Steiner Waldorf Education in the World

Creating space for the development of a child’s potential in school

Kath Bransby from Waldorf UK and pedagogical advisor, Martyn Rawson, representing the European Council for Steiner Waldorf Education, participated in the Lifelong Learning Week 2023, on 29 November in Brussels, where they presented the idea that competences emerge from children’s potential across different areas of learning. They explained that the capacities and dispositions which Waldorf education particularly values are seen as a potential in all children, and can be identified as:

• moving/doing/making,
• language and communication,
• noticing and enquiring,
• well-being,
• empathy,
• imagining,
• literacies,
• aesthetics,
• holistic thinking,
• learning to learn,
• democratic capability,
• and making judgements

Using the Waldorf UK case as an example, they clarified the role of a school curriculum in providing rich opportunities for the continuous, cross-curricular, and age-appropriate development of these potentialities.

excerpted from https://ecswe.eu/bringing-our-take-on-key-competences-to-the-eu-policy-arena/