Bringing the Steiner Waldorf Approach to your Early Years Practice

Janni Nicol

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317556169
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Early Childhood Education

Have you ever wondered what the Steiner approach is all about, where it comes from and how it can be used to benefit the young children in your setting?

Bringing the Steiner Waldorf Approach to your Early Years Setting is an excellent introduction to this philosophy. Janni Nicol clearly explains the history of Steiner Waldorf education, the role of play in learning and the key themes of rhythm, repetition and reverence with ideas for activities and resources. Practical examples throughout the book involving children of different ages in a wide variety of settings allow readers to see the connection between theory and practice.

This new edition has been fully updated to include:

• Clear comparisons between Steiner practice and the revised Early Years Foundations Stage (EYFS) requirements
• A section on the growth of international Steiner settings
• Information on celebrating festivals and outdoor environments

This convenient guide will help Early Years practitioners, students and parents to really understand what the Steiner Waldorf approach can bring to their practice and children.

1 An introduction to Steiner Waldorf early childhood education

DOI: 10.4324/9781315732831-1

Waldorf education and early years practice today

Steiner Waldorf education was founded in 1919, and is continuing to grow and spread throughout the world, keeping true to its fundamental curriculum no matter in which culture it appears, from China to South Africa, South America to Finland. The ‘early years’ (known as ‘Steiner Waldorf early childhood’) cover pre-birth, working with parenting, baby groups and on into kindergarten (3 to 6 plus years). Steiner Waldorf schools offer a real alternative to mainstream education throughout the world, and see themselves not as competitors but as partners, providing a complementary provision, contributing to and learning from other educational practices. In many countries, such as Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Germany, Holland, New Zealand and Australia, Steiner Waldorf schools are publicly funded within the maintained sector. Steiner kindergartens thrive in Europe, (particularly in Germany where they were established originally), where they are an accepted part of education. New initiatives for training Steiner Waldorf early childhood teachers are springing up all over the world, particularly in the Far East, where new kindergartens are growing and spreading.

In the United Kingdom, there are now publicly funded Steiner schools, and in 2009, the Steiner Academy, Hereford, became the first fully funded Steiner school as an Alternative Provision Free School (i.e. Academy). There are now four academies (and more in the pipeline), all of which have kindergarten provision. Steiner kindergartens receive Nursery Education Grant funding through their Local Authority, and all work within the Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS), as this is a statutory requirement. Teacher training is offered for all stages of the curriculum. Steiner kindergartens can be registered as independent, or attached to an independently registered Steiner Waldorf school, as part of their early years department.

Birth-to-three work is growing, and there are also new day-care centres being established, as well as growing work with the ‘Pikler Approach’, which is being integrated into the birth-to-three work (further information in Chapter 11). There are a number of Steiner-inspired childminders who have also completed the Steiner (EYE) training.

Steiner Waldorf education aims to respect the essential nature of childhood and, in the early years, a secure and unhurried environment enables children to develop a range of skills, which provide a sound foundation for emotional, social and cognitive intelligence later. A highly trained Steiner practitioner (usually referred to as a ‘kindergarten teacher’) encourages the child’s creative play and self-motivated enquiry, and offers themselves as an example rather than an instructor. Through imitation, children naturally develop a sense of their own purposeful doing and creating alongside the working adult.

In the pre-school years the inner activities of thinking, feeling and willing (doing) are largely undifferentiated. The young child thinks in doing and expresses their feelings spontaneously in word, gesture and action. At this age children learn by doing and especially in joining in what is being done by others. Within the kindergarten, learning experiences are embedded within the business of daily living, and a great range of domestic and creative (artistic) activities are offered in an informal way, allowing enthusiasm and initiative to flourish. The kindergarten environment provides a quality sensory experience, and is equipped with simple natural materials and toys, enabling the child to develop their spontaneous play, which arises from within the innate creativity of each child. Within the rhythmical structure of the day and week, regular activities are repeated. A sense of familiarity enables the child to learn new skills without undue stress, allowing them to feel secure and confident. Opportunities for reverence, to experience awe and wonder, are developed through respect for each other and the environment. The oral tradition of storytelling, puppetry, music and movement, rhymes and songs, develop memory and a rich imagination.

