Seeing What Is: The Education Challenges for Teachers and Their Students

By Jacqueline CoxTaylor

We can decide what we teach but we cannot decide what children will learn. Only the children themselves will decide what to learn. These three manuscripts whilst each being an individual study, are linked in their endeavour to assist children with challenges and diverse learning styles. ‘Seeing what is’ examines three topics , looking through the lenses of Steiner pedagogy comparing findings with current research, historical knowledge, current practises, and close observation of today’s children . How do children learn? What influences their learning? How, can we assess children’s learning ? And how do we decide what is important for children to learn.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris AU
• Release date: Feb 14, 2020
• ISBN: 9781796009699

Jacqueline CoxTaylor

Born and raised on the North Norfolk coast of Great Britain, I am the only daughter, with three brothers an academic mother ,and a fisherman father from generations of fishing and lifeboat crew. Completing my teaching degree at the Froebel Institute I soon moved into the education sphere of children with diverse learning styles and often challenging behaviours. Raising my five children I discovered Steiner education and have since examined all teaching and learning through the lenses Steiner gave . With an Australian husband I have settled in Queensland and continued the pursuit of ‘seeing what is’. Researching how children learn and how children with challenges and diversity can access the same learning offered to all children. Studying for a doctorate has provided the focus and rigour.

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Copyright © 2020 by Jacqueline CoxTaylor.

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Editor: Mehitabel Douglas-Drysdale

Rev. date: 08/05/2020

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Challenges of education

in the 21st century

What is a child? What is the value of childhood? What is education? These questions should underpin any research, curriculums, assessments or judgements of children in education. In 1924 at a lecture given in Torquay, England, Rudolf Steiner (1995) spoke of the need for education reform. Any new art of education, he stressed, must consider the whole life process. Steiner based his education on a cycle of seven years: birth to 7, 7-14 and 14-21. He also used careful observations of the child, an understanding of pedagogy and child development, together with an understanding of the whole child and his cycles of life and death. From birth to age 7, the child slips from the heavens into an inherited body. It does not fit well; it’s made from generations, and often the child struggles with the fit. During the first seven years, the child moulds and grows the body to his own fit. During this time he learns as an extension of the family, absorbing through his 12 senses, not intellectual learning. After the change of teeth, the forces previously used for reshaping the body are released, and through rhythm, can be used for learning. Curiosity begins. But not curiosity for dry facts–curiosity for beauty, colour, imagination, creativity. To teach the child, we have to use imagination and creativity, music and rhythm. During the first seven years, it is not what adults present to children which constitutes learning, it is how adults behave, how they are. The young child is all sense organ and absorbs soul development from the adults around him. These will affect him throughout his life. Negative effects will need conscious work in later life to free himself from these influences. Indeed, not only does the child before the age of 7 not learn in a conscious cognitive way, but also efforts to teach him are detrimental and injurious to his soul and physical development. Formal education begins at age 7, when the forces are freed from developing the human body. Then the task of the teacher is observation. It is only by close observation of the child that a teacher can hope for children to learn what is brought to them. Observing how a child sits, stands, walks, talks, holds his pencil, eats, wears his clothes, reacts to temperature and so on. Observing just how a child walks can reveal so much to the observant teacher about the child and how he learns. At the change of teeth, imagination develops and an eye for the artistic. Thus, it is the task of the teacher to bring the curriculum through imagination, story and the arts. What was learning in the senses, now becomes internal and of the soul: soul pictures learnt through images and imaginations. Not only is the stage between 7 and 14 one of imagination and artistic expression–in the forms of painting, modelling, drawing, movement, music and rhythm–it is also a stage of preparing for spiritual development. Analytical thinking at an early age is not conducive to later spiritual development. Steiner (1995) stated that learning to read and write, learning the symbolism of the Western world is not really appropriate until after the age of 12. The symbols bear no relevance to the stage of development of the child. Unlike indigenous or Chinese script, they are not pictorial representations. It would be preferable to wait to teach reading and writing until the twelfth year, but as part of a teacher’s task is to assist a child to find his place in society, these things must be done earlier, as is customary. Steiner then advocates that the teacher must endeavour to bring the subject artistically and with imagination.

