What is happening in the Anthroposophical Society – is what Anthroposophy Worldwide would like to bring to you in a new form. With this issue we warmly welcome all the members who have not received Anthroposophy Worldwide before and who have decided to subscribe to it. 

Using digital channels offers new possibilities of a closer connection, new forms of participation and the availability of contributions, letters to the editor and material. We will develop these possibilities, as well as the design of the print version, step by step. 

Because Anthroposophy Worldwide will, for the first time, come out in print, as newsletter and website, all in several languages (which means that several processing steps are required for each contribution), the printed version will have 12 pages. The thematic concept has been adapted with the help of the Communications project group, which is part of the Goetheanum in Development initiative. The group has extended the structure of Anthroposophy Worldwide by adding further contents and was also actively involved in this issue. The group members, Matthias Girke, Gerald Häfner, Christiane Haid and Justus Wittich, were joined at the end of 2018 by the editorial team of the Goetheanum journal. 

We send you our best wishes for the New Year, the year in which we celebrate a hundred years of Waldorf Education. It was in 1919 that, following Rudolf Steiner’s efforts for the social threefolding impulse, the first Waldorf School opened its doors. We are looking forward to being more closely connected with you! 

Justus Wittich for the publisher, Sebastian Jüngel for Communications.  More ...

​Please forward this announcement to your faculty and staff, and include in your bulletin and/or newsletter. Thank you very much!

Greetings Friends,

We are hoping you can join us in the beautiful Pacific Northwest this summer for another exploration and deepening of our puppetry and storytelling pursuits.

This summer, while exploring our theme of “Nurturing a Resilient Heart,” we will also practice working on elements of performance: Movement and gesture, color, lighting, voice, music, ways of staging, opening and closing a performance, polarities like tension and humor, courage and fear, pacing, turning story into script, etc. We will also be busy making things for staging our puppet shows and stories: Natural dyeing of large scenery cloths, wet felting props and possibly making colored transparency puppets.

Our wonderful teachers will include Janene Ping, Jennifer Aguirre, Susan Strauss and possibly others.

Let me know your questions,

Marjorie Rehbach


The cost of the conference will be $425 (USD) with extra for room and board. If you bring a puppet show to share, you will receive 10% off the conference fee. A few work-study opportunities will be available. More details, including early bird discount, deposit info, registration info, housing, etc. will be available soon. More info ...

Do you want to receive updates as they come in? Subscribe to our mailing list here.

by Linda M. Platas

Monique, like many toddlers, loved emptying and filling everything. She filled pots and pans with wooden blocks, took the lid off her shape sorter bucket and filled it with rubber balls, and she delighted in emptying her small basket of toys. At the same time, through interactions with caregivers she was learning positional words and phrases such as in, on top of, and under.
​
Shortly after her second birthday, while playing with her wooden block set, Monique noticed a sphere lying next to the base of a cone, and announced “I-skeem!” excitedly. Her mother, looking over, took a minute to realize that Monique saw what looked like an ice cream cone in the arrangement of blocks.

At school several months later, Monique was burying toys in the sandbox. Teacher Jorge watched as she hid two small toys. After talking with her about “seeds” (they had read The Tiny Seed, by Eric Carle, earlier that morning), he watched as she accurately retrieved both toys from where she had buried them.

What is this all about? What do positional words, three-dimensional shapes, and buried toys have to do with each other?

An Anthroposophical Perspective of Psychology

Anthroposophic Psychotherapy has its foundation in the image of the human being, raised from the Spiritual Science created by Rudolf Steiner. This image considers the human being as an individual formed by the physical-etheric, the psychic dimensions, and the spiritual dimension or I.

This workshop is for those who want to expand the academic perspective, and are in search of a new integrative view.

On this occasion the theme will focus on early childhood, education as the center for health.

March 2019
Friday 22 from 18:00 a 21:30
Saturday 23 from 9:00 a 19:30
Sunday 24 from 9:00 a 13:00

We can help find transportation and lodging in Tijuana.

Themes:
Open talk: Building Resilience - Education as Therapy
Child Development - Current Paradigms & Their Limitations
Assimilating Sense Life as Inner Experience
The Invisible Human Being Within Us: The Pathology Underlying Therapy
Small Groups Digestion Exercise
Life Processes: A Key to Understanding Pathology
Questions & Answers
Concluding Contributions from the Presenters

Costs:
UNTIL FEBRUARY 28. $127 (USD)
AFTER MARCH 1st. $148 (USD)
REGISTRATION PROCESS
1. Fill out the following form https://goo.gl/forms/0wmyUojBLjz3OzRq1
2. It is necessary to reserve your place with $50 (USD). You can do it thru Paypal with the email semilleroeducativo@gmail.com
3. Registration must be completed before the workshop begins. 
Contact us at +52 664 381 1071 from 9am to 2pm Monday thru Friday or email info@semilleroeducativo.com for any question or clarification.

