Seeking Registrar / Database Manager
Center for Anthroposophy, a not-for-profit organization sponsoring adult education programs including the preparation of Waldorf teachers and administrators, is seeking an experienced Registrar and Database Manager to assist with the administrative flow of its 5 programs. As a flexible, part-time position, hourly remuneration is based on experience, expertise, and availability. Interested candidates are invited to submit letter of interest, resume, photograph, and three professional references to: milan@centerforanthroposophy.org
Newsletter Spring 2021
Dear Friends: Over the years, CfA has pioneered a growing number of different programs related to Waldorf education, from introductory courses and teacher preparation to administrative training and ongoing rejuvenation – seven programs in all. In this issue of our online newsletter, we briefly showcase their latest offerings and most recent innovations. And we examine a basic right of all students. — Douglas Gerwin Executive Director Center for Anthroposophy Dateline Amherst, MA: The Right to Write In barely a generation, students have reversed the order in which they learn to write and to type. Douglas Gerwin, Executive Director of the Center for Anthroposophy (CfA), explores what happens when keyboard replaces cursive. The last time I wrote out a major-length paper by hand was during the early 1980s, when I was working on my graduate dissertation. Under pressure of time, I disciplined myself to compose some ten pages per day––or 50 pages a week––so that in eight weeks I had completed a first draft of the manuscript. To speed the process, I placed a typewriter at my elbow in order, with minimum distraction, to keep a running tab of footnote references and supplementary remarks. However, notwithstanding impending deadlines, I opted to write––at times to scribble––the body of the dissertation itself in long-hand. At the time, it was quite evident to me that the tone and style arising from long-hand cursive (or sometimes my short-handed approximation of cursive) were quite different from the more clipped tone and style of the typed footnotes. At some level I was aware that linking one letter to another by hand was helping me construct an argument in which one thought was linked (“seamlessly”, I hoped my dissertation advisor would say) to the next. Footnoting, by contrast, did not require that kind of textual weaving. Only after a final edit did I undertake the weary task of converting the written manuscript into a 391-page typed document. Were I to engage in such a project today, I would doubtless opt for the convenience of a computer –– not least because of that convenient button labeled “delete”, to say nothing of the time-savers “cut” and “paste”. In retrospect, however, I am grateful that I chose to compose that thesis on a notepad, rather than an electronic Notebook. Nowadays, in light of government-mandated Common Core standards, I read with alarm how cursive has been dropped as a curricular requirement in many schools (to be precise, Common Core remains silent on this issue), though several states––among them California, Idaho, Kansas, Massachusetts, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Tennessee––have opted to give cursive another look. One reason to be alarmed is that, according to William Klemm, a neuro-scientist at Texas A&M University, writing in cursive makes kids smarter. below“Cursive writing, compared to printing,” he concludes, is more beneficial “because the movement tasks are more demanding, the letters are less stereotypical, and the visual-recognition requirements create a broader repertoire of letter representation.” His is not the only voice to speak up for the merits of cursive writing, though there are others who challenge his conclusions. But the National Association of State Boards of Education, for one, stands with Professor Klemm: it has issued a report saying that cursive helps develop memory, fine motor skills, and better expression. belowKlemm’s conclusions are further supported by a study in the journal Current Directions in Psychological Science, which reports that children who practice cursive writing show improved symbol recognition, leading to a heightened ability to read fluently. The study’s published fMRI scans show that physically writing the letters by hand links visual processing and motor experience, thereby strengthening students’ ability to recognize––and later to write––words and sentences. Writing by hand also improves memory and comprehension among adults. According to a study published in the journal Psychological Science, college students who take notes longhand write less but remember more than those who type their notes on a laptop. However, even those elementary schools that retain cursive in their curriculum are giving their students less time to practice it. Catholic schools, famous for emphasizing penmanship, are devoting considerably less class time these days to this skill. Instead of getting it for a half hour or so a day––or roughly 7 1/2 hours per week––students may get 15 minutes’ practice three times a week. That comes to less than an hour a week, or a tenth of the time once allotted to this exercise. Meg Kursonis, principal at St. Peter Central Catholic Elementary School in Worcester, nevertheless points to research that