Abstract
Modern education, which has inherited the rationalist epistemological tradition, discarding subjective and aesthetic experience and privileging conceptual cognitive learning, has contributed to students’ difficulty with oral expression. After relating Waldorf Education’s vocation of meeting students’ multidimensionality in their formative process to the emerging educational paradigm, this article is located in the aesthetic mediation characteristic of this model of education the fundamental element for learners’ spontaneity, creativity and self-expression to emerge in a significant manner. This article is derived from doctoral research comprising a case study conducted in a Waldorf school.
Zusammenfassung
Die moderne Bildung, die auf der rationalistisch erkenntnistheoretischen Tradition basiert, subjektive und ästhetische Erfahrungen verwirft und konzeptionelles kognitives Lernen bevorzugt, hat zu den Schwierigkeiten der Schüler*innen mit dem mündlichen Ausdruck beigetragen. Nachdem die Waldorfpädagogik, die eine Mehrdimensionalität der Schüler*innen in ihrem Bildungsprozess anstrebt, mit dem aufkommenden Bildungsparadigma in Verbindung gebracht wurde, befasst sich dieser Artikel mit der ästhetischen Vermittlung, die für dieses Bildungsmodell charakteristisch ist und das grundlegende Element für die Spontaneität, Kreativität und Selbstdarstellung der Lernenden darstellt. Der Artikel stammt aus der Doktorarbeit zu einer Fallstudie, die an einer Waldorfschule durchgeführt wurde.
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Notes
- 1.
According to Capra (2004), systemic thought, which emerged simultaneously in various disciplines in the first half of the twentieth century, was pioneered by the organismic biologists and was soon shared by German Gestalt (literally ‘organized form’) Psychology and by the new science of Ecology, exercising its more dramatic effects on Quantum Physics (in which subatomic particles can no longer be understood as isolated entities – things, but only as ‘interconnections’ – between things). According to the ramifications of this line of thought, the essential properties of an organism, or living system, cannot be understood solely from the pure analysis of its parts – in opposition to the notorious belief of the modern and Cartesian belief that in every complex system the behaviour of the whole can be understood through the properties of its parts. According to the author, as Goethe, whose scientific works have not been translated to Portuguese, was the first person to propose a study of biological form from a dynamic point of view, in which “each creature is only a shade of a great harmony which one must study as a whole”, Goethe’s work is situated “on the front line of contemporary systemic thought” (Capra 2004, p. 35).
- 2.
According to Nicolescu (2001), quantum physics, by clarifying that the laws of physics are different depending on the levels of the subatomic scales (microphysical) and atomic scales (macrophysical), and by noting that it is possible for these pares that come from contradictory scales to coexist in the natural systems, gave rise to a deep rupture in modern logic and epistemology, advocating that each of these two levels is ruled by its own laws – which dismisses the former philosophical dogma of the mechanistic cosmovision of the existence of a single level of reality.
- 3.
Like Steiner, other authors have made evident the importance of playing for the child’s cognitive development. Piaget (1971), for example, considers that the child, as it develops, in its constant quest for equilibration with external reality, frequently uses playing as a basic mechanism in its successive processes of assimilation and accommodation. Playing, for the child, is a bridge between the adult world (external) and the childhood world (internal); it is, in its essence, the element that enables the progressive organization of its intellect. For the Swiss epistemologist, therefore, playing is an extreme pole of the assimilation of the real in the ego, relating itself with creative imagination which, in turn, will be the basis of all subsequent thought and reasoning. In other words, when the child plays it assimilates objects, situations and/or ideas into its “ego” and into its mental structures, as well as into its previous schemas. Playing, therefore, is the “expression of one of the stages of this progressive differentiation: it is the product of assimilation, dissociating itself from accommodation before reintegrating itself into the forms of permanent equilibration which will make of it their complement, on the level of operational or rational thought” (p. 207).
- 4.
This is the process of the axons being covered by a sheath of myelin, a lipid-rich substance that enables an increase in the transmission speed of nerve stimuli or electrical impulses (synapses), providing greater efficiency in the transmission of information by the neurotransmitters. Given that the myelination process, which starts as early as the embryonic period, more precisely in the seventh month of pregnancy, extends until the child is six or seven years old, early literacy, by excessively stimulating the rational part of the brain, places great strain on the central nervous system, so as to favour the development of degenerative diseases in later life.
- 5.
- 6.
Like Steiner, Piaget in his psychogenetic theory (1967, 1971) also understands that in the age range from 6/7 to 12 years old, which he calls the concrete operational stage, although the child already manipulates objects found in reality, coming closer to logical rules and operations, it still does not do so with the abstraction characteristic of the next stage, the formal or abstract operations stage.
- 7.
Eurhythmics is a body movement created based on the indication of Rudolf Steiner.
- 8.
Art of Speech is an activity that explores the sounds of words placed poetically, emphasizing the phonemes from the rhythmic or metric point of view implicit in intentionally selected verses.
- 9.
Also according to Piaget (1967, 1975), it is at this stage, which he calls the stage of formal or abstract operations, that adolescents acquire mental structures that enable them to perform operations based on a kind of abstract reasoning.
- 10.
Howard Gardner (1995), a researcher at Harvard University who worked alongside Erick Erikson, states in his theory about multiple intelligences that there is a set of abilities, called intelligences, that each person has to different extents and in different combinations, as part of human genetic inheritance, regardless of the education our cultural support they have. There are seven such intelligences: musical, bodily-kinesthetic, logical-mathematical, linguistic, spatial, interpersonal and intrapersonal. For Gardner, every human being has certain essential abilities in each of these intelligences, but, even though an individual may have great biological potential for a given ability, he/she needs opportunities in order to explore and develop it. It would be the school’s role to respect the abilities of each student, and also to provide contact with activities involving the other intelligences, in addition to logical-mathematical and linguistic intelligence, given that in all the activities we undertake we necessarily use more than one intelligence.
- 11.
Cf: Gerwin & Mitchell, 2007. In: www.waldorflibrary.org/Journal_Articles/GradPhase2.pdf.
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de Andrade e Silva, D.A. (2021). Reintegrating the Subjective and Aesthetic Dimensions in Education: Reflections on Waldorf Education and Development of Students’ Oral Expression. In: Stoltz, T., Wiehl, A. (eds) Education – Spirituality – Creativity. Springer VS, Wiesbaden. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-32968-6_11
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