area Schools.
Jon McAlice will bring seed thoughts and activities that focus on practices of attentiveness and imagination that allow us to enter more fully into the learning experiences of our students. The lecture “Practical Training in Thought” by Rudolf Steiner can be found at the Rudolf Steiner Archive.
Registration: Click here for workshop registration and more information.
Read moreFor our first in-person gathering since February, 2020, we will meet for a one-day intensive at the San Francisco Waldorf High School on Saturday, November 6! Waldorf teachers in grades 6-12, as well as students in teacher education programs, are warmly invited to join this collaborative event for Bay Area Schools.
Jon McAlice will bring seed thoughts and activities that focus on practices of attentiveness and imagination that allow us to enter more fully into the learning experiences of our students. The lecture “Practical Training in Thought” by Rudolf Steiner provides reading context and can be found at rsarchive.org.
Register now on the workshop page on the CCS Website.
On Wednesday evening, November 3, 6:30-8:00 p.m Pacific Time, Jon will give a Zoom talk, “The Inner Life of the Teacher” for BACWTT that will be related to Saturday’s work. We will send you the link once your are registered.
Read moreWhat is it like to be human?
In one week, Wilfried Sommer and Jon McAlice will be hosting an online symposium for students, alumni and teachers around this question. Now, individuals can register to attend on our website by choosing the page for Conditio Humana Workshop. You can listen to recorded youtube lectures by Siri Hustfedt, Hartmut Rosa, Thomas Fuchs and Wilfried Sommer whenever it is convenient for you. You are welcome to attend North American zoom discussions of Siri’s lectures with Jon McAlice scheduled at 2:00 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time each day, Wednesday-Friday, June 9-11, 2021.
Wilfried Sommer introduces the conference theme:
In June, Waldorf high schools in North America have the unique opportunity for Juniors, Seniors and Alumni to participate in an international conference called the “Kassel Youth Symposium” which is organized by the Kassel Teacher Training College. This year, this event is being broadcast to English speaking schools around the world for the first time in celebration of the 100th anniversary of the opening of the first Waldorf high school.
The Center for Contextual Studies will be hosting the event in North America and would like to invite your students to participate. For this special year, the Symposium will feature an American author and three college professors collaborating with the theme of “Conditio humana” or “the human condition”.
Read moreFebruary 13-15, 2021
Saturday, Sunday, Monday
10:00-12:00 Pacific Standard Time/ 1:00-3:00 Eastern Standard Time.
Registration: https://www.findingcontext.org/workshops/2021/2/13/sru3pjbg6pv6tlv1xxu0pvvh6qwgi6
Fee: There is a fee of $40 for the three days, scholarships are available.
Please register early, as we will limit attendance to 30 people for this offering.
Read moreWhat inspires your teaching? How are you crafting educational community? What tips would you like to share for teachers in these times? Although we cannot gather in person, this February, some colleagues have asked if we could meet using Zoom to foster dialogue between teachers from different schools.
We will host sessions on three consecutive days, for colleagues to consider the task of teaching as described by Rudolf Steiner in the first lecture for the teacher’s course in 1919. With this as background we will engage in open dialogue around the challenges teachers are experiencing at the moment, and what education might look like going forward. There will be time to reflect on your recent experiences, share ideas, and also take breaks as needed.
Read moreby 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.
Read moreby Beth Weisburn
What activities could students say “yes” to and enter with their whole beings? How could each student be inspired to live with questions from main lesson all day long? What unique opportunities might our “sheltering in place” provide for learning?
These were questions that the high school faculty at Summerfield Waldorf School entertained in preparing a new schedule and lessons for April and May. What emerged were these goals: independence in planning a project the student chooses, deeper dives into core topics, time to experience nature as a teacher, practices for establishing rhythms, finding balance, and slowing down. All of these together would strengthen the individual student, and possibly open new avenues of growth.
Read moreby 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.
Read moreby 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.
Read moreBy 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”.
Read moreby 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.
Read moreBy Jon McAlice
In a letter written in 1819 to his friend Chancellor Friedrich von Mueller, Goethe ventured that “you only recognize what you already know and understand.” One of the challenges of returning to the lectures in which Rudolf Steiner first laid out the fundamental gestures of what would become Waldorf education is to try and see them anew. It is easy to overlook nuances that don’t quite fit with the way we have become used to understanding these lectures. When we approach them fresh, without prejudice or pre-conceived notions, we can sometimes make unexpected discoveries. I remember one teacher, a woman who had taught for many years and was an avid reader of Steiner, suddenly declaring that there was a sentence in one of the lectures that had never been there before.
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