FAQs about the Online Conferences:
An Excerpt from WaldorfToday.com
David Kennedy from Waldorf Today interviewed Eugene Schwartz soon after the Online Conferences began. All that was discussed still holds true! The conversation touched on the challenges and opportunities of the Internet and online teacher training, the inner path of the teacher and the exploding Waldorf movement in China among other topics. We have excerpted the section on the Internet and Online Teacher Conferences.
Can Waldorf education, can Anthroposophy be conveyed online?
A decade or two ago, the answer would have been a firm “Absolutely not!” but times have changed, and human beings (even those employed by Waldorf schools) have changed as well. Rather than place everything anthroposophical or “Waldorf” on one side, and everything technological on the other, there is a growing recognition that we may now be empowered to transform or even begin redeeming technology by using it for spiritual purposes. There are, of course, great hurdles raised when you try to squeeze the living, pulsing spirit of Waldorf education into the micro-circuitry of the Internet, but with good will and consciousness on both ends of the broadband, it can be done.
From the moment I began recording my lectures in the 1980s I was told, “Neither Anthroposophy nor Waldorf education can be disseminated without the live presence of a human being standing before you.” We must realize, however, that the people who tend to say that sort of thing were not on earth when Rudolf Steiner was a “live presence.” They learned about Anthroposophy from Rudolf Steiner’s books. And Steiner was clear that it is possible for a spiritual teacher in our time to be embodied in a book, so that he becomes “mobile” and people can encounter him or her in freedom and when the time is ripe.
Most Waldorf teachers under age 30 have no problem with online learning, and I am interested in how many teachers in their 50s tell me that the most exciting thing about my online conference is that it helped them overcome their fear of computers and the Internet. It is likely that within the next decades far more people will encounter Anthroposophy through the radiant light of computer screens and devices rather than via the reflected light of the page of a book.
Why do so many people come to an online conference, when it’s brand new and untried?
There is no question that the economy has played a role. Schools cannot subsidize summer trainings as generously as they did in the past, and teachers’ funds are very limited right now. Our online conferences charge a moderate registration fee (our overhead costs are low) and there are no airfares, accommodations, or meal plans – a teacher may save many hundreds of dollars by going online. Schools have longer academic years nowadays, and there is so much to fit into a short summer vacation – a fixed six-day conference doesn’t work for everyone. We run the conferences from early June through late August and a teacher can choose fourteen days out of those many weeks in which to take part. We have had mothers nursing newborns, teachers looking after aging parents, or teachers who were traveling abroad during the July conferences “peak” – for all them, the online conference was the only conference that they could attend.
I also think that younger teachers, in particular, are looking for something new. We have not tried to create online “substitutes” for the “real thing,” i.e. the live conference. Rather, each online conference represents an entirely new departure in the way in which content is organized and presented. For example, in the hundreds of live conference lectures that I have given over the years, I only had an hour and a quarter to present most subjects; some were worthy of two lectures. On the other hand, my online lectures on a subject like Grade Four Child Development, Grade Five Ancient Cultures or Grade Six Astronomy may go on for three or four hours (divided into 15 – 20 minute segments to make listening easier). The freedom that online recording gives a lecturer makes it possible to fit far more valuable content into a conference than could be done in a weeklong live conference.
And teachers appreciate the fact that, at any moment, they can “pause” a lecture, leave the room, and turn it back on later. Rather than take endless notes while a lecturer speaks, the listener can return to segments several times until the content is mastered. (If notes are needed, a word processor can be available in one window while the audio file plays in another). The hours of student work slide shows and instructional videos that are part of each online conference allow teachers to experience the rich visual components of Waldorf education again and again.
And one more thing! Every Waldorf conference has an audience member who raises her hand or calls out repeatedly, interrupting the lecturer’s train of thought to ask questions that are personal and irrelevant to the subject. Serious teachers hate this, but they are too polite to stop her, and so she tyrannizes everyone else all week long. I can’t tell you how many participants in the online conferences have expressed their gratitude that such a thing can’t happen online, where lectures are recorded without an audience, months in advance. Some say that this alone is worth the price of the conference.
So what’s the downside? What’s missing?
There are three downsides.
The first is that we do not offer eurythmy. Of course, very few class teachers will ever teach eurythmy to their class – we rely on instructors who are trained to do that – so it is not a necessity for a teacher to have five or six eurythmy sessions in a weeklong conference. However, the therapeutic and vitalizing aspects of doing eurythmy during a conference are undeniable. Until the eurythmy world finds its own Jane Fonda to create video sessions that can be followed at home, we will not be offering it as one of our online segments.
Number two is the social aspect of the “live” conference. Since most Waldorf schools only have one class teacher per grade, it is easy to feel quite alone. At a big conference, you meet others who have been through similar experiences all year long, and you can socialize and commiserate as you prepare for the year to come. (It is poignant that Waldorf teachers, of all people, have to leave their schools and attend conferences to feel part of a “community.”) If that social aspect of the conference is all-important to you, then an online conference may not be fulfilling.
The third factor that draws people to live conferences is quite basic, even primal. As many women teachers have told me, “The ‘Art of Teaching Grade X’ conference is the one week all year long in which I don’t have to cook any meals or wash any dishes!” Until we get our Online Catering Service up and running, I don’t think that we can be of too much help there, though I would be willing to talk to some husbands about changing their expectations.
But I would have to say that those are the only downsides. When it comes to content, depth, integration of subjects, and time to digest it all, the online conferences are unique.
If online training is one picture of future teacher training, then aren’t we all just drifting apart into our own little cyber worlds, when we should really be coming together socially and spiritually?
Yes, there is that danger! Of course, this issue has been with us since people began experiencing life through books, rather than through other people, and it is actually part and parcel of the Consciousness Soul experience. Everything in our time is held guilty of being the cause of this alienation, when more than likely everything is just symptomatic of the “anti-social impulses” of which Steiner spoke time and again.
For my own part, I do everything possible to “humanize” the online experience. I have given thousands of lectures to live audiences over four decades, and when recording the online lectures I strive to imagine an audience around me, and I try to direct my words to human beings, and not to computer chips. Anyone old enough to remember the “Golden Age of Radio” knows that an auditory experience can be a stimulant to the listener’s imagination, and even Rudolf Steiner was open to considering how his lectures might be broadcast to receivers. A number of