Information Literacy
Information literacy as an educational task
Media education in Waldorf schools ideally begins on the first day of school. For the author thinks that the anthroposophical understanding of the human being and media education are not contradictory. In his opinion, age-appropriate teaching that gradually trains the individual power of judgement must be complemented by appropriate developmental support in feeling and volition. [more]
Information Literacy
We need the ethics of communication as a school subject!
Bernhard Pörksen, born in 1969, is professor of media studies at Tübingen University. In 2008 he was voted “Professor of the Year” and honoured for his teaching. He has researched and written about scandals, truth and lies, and communication as an art of living. Pörksen warns against the democracy-destroying way in which information flows have become polluted and pleads for a new educational campaign, which has to start with children. [more]
Information Literacy, Publisher's View
Pulling the plug or the duty to be lazy
Are you also familiar with these mostly male colleagues who, when asked for a meeting, begin by emphasising how important they think the request is, but unfortunately do not have a date free in the near future and, moreover, their weekends are also fully booked until Christmas (or summer holidays)? [more]
Information Literacy, Spotlight
The M-word in the classroom
We are all called upon daily to listen sensitively into ourselves as to whether we feel or think in a racist way. And whether the language we use might be racist, even if we do not actually want it to be. This also applies to Waldorf education, where teachers are called upon to explain loaded terms in their historical context. This text by a Waldorf father is about the word “blackamoor” [German: “Mohr”], which is written out here only once and subsequently called the “M-word”. [more]
Information Literacy, Spotlight
School in freedom
The worldwide increase of autocratic governments, including in Europe, shows once more that we have to actively defend democracy, social solidarity and freedom as core elements of civil society if we do not want them to be snatched out of our hands. Freedom is neither a natural given nor a matter of course, but has to be repeatedly won and stewarded. This applies in particular to freedom in the cultural and educational sectors, without which there can be no freedom at all. [more]
Hands intelligence
The head needs hands and feet
Lisa's feet have been marvelling since she climbed out of the car barefoot. They feel coolness, gunge, moistness, softness, darkness in some way. Then something firmer, spiky, needle-like, warmer, stony, softer again, dry, huge, tart, warm, bright. A thousand touches. Finally: "Ouch, hot!" and the head gives the signal to Lisa: "Run! Fast! Go! It's soft, cool and wet ..." [more]
Hands intelligence
Movement is education and education is movement
Movement is of utmost importance for humans. This applies to external, physical movement as well as to our inner life: we feel excited and attracted by a person, an image, a group or an environment, or we feel aversion, it tends to push us away from a thing or a fellow human being. In our feelings, in the emotions, we are constantly moving in the area of tension between sympathy and antipathy. Sometimes we succeed better in empathising with a situation or another person – and sometimes, unfortunately, not so well. [more]
Series, Hands intelligence
"We would like to have grades so we know where we stand."
Do grade reports really help to find our position? [more]
Publisher's View, Hands intelligence
What do they mean: the free intellectual life or the fundamental right to freedom of expression?
When Rudolf Steiner introduced the ideas of the threefold social organism into the discussion on a new social order in 1917 – at the same time as the violent implementation of a new order in Russia – he took up the ideals of the French Revolution and specified them by assigning freedom, equality and fraternity to areas in which they each had a focus: liberty to intellectual life, equality to legal life and fraternity to economic life. [more]
Young writers, Hands intelligence
I can't get the images out of my head
In March, our class visited the Holocaust memorial in Bergen-Belsen together with class 10 of our school. The trip was part of the curriculum for class 10, who were studying the Nazi period and the Holocaust in their history main lesson. Because we had not been able to go three years ago, or in the following years, my class made up for it with this trip. [more]
Bund der Freien Waldorfschulen e.V.