comprehension and retention improves among students who write in cursive. “Students who print or type on a keyboard see individual letters when writing,” she says, “whereas cursive writers see the word as a whole, using the bridges and circular movements to join letters for connectivity. Seeing the whole word also helps them to be better spellers.” Meanwhile, an online poll by Harris Interactive reports that 79 percent of adult respondents––and even 68 percent of kids, ages 8-18––feel cursive should still be taught in school. Nearly half the adults polled (49%) and more than a third of the kids (35%) said that practicing reading and writing in cursive improved literacy. Regardless of what schools decide about their curricula, most children these days begin to peck their way around the keyboard of a computer or smartphone long before they enter school and years before they are handed their first pen (if indeed they are handed a pen in school at all). And even when––in some cases we may need to say if––they pick up a pen, a growing number of children don’t even attempt to learn cursive, since they are allowed to remain with printing as they exercise their writing skills. Some teachers worry that students may leave school unable to sign their name in cursive. What does this developmental switch––from writing or printing to typing or keyboarding––imply for future generations of writers –– and of thinkers? At a superficial level, one could say that they will not be able to decipher great historical documents such
An urgent call for support of our new Diversity Scholarship Fund
Dear Friends, In November of 1960, six-year-old Ruby Bridges, flanked by a quartet of armed federal marshals, stepped silently through the doors of an all-white school in New Orleans, where she had recently been enrolled as its first African-American pupil. For the rest of the year, she sat alone all day in an empty classroom with just one white teacher who had volunteered to instruct her. It took nearly a year for Ruby to be integrated with other children in her new school. While Ruby’s experience is an extreme example, no children should be expected to sit in classrooms that fail to reflect the diversity of their own community. And yet still today, children of minorities in many independent schools, including Waldorf schools, face the prospect of never being educated by a teacher who shares their ethnic background. Though founded over 100 years ago on the ideals of human freedom, equality, and fraternity, many Waldorf schools across this continent still do not fully embody these social ideals. And, as one might expect, a lack of diversity within the faculty and staff of schools is also evident among Waldorf teacher education programs, which struggle to attract sufficient minority teachers to meet the demands of our schools. The leadership of the Center for Anthroposophy (CfA) and the Waldorf Program at Antioch University New England are committed to addressing this issue, but we cannot effect change on our own. With this appeal, therefore, CfA is launching a new “Diversity Scholarship Fund” to attract, retain, and support teachers of color in our education programs with large-scale scholarships. We ask that if you have not been a donor before, please join us this year. And if you have supported our programs in the past, we urge you to increase your gift. If this turbulent past year has taught us anything, it is that deep-seated social change requires collaborative human initiative. Please help us take a stand and donate generously. [maxbutton id=”3″ url=”https://centerforanthroposophy.z2systems.com/np/clients/centerforanthroposophy/donation.jsp?campaign=10&&test=true” text=”Please Donate Now” window=”new” linktitle=”Please Donate Now” ] In appreciation, Torin M Finser President, CfA Board of Trustees
Exciting news on Waldorf EdD program at Antioch University
October 15, 2020 Dear Waldorf Colleagues, Alums, and Friends, We are delighted to announce that Antioch University has launched an accredited doctoral program for educators! Thanks to recent work with alums, school responses and many expressions of personal interest, Antioch has agreed to inaugurate a Waldorf cohort within this EdD program in 2021. Here are a few features: This exciting new program is ideal for experienced Waldorf teachers, school leaders, those with aspirations for work in teacher education programs and higher ed, as well as individuals looking to prepare for leadership in public Waldorf schools The first four-day residency will take place in Keene, NH at the end of June, 2021 just before the start of our other summer programs in Wilton. Courses will be online throughout the year in a format that fits practicing teachers The EdD faculty will come from across Antioch University. In addition, five stellar Waldorf leaders have agreed to serve as mentors during the program as well as possible dissertation advisors: Liz Beaven, EdD, currently Board President of the Alliance for Waldorf Public Education Torin Finser, PhD, Director of Waldorf Programs (AUNE) and President of CfA’s Board of Trustees Douglas Gerwin, PhD, Executive Director of CfA and Chair of its high school training program Melanie Reiser, PhD, AWSNA’s Executive Director for Membership Linda Williams, PhD, former college professor and now class teacher at the Detroit Waldorf School Applicants who have an MEd from Antioch with Waldorf certification may be eligible for advance standing for up to 12 (of the 60) credits required in the EdD. Other professional work in Waldorf may also count toward our approved “Waldorf specialization” component. The focus in many courses on social justice will support our need to renew our Waldorf curriculum to meet social, emotional, and pedagogical needs of our children today The application deadline in April, 2021 but since we anticipate strong interest, please apply early! In order to apply, contact Jonathan Eskridge, Associate Director of the EdD Program (jeskridge@antioch.edu). On behalf of us all at Antioch, we wish you good health and send our best wishes for the months ahead. Torin M. Finser