In the first seven years, the education works with the developing child’s innate rhythms in such a way that they develop a strong physical body, good motor skills, as well as a healthy regard and respect for each other and the world in which they live. These first seven years are a time for children to experience an unpressured childhood, in a place where they can grow in peace and harmony, feeling safe and not under pressure to perform or compete. Within this protective and homely mixed-age environment a rich tapestry of essential lifelong learning experiences can be slowly woven, before formal teaching is introduced at around 7 years old. In Steiner Waldorf education, we call this place the ‘kindergarten’ or ‘early childhood environment’.

2 A brief history of Steiner Waldorf education

DOI: 10.4324/9781315732831-2

Rudolf Steiner was born in Kraljevec, then part of Hungary, now Croatia, in 1861. He was intensely awake to nature, and was convinced of the reality of an inner life. He studied science and the classics, and tutored pupils in the humanities. Philosophy, science, literature and the arts were his principle interests, and he gained his doctorate in Philosophy.

Figure 2.1 Rudolf Steiner

The extraordinary originality of Rudolf Steiner’s mind led him to a philosophy which linked up the world of science with that of spirituality. His revolutionary ideas (called ‘Anthroposophy’) took form in a number of enterprises, among which are art and architecture; biodynamic agriculture (organic farming working with natural rhythms); anthroposophical medicine (an extension of orthodox medical practice, including Weleda medicines and toiletries); curative education and social therapy (including the Camphill movement); speech and drama; Eurythmy (an art of movement making speech and music visible); virbela flowforms (water purification systems); ethical banking; and education.

The Waldorf method of education

The first Waldorf School grew out of the political and social devastation throughout Europe following the First World War. In 1919, Emil Molt, an industrialist and the founder and managing director of the Waldorf Astoria Cigarette factory, in Stuttgart, Germany, asked Rudolf Steiner to provide an education which could offer a healing to mankind:

It is essential that we develop an art of education which will lead us out of the social chaos into which we have fallen. The only way out of this is to bring spirituality into the soul of human beings through education.

(Steiner 1968:11)

After a period of intensive teacher training, the first truly comprehensive, non-selective, non-denominational school, ‘which could provide for the children of workmen and employees the same teaching and education as that enjoyed by children of families with means’ (Molt 1975: 137), was founded, starting the growth of Steiner education throughout the world. This educational impulse roused particular interest in England, where Steiner was invited to lecture. Here, he met many educationalists, forming a warm and mutually respectful friendship with Margaret McMillan, the founder of the ‘nursery schools’, and who achieved so much in the field of early childhood education and care in Britain in the early 1900s.

Rudolf Steiner passed on his ideas for the kindergarten to Elisabeth Grunelius (1885–1989), a Froebel-trained kindergarten teacher (see Chapter 3), who took on a kindergarten group in Germany for a temporary period in 1920, and then established the first Steiner kindergarten in 1926, in Stuttgart. She worked closely with Steiner in establishing the fundamental principles for Waldorf early childhood education before his death in 1925. The school was closed by the Nazis in 1938, and in 1940, Elisabeth went to America, where she founded Steiner Waldorf kindergartens. In 1947, she returned to Germany to work with Klara Hattermann and others, who were expanding the work in Europe. She gave support to teacher training and started the first international kindergarten conference in Hanover in 1951 (which continues today). Her book, Early Childhood Education and the Waldorf School Plan, was published in America in 1952.

3 Steiner Waldorf early years

DOI: 10.4324/9781315732831-3

The kindergarten

The word ‘Kindergarten’ originated in the nineteenth century with the German educationalist Friedrich Froebel (1782–1852). The literal translation from the German Kinder-Garten means ‘Child Garden’. ‘Garden’ in German is connected with the word that means ‘to bend’ (transform, metamorphose). Froebel used this concept as an inspiration for the child’s environment; namely a ‘Paradise Garden’. It is a common term for early years settings in many countries throughout the world.

