Research & Reviews The 2024 AWSNA Conference

The Association of Waldorf Schools of North America

By Monika Sutherland

The Association of Waldorf Schools of North America hosted its first in-person conference since 2019, after a five-year pause due to COVID-19. The conference took place at the Denver Waldorf School from June 24 to 27, 2024, and was attended by 279 people from the US, Canada, and Mexico. The school’s spacious campus, adorned with students’ artwork, and its numerous gathering spaces for small and large groups, created a vibrant and welcoming atmosphere. Outside, a large tent was festively decorated with flags sewn by 8th-grade students over many years. Walking into the space, you immediately felt part of something exciting and wonderful.

The theme of the conference – Radiant Self, Resilient Students, Robust Schools - was brought to life by the three esteemed keynote speakers Constanza Kaliks, Nkem Ndefo, and Simone Shurney. Each keynote presentation was introduced with storytelling and singing by Baba the Storyteller, a West African griot who brought potent themes and truths through stories and call-and-response singing before each keynote presentation. This immersive experience set a beautiful mood and allowed attendees to experience firsthand what teachers strive to bring to children in Waldorf schools - teaching through the richness of stories and images.

On the afternoon before the opening evening of the conference, a special time and space was created for conference attendees of color to gather and socialize. This initiative was well-received, with our colleagues of color reporting feeling supported and strengthened by this offering. It provided them with a safe and empowering space to meet as an affinity group and permeate the space before being joined by all the other conference attendees.

On the opening evening of the conference, the first keynote presentation was beautifully presented by the esteemed Constanza Kaliks, who is based at the Goetheanum in Dornach, Switzerland, and serves as the co-chair of the General Anthroposophical and

Pedagogical Section. Constanza spoke on the topic of radiant self and began with a question: Are we, as teachers, able to develop the longing in the soul of our children and young people so that they want more than anything to participate in, to be part of, to be citizens of, this world? Constanza brought the image of the teacher as mediator, ..as one who is coming and going between the world – the vastness, the diversity, the beauty, the complexity of the whole world – and the child who is entering this world having decided to be part of this world and having decided to transform this world but first needing to learn how to live together in this shared world, each one of us different from the other.

Constanza’s talk frequently emphasized the concept of ‘mutuality,’ highlighting that it is this act of positioning ourselves ‘between’ the child and the world that increasingly shapes our ability to become teachers. She reminded us that Rudolf Steiner told the teachers, “If you want to teach, you need to learn to read the human being as a book,” and that teachers need to transform themselves every day to learn to read the human being anew. Continuing to reflect on the theme of mutuality, Constanza said, “Our deepest commitment is to the reality of the world today. Children are coming not for the world that we would love to offer to them, not the world that we remember from our childhood, but rather this exact world we are in with all the difficulties. The children came to be citizens today.” These experiences of mutuality - to become citizens of the world and to constantly re-learn to read the human being - are the teacher’s task.

On day two of the conference, the theme of Resilient Students was taken up beautifully by well-known keynote speaker Nkem Ndefo, the founder of Lumos Transforms and creator of The Resilience Toolkit. Nkem defined ‘resilience’ as a combination of strength and flexibility. Nkem emphasized that both aspects are essential, but our dominant culture overvalues the strength aspect. Said Nkem, “Most people, when asked the question ‘what is resilience to you?’ overwhelmingly think it is strength, perseverance, and grit, with only a small voice for adaptability.” Nkem highlighted that resilience never stands alone but is always paired with adversity, as you don’t need to be resilient if there is no adversity. This adversity may be a single incident or trauma, may be embedded chronically into life, or may be systemic, and that it can be punitive to say, ‘you need to be more resilient’ where there is no control over the adversity. Said Nkem, “There is no amount of personal resilience that will resource someone sufficiently to thrive or flourish in systems of extraction, inequity, and oppression.” Nkem spoke about a new definition of resilience, which she calls ‘alchemical resilience’, as ‘the flexible strength and increased capacity to overcome adversity, to heal, and have the capacity to change systems of inequity and oppression into places where we can thrive .‘

Helping children develop resilience requires finding the ‘sweet spot’ between underexposing and overexposing them to challenge and adversity, noted Nkem. As teachers, we can help children, in developmentally appropriate ways, problem-solve, stretch outside their comfort zone, and learn to rise to the occasion. When children are supported through these types of challenges, they grow resilient. Going a step further, Nkem spoke about racism, white privilege, and white fragility and asked, ‘How do you build resilience where there is fragility?’ She proposed that, along with learning about other cultures, educators create opportunities for children to develop a deeper understanding of white culture and privilege as a way to reduce its associated fragility.

Day three began with keynote speaker Simone Shurney, a Waldorf alum and class teacher at the Detroit Waldorf School, speaking powerfully on the theme of “robust schools.” Simone began by sharing her experience of reflecting deeply, for over a year, on the topic of robust schools and communities and that this deep contemplation compared strongly with her own experience of practicing Steiner’s ‘six basic exercises.’ Said Simone, ‘It was many weeks, perhaps months, after I formed the connection between my experience with the basic exercises and the transformation of my thoughts on community that I was able to recognize how the basic exercises, all six of them, provide a very effective framework for movement toward social change and social renewal, or social transformation, social evolution, as a whole .’

In reflecting on communities, Simone shared the inspiration she received from the timeless African proverb, ‘It takes a village to raise a child’ and that ‘one interpretation of this wisdom might be: It is the love and strength of community that nurtures and brings the developing human being into being, raises them into being, into life.’ With this Simone asked, “How are we, as Waldorf school communities, striving to intentionally organize and establish ourselves as villages to serve the evolving developmental needs of our children, of the world’s, the earthly and spiritual world’s, children?” and she acknowledged that this question grows in its significance when we consider it in light of the pervasive social dynamics of the modern day. Simone spoke of the potential of Waldorf schools in creating community saying, “If we as Waldorf schools and communities empower ourselves to be our most authentic selves and continue in our striving to create independent, free-thinking, open, responsible, and responsive school communities and communal cultures we will in turn teach the students in our care to do the same. We will teach them to think for themselves so they have the courage and confidence to stand away from the oppression and limitations of mainstream culture and resist, restore, renew, and recreate.”

In addition to the keynote speeches, attendees participated in conversation group sessions to explore, deepen, and contribute their ideas to the conference themes. In the afternoons, a diverse range of workshops was available, covering topics such as ‘Burnout Support,’ ‘Form and Metamorphosis,’ and ‘Detecting Colonial Practices.’ The final hour of each day was dedicated to special interest groups, which were self-organized, plentiful, and very popular.

Conference feedback was overwhelmingly positive, with most attendees reflecting that it exceeded their expectations. Said one attendee, ‘I loved the diversity of speakers and their content. This was perhaps my favorite speaker event in the six years I have been consistently attending.’