Reflections on the current events from the General Secretary of the Anthroposophical Society
If you’re having trouble viewing this email, you may see it online From the General Secretary June 3, 2020 Dear Members and Friends, Present events and the beat of daily news have kept me in a state of rawness. No one I have spoken with is immune from suffering. How can we comprehend what is unfolding, maybe even unravelling, in so many dimensions? And in the unravelling, we are also witness to what is revealed—painful, direct, immoral—through the sacrifice of lives and the taking of a life. George Floyd’s death is the most recent in a long list. Some of us have known this pain for a long time and some of us have only just now heard the cry. All of this with the background reality of the pandemic and its accompanying cloud of disjunctive strains of science and opinion. Also mourning, vulnerability, an economy full of unconscionable disparity, and sheer anger. Protest and civil disobedience are means of expression; and the path forward through this does not yet seem at all clear. What is clear, however, is that we are at a momentous crossroad: will our social and ecological intentions and actions guide us toward a path of healing, or will it be something more destructive? While physical isolation and the need for online activity may have been having a certain numbing effect on our sense of time and energy, our direct experience, the work to be present for oneself moment by moment has certainly opened inner space in an unusual way. What draws our interest, what we choose to pay attention to may be more heightened in our consciousness and maybe even in our dream life. The rhythmic breathing between knowing the world and knowing oneself, a kind of normative spiritual principle, has been shaken by uncertainty. Just as we can easily fall asleep in the rhythmic sensory breathing between world and self, we risk falling asleep into a return to what was the convenience of “normal” life. Well, to be fair, it was convenient to me and tremendously inconvenient, even tenuous and life-threatening for others. And this is reflective of the very point I am trying to make. I then have to ask: What am I willing to change or give up, or both, in order to be part of a new way to be in the world as I reengage? I know that I must somehow connect my inner freedom with the justice needed in the world. That is the work for me it seems. Fortunately, the anthroposophical toolbox contains useful resources. Freedom in the cultural sphere, equity in the rights and agreements sphere, and compassionate interdependence in the economic sphere, all feel more significant than ever. As Rudolf Steiner articulated the Threefold Commonwealth in 1917, a response to the tragic conditions of World War I, he saw the need to transform all three spheres as a healing path forward toward peace and a just society. Now in 2020, given the economic, societal, and political turmoil we are witnessing, the conditions seem ripe for implementing threefold practices, and recognizing where they are already active. We need to be certain in what we are working toward. We also have to be clear what we are working against: fear, power over, hatred, racism, and any theory or practice that dehumanizes any individual. The ideals that comprise threefolding are alive and meaningful right now. The recent heinous actions of police in Minneapolis, by those charged with “protecting” people’s rights, make it abundantly evident again that equity is painfully far from a reality for people of color. The same is true concerning access to healthcare, based on the data about who suffers most from the pandemic. As for the economy, more than 40 million people have applied for unemployment. The economic ground on which people have stood, especially minimum-wage earners, is quickly eroding and is reflected directly in the rise of hunger. It seems our real economic interdependence and disparity could not possibly become more visible. We can understand protest in a threefold context, though of course those rightfully protesting don’t start with an abstract framework. Protest is direct cultural action exercised in response to abuse of rights. An act of protest, right deed, flows from an individual’s or group’s sense of what is moral and ethical toward the immoral and unethical. The recognition of what is moral is an emanation from spiritual freedom. And so is anger. The need for threefolding is greater than ever, and I believe there will be an increasing openness in the rebuilding process if we can find a way to have a voice in that process. What