Ours is a challenging moment. No need to list the endlessly enumerated crises that we and our students face. But there is more going on, more to the story of our time. Waldorf teachers and graduates are finding joy, positivity and meaning in lives well led, in acts of service, and in feeling a deep sense of responsibility. Hard times ain’t gonna rule our minds, no more!

Our collective images of leadership are perhaps more conflicted than ever. Yet this situation can also provide an opportunity for Waldorf schools and other service-oriented non-profits organizations to model alternative examples. At a time when the old forms of governance and past structures are being dis-membered, Waldorf schools have a unique chance to stand for transformative leadership that inspires confidence and builds trust within the community.

In February Building Bridges to Waldorf Teacher Training will complete its program at the Ocean Charter School in Los Angeles, and start a new cluster at the Mountain Phoenix Community School in Wheat Ridge, in the Denver area in Colorado.

The first undertaking for a teacher who recognizes the vast range of needs in a given classroom is to drop any preconception of what a student should or shouldn’t be. In the place of judgements, just observe. This builds our phenomenological muscles. Instead of saying “Ralph acts out in frustration,” say “Ralph threw his book.” Instead of saying “Malika is in a good mood today,” say “Malika smiled as she was speaking to me this morning.” There are so many things we miss out on observing because we are busy judging.

“The journey of Camphill Academy Afrika began not with policy or paperwork, but with a dream—a vision deeply rooted in the soil, soul, and spirit of Africa. It was a yearning to cultivate a truly African-based Waldorf inclusive education—one that honors the genius loci: the sacred essence of our land, our people, our animals, plants, and minerals.”

Antioch alum and current Maine Coast Waldorf School high school faculty chair & humanities teacher John Reinhart tells us, “I think it’s important that we find space to slow down. The world is so busy, so overloaded with information, so utterly undigestible that we all go around with stomach aches, head aches, existential aches. I think there’s great risk that such pressures lead teachers to feel more need for more information, just as students might be begging for more entertainment. We need to do real things, get our hands dirty, work hard. Connect with one another. Remember what it’s like to be human without having to prove it by clicking all the images with stairs in them.”

We are living in a moment when education is becoming, unmistakably, a healing profession. It is a tightrope-wire time with few easy answers. Rudolf Steiner gave us a picture of the incarnating human being—body, soul, and spirit—arriving on Earth with intentions that stretch beyond a single lifetime. When we pair that view with a loving relationship to our students and our era, we stand on solid ground. What do we do with such a potent view of the human being as we face a turbulent present and an unknowable future? We do the work together.

David Sloan has an impressive collection of published works, including, Stages of Imagination: Working Dramatically With Adolescence (©2001) and Life Lessons: Reaching Teenagers Through Literature (© 2007). Now you can read a sneak peek excerpt from David’s upcoming book, Keeping Ideals Intact: A Waldorf Teacher’s Forty-Year Journey. See what beauty & wisdom a lifetime spent as a Waldorf educator yields.

Clearly, two thorny, related questions are pressuring many high school directors to reassess their benchmarks for selecting productions: 1) When does a play cross the increasingly fraught and dangerous line from “appropriateness” to “cultural appropriation?” 2) How much should directors heed the accelerating movement to confine their casting to “lived experience” instead of keeping channels open for “imagined experience?”