Children attend the ‘kindergarten’ between the ages of three and six. In many schools or attached to kindergartens, parent and child groups and pre-kindergarten groups (often called ‘pre-kindy’ or playgroups) are provided for younger children (2 to 3 or 4 years old). There are a number of nurseries or full day care which also cater for babies upwards, and run all day. Group sizes vary and are compliant with statutory regulation. Traditionally, in the kindergarten years, five morning sessions per week are offered, each session lasting for approximately four to four and a half hours. Children take up provision according to age and need, but by five they are expected to attend five ‘days’ a week. Wrap-around or afternoon care is often available if required, and in some day-care centres they form a continuous provision until 6 p.m. Increasingly, providers are exploring the need for wider early childhood provision with Steiner Waldorf nurseries and all-day kindergartens, and the move to the Children-Centre concept – combining health, care and education and working specifically with parents – is an idea particularly compatible with Steiner education.

General educational principles

The seven-year periods

Steiner divided the broad principles of child development, and the educational methodology supporting it, into three psychological and physiological phases of childhood, each approximately seven years in length. These indicate a change, both physically and mentally, at around the age of 6 to 7 years; the second period, including puberty, to 14 years; and the development to adulthood culminating at around 21 years old. Although each stage has a precise integrity, processes coming to a certain culmination in one phase transform into faculties in the subsequent stage of development. An example of this is that the forces so strongly at work in building up the physical body (often referred to in Steiner education as ‘the hand’) in the first seven years, become available as the basis for healthy cognitive development later on (the ‘head’). This threefold approach involves holistic support for the development of the all-round human qualities of willing (doing), feeling (emotions) and thinking (cognitive); in truth, an education of hand, heart and the head.

The first seven years

Social, emotional, cognitive, linguistic and physical skills are accorded equal value in Steiner Waldorf early childhood education, and many different competencies are developed. Activities reflect the concerns, interests and developmental stages of the child, and the carefully structured environment is designed to foster both personal and social learning. The curriculum is adapted to the child and takes as its starting point the careful observation of the nature of the growing and evolving human being seen in their physiological, psychological and spiritual aspects, and focusses on the inner nature of the child, rather than theoretical or ideological aspects.

This view that physical, emotional and cognitive/intellectual development are subtly and inextricably linked underpins and informs the early childhood curriculum, which is tailored to meet the child’s changing needs during each phase.

Developmental stages

At each developmental stage, the child presents a particular set of physical, emotional and intellectual characteristics which require a particular (empathetic) educational response in return. This is the basis of childcentred education. The formative period before second dentition (5 to 6 years) is seen as the period of greatest physical growth and development. Structures in the brain are being refined and elaborated – a process which is not completed until around 6 to 7 years – and until that time the young child’s primary mode of learning is through doing and experiencing; the child ‘thinks’ with the entire physical being.

Early learning

This early learning is mostly self–motivated, allowing the child to come to know the world in the way most appropriate to their age: through active interaction, feeling, touching, exploring and imitating; in other words, through ‘doing’. Only when new capabilities appear, at around the seventh year, is the child seen to be physically, emotionally and intellectually ready for formal instruction. Through experiential, self-motivated physical activity the small child ‘grasps’ the world with their entire being in order to understand it: an essential pre-requisite for the later activity of grasping the world through concepts. Children are encouraged to master physical skills (sewing, sawing, building, baking), before abstract intellectual ones (reading and writing).

The formative forces

The core idea relevant for the first seven years is that the formative forces – those working on the development of the physic...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 An introduction to Steiner Waldorf early childhood education
• 2 A brief history of Steiner Waldorf education
• 3 Steiner Waldorf early years
• 4 Play: the serious work of childhood
• 5 The kindergarten environment
• 6 Rhythm, repetition and reverence
• 7 The celebration of festivals
• 8 Storytelling and puppetry
• 9 Working within the Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS)
• 10 Observation, assessment and planning
• 11 Working with parents and the first three years
• 12 Other subjects
• Appendix 1: exemptions and modifications to EYFS 2014
• Appendix 2: relevant organisations
• Bibliography and resources