Rudolf Steiner articulated in 1917, in extreme conditions, as a way forward toward lasting peace and a more just, engaged and empowered society, is critical to meeting the present and future. First and foremost, it is a whole and dynamic view of an inclusive social life that fully embraces all the aspects—of culture or civil society; rights, agreements and laws; and the economy—in a way that celebrates both the individual and the community. The framework of threefolding is deliberative and designed for social self-governed equilibrium. However, if as anthroposophists, we want to be part of the conversation and work going forward, first we need to cultivate listening to others’ experience, and to know the full cultural, legal, and economic history in which we are embedded here in the US. Even so, as a white culture, we will blunder. We are going to have to find innovative ways to carry these ideas and ideals and be able to embody them so that they can be received and useful. This is a challenge, and not without risks. But a greater risk is silence or inaction which equates to complicity with the abuse of power in what is unfolding before us. Rudolf Steiner gave us powerful tools. We really can begin with the path of self-knowledge that requires the condition of freedom and the recognition of and respect for that freedom
Lifeboats ~ Douglas Gerwin
In retrospect, we may come to see the impact on secondary education of the current Covid-19 pandemic as akin to the iceberg that struck the Titanic. In mid-stream, the course of the Good Ship Education carrying high school, college-aged, and graduate students––including Waldorf teachers in training––was abruptly arrested. University campuses emptied out. Dorms and libraries and research labs fell silent. Tuition income drained from college coffers. SAT and other test score requirements, suspended at the time of the pandemic, lost their near ubiquitous control over the process of college admission. It is too early to say whether this venerable old vessel will sink, but for sure it is taking on water. When a big boat begins to sink, passengers and crew must take to the lifeboats. This does not mean that flimsy life rafts will forever take the place of giant cruise liners or tankers. It means only that in moments of danger and crisis, you need to take action in ways you would otherwise never countenance. Survive a crisis of this magnitude, and you may well learn how to redesign both life rafts and the boat that carries them. And indeed, designers of a future vessel may choose to incorporate some of the features of a lifeboat. But in all of this, it is important to remember that life rafts and the mother ship on which they are stored serve different purposes, even though both are intended to transport human beings or at least the merchandize they need and desire. As constituent members of Waldorf schools and institutes, it is remarkable how nimbly we have leaped into lifeboats of online courses and begun to paddle away towards an as yet unillumined shoreline. In a matter of days and weeks, entire programs have been shifted to virtual learning options, even while the schools and institutes acknowledge the huge compromises inherent in this switch. When it comes to pedagogical survival, as with medical triage, some modalities will involve less compromise and more efficacy than others, but all require an element of improvising. Right now, we are living by the protocols of a jazz jam session, not of a carefully rehearsed concert. Inevitably, the question must be asked: What will adult education look like once the current pandemic has begun to recede? Will we continue to see giant educational cruise liners and tankers on the high seas of learning, or will they give way, not to a flotilla of tiny lifeboats but to some form of smaller, nimbler watercraft? To be sure, it is premature to answer this question with any confidence, but it is to be hoped––indeed, it should be required––that college education and graduate training programs not revert to their pre-pandemic form. At the same time, the tempting––oh, so tempting!––idea to convert adult education entirely to online learning cannot hold the solution either, since in the end human beings learn best from other human beings, not just from the books or plays they write, the music or poetry they compose, or the computer programs and platforms they design. We know from the disastrous experiment with the so-called “MOOC’s” (Massive Open Online Courses) that real face-to-face encounters with other human beings hold the secret to lasting success in education, at any age. That is why CfA has given its new online summer program the subtitle: “Serving in the Interval”. A musical interval arises when two or more distinctly different notes are sounded at the same moment, creating a new and fleeting reality that draws from both tones without being identical with either. In this sense we recognize that the forthcoming summer will have the quality of an interval arising between a past note that is now fast fading away and a new tone that is just beginning to sound. In the present moment we hope to experience a harmonious transition from receding past to fast-approaching future. We invite you to join in our summer song! Lend us your voice and contact us with your thoughts and interests at www.centerforanthroposophy.org