Reference.

Steiner, R. (1995) The Kingdom of Childhood. Anthroposophic Press. Gt Barrington. MA.

What follows here are three explorations of how children learn and how teachers can meet the learning needs of their students. Each article is separate, but there is a theme that links them together: observing, ‘Seeing What Is’.

Seeing What Is

‘Seeing What Is’ is a study of effective support in the education of children in the 21st century. What are the possible positive effects of movement activities on the behaviour and learning challenges faced by many children raised within a sedentary lifestyle?

CONTENTS

Chapter 1   Introduction

Chapter 2   Definition

Chapter 3   Goal Objective of Investigation

Chapter 4   Strategy Technique

Chapter 5   Analysis

Chapter 6   Discussion

Chapter 7   Summary

Bibliography

In olden times

There lived in the souls of initiates

Powerfully the thought

That by nature

Every person is ill

And education was seen

As a healing process

Which gave the child as he matured

The health to be a true human being

- Rudolf Steiner

Chapter 1

Introduction

The 21st century, the cusp of artificial intelligence, a world of contradictions. New technologies are flooding community life. There is a myriad of research stating the harm inflicted through technology on children’s development, yet the technology continues to be pervaded as a beneficial learning tool. Obesity is a current Western world dilemma, obesity caused by poor nutrition and lack of exercise. Children are leading sedentary lives. Even in a country of vast open space, like Australia, children are inactive, sedentary and remaining indoors, choosing virtual reality over nature.

The children of this epoch are not the children of post-World War 2. They are not children who naturally defer to adults, and they are not naturally polite and self-effacing. They do not worship in conventional churches, and they are not ‘seen and not heard’. They are intelligent, thinkers, but they are often emotionally immature and physically underdeveloped. Glockler (2006) writes of so called ‘difficult children’. She explains that when a person feels misunderstood, they feel less comfortable in their own skin. And anyone who feels uncomfortable is likely to have a low aggression or provocation threshold. If they feel understood or accepted, they can become more confident and relax, which in turn assists their development and maturity.

100 years ago, Rudolf Steiner opened his first Steiner School in Germany for the Waldorf Astoria cigarette factory workers’ children. Steiner’s education system is a pedagogy based on his philosophy, Anthroposophy. It is an education of the whole child, encompassing life before birth and in preparation for life after death Steiner’s education philosophy has an international curriculum. The child development picture is divided into three sections. Birth to age 7, 7-14 and 14-21. Age 7 to 14 is the primary school section, and for these seven years the children have one class teacher. Teachers completing a seven year cycle often then proceed to take another cycle. It has been noticed and recorded by teachers just how different the children of today are as compared to 14 years ago. Robyn Brown (Brown 2016) describes the current cohort of her class, her challenge to meet their needs and the vast difference from her previous two cycles of children. Brown (2016) describes children who display intellectual ability, cognitive function compatible with children in advance of their chronological ages, yet have poor social skills, poor impulse control and immature physical development.

Interviewing children for 2020 entrance to school, I encountered Edmund, aged 4 years, 3 months. Edmund, during the observation period, spent 45 minutes absorbedly playing in the sand. Playing near other children, but solitary, he plunged a truck under the sand and drove it through the resisting sand. He seemed oblivious to the children who were climbing around him. They too seemed unaware of him and often walked over him and sometimes into him. His response to being walked on was to slap the offender, but a slap without making eye contact or indeed without looking toward the child. Edmund is of slight build. When he runs, his arms are bent in a 90-degree position with his fingers straight stiff and splayed. Edmund did not imitate the gestures at singing time. Looking at a