Kind regards,
Semillero Comunidad Educativa
semilleroeducativo.com

Children’s Vocal Development
Whilst we have progressions for children’s musical and instrumental development, it is hard to find such developmental progressions regarding what we should expect in terms of children’s vocal development—namely what is NATURAL for their voices to do—or how to listen for the sounds of this development. Surely we should have concerns about this, given the goal of matching all aspects of children’s music making to their innate development? Fortunately, some well known academics have researched and written up this question (e.g. Graham Welch, Leon Thurman and Carol Klitzke). Having said this, like much research it remains hidden away behind the doors of academia and struggles to find its way into classroom practice. So here, first of all, are some insights on the growth of children’s vocal anatomy – inspired by the book Bodymind & Voice edited by Thurman and Welch. Laryngeal dimensions increase slowly and steadily in size and firmness throughout childhood. Likewise, the vocal folds increase their total length by about 6.5mm between the ages of 1 to 12. In the first few years of a child’s life, the vocal folds are made up primarily of mucosal tissue. Only around the age of 2/3 years old does the thyroarytenoid muscle—the vocal folds ligament—begin to develop which gradually gives the vocal folds more stability and structure. Consequently, only by age 10 are the vocal ligament and mucosal tissues considerably developed. In the same vein, the vocal tract – which extends from the true vocal folds to the exterior surfaces of the lips – is also very short in early childhood. Until the age of 2 years the tongue lies entirely in the oral cavity, and then its base begins the gradual descent into the pharynx, so that by the age of 4, the posterior one third of the tongue is located in the pharynx. Only by age 5 is the basic adult configuration of the vocal tract present, but of course this does not mean it has reached its full size. Only by age 9 will the curved contour of the vocal tract be comparable with that of an adult, but even then it still remains shorter and smaller.

A lecture by Rudolf Steiner, given in Zürich, Switzerland on October 10, 1916 

​What we seek as spiritual-scientific truths should not be just a dead knowledge for us, but a living one. It should be knowledge that can really find its way into our life, into all aspects of our life, and at the most important points in our life. Spiritual science today is often taken in quite abstractly. And people—especially those who have little understanding of spiritual science—may even come to a sort of detached knowledge that initially proves to be unfruitful for life, and they then have the following impression: “What does it matter that we know human beings are made of so-and-so many parts or members, and that humanity has evolved through different cultural epochs and will continue to evolve, and so on?” For those who believe, according to today’s demands, that people should be completely present in practical life, spiritual science often seems quite unproductive. And it is often conveyed as being unproductive, even by those who already have some heart and feeling for it. 

Nevertheless, spiritual science itself, as it is, is something infinitely full of life; it can come alive even in the most exoteric practices in life; and it also must come alive for the sake of the future. Today I would like to make this clear with a particular example by choosing something from our spiritual science that we all presumably know, that is well known to us, and to show how it will gradually become even more enlivened by our looking at it as being full of life.  

Most of you will have heard before that our time was preceded by the so-called fourth post-Atlantean cultural period, in which the Greeks and Romans were the most important peoples. The impulses of this fourth post-Atlantean cultural period influenced the following centuries into the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. We have been in the fifth post-Atlantean cultural period since the fifteenth century. We have been born into this period in our current incarnation, and human beings will live in this fifth cultural period for many centuries to come. We know, furthermore, and have often let it flow through our souls (at least, most of us have) that humanity particularly advanced outer culture and outer work during the fourth post-Atlantean—the Greco-Roman—cultural period, which developed the so-called intellectual- or mind-soul at that time. Our task now is to develop the consciousness soul.

Founded in 1942, High Mowing School merged with Pine Hill Waldorf School in 2017 to offer a comprehensive preschool through grade 12 Waldorf program to day and boarding students from the local area, across the USA, and from around the world. HMS is building a thrilling future that will continue to grow in 2019-20 and is looking for a number of
new additions to our faculty and staff.

Two programs are well underway in 2018-19: The Middle School English Immersion Trimesteroffers three trimester sessions for up to 20 middle school students each session to discover American language and culture and sample Waldorf education for a truly unique, immersive Waldorf Experience. Our Waldorf Apprenticeship program, has offered seven apprentices the opportunity to hone their skills in the classroom in a variety of subject areas and grade levels. Experience teaches us that one of the most effective elements in preparing for Waldorf teaching is an active involvement in the life of a school over a significant period of time. Our Apprenticeship Program welcomes up to five apprentices each year. Join us this coming year! Visit highmowing.org to learn more.

In the devastating aftermath of World War I, Rudolf Steiner gained a reputation as a leading social thinker. One mainstream reviewer of his book Towards Social Renewal referred to it as “...perhaps the most widely read of all books on politics appearing since the war.” Steiner’s proposals for the reconstruction of Europe and rebuilding the crumbling social structure were thus discussed publicly as a serious alternative to both Communism and capitalism. 

Steiner’s “threefold” ideas involve the progressive independence of socioeconomic, political, and cultural institutions. This should be realized through the promotion of human rights and equality in political life, freedom in the cultural realm, and associative cooperation in economics and business. Learn more ...

Apply by February 13 to join the 2019-2020 cohort of the Biodynamic Farmer Foundation Year — a hands-on, holistic approach to farmer education. Delve deeply into the practice of biodynamics with individualized support from an experienced biodynamic mentor farmer. Apprentice on an established biodynamic mentor farm or implement biodynamics on the farm you manage. Work with a cohesive learning curriculum of short readings, experiential exercises, and lively conversation spaces. Find out more and apply here.

The First Teachers Course 1919 in 2019: July 6-14 at the Goetheanum in Dornach, Switzerland in English/ German. From July 6-14, 2019 The Pedagogical Section is reviving the 'The First Teachers Course' of the first Waldorf school which took place in 1919. In the first teacher education course Rudolf Steiner laid the foundations for the Waldorf/Steiner schools. And what a strong foundation this is! In lectures, discussion groups and artistic workshops we will work with the notes taken by the participants in 1919 which led to the publications of 'The Foundations of Human Experience', 'Practical Advice to Teachers' and 'Discussions with Teachers'. In this way we will find new approaches to the foundations of the Waldorf/Steiner schools and revitalize them. We hope that this special 2019 conference will serve as a strong impulse for the future. The conference will be based on a special edition of the 'The First Teachers Course'. The three parts of the course have been newly edited and chronologically arranged and will be published to coincide with the Waldorf Centenary. More info here.