Colloquium on English - Research Institute for Waldorf Education

46
Keeping The Curriculum Timely
by
Joan Calderera, Allegra Alessandri, Meg Gorman,
At the San Francisco Waldorf School, the development of a modern
curriculum has been a group effort. In the pioneering years, we decided that
we wanted to move away from the traditional Eurocentric and North American
oriented focus and avoid the criticism that is often leveled at the traditional
Waldorf curriculum. We wanted to include other cultures: the Pacific
Rim, Africa, and South America. We wanted, too, to investigate world religions.
We actively set out to include literature from various cultures within
all our blocks. We felt the need to expand the curriculum in order to make it
more culturally diverse by approaching historical periods in a more global
way rather than simply a focus on Western development. What was happening
in the rest of the world beyond Europe during the Middle Ages? We
have added a block on Arab studies, for example, which is a combination of
literature, history, and cultural studies. We have also been aware that we
must include the voices of women and peoples of color.
Our task is to help students be in this world at this time. We need to
face the fact that it is not fashionable to discuss the cannon. We must realize
that there is a changing cannon. As teachers, we need constantly to ask ourselves
why we are teaching something.
Our questions might include: How do we make it new? What do
students need to know for general cultural knowledge? What is timely? What
allows young people to know the world now? What connects them to the
richness of their humanity? What connects them to their pre-birth intentions?
What meets them at their developmental stages? What books keep
them in process? How do we keep our students, even the brightest and most
ambitious of them, from opting out of consciousness? How do we create an
atmosphere where they don’t want to opt out of consciousness?
As literature teachers, we know the value of reading both to meet
another consciousness and to understand what is happening in the world.
The most important thing for us to achieve is a condition where students
can live comfortably in the unanswerable questions, where they can live
with what it means to be human. Literature has to open the questions of the
students’ souls to move them into the will.
How can we as readers discover the experience of the human soul in
this age? Every culture is affected by the consciousness soul. Where can we
see in other cultures symptoms and ways that we can come to the consciousness
soul where transformation occurs? In all good literature, there seems to
be a damming up before the movement of transformation is possible.
For our reading list, we have found authors in other cultures to put
beside the books that most Waldorf schools use, such as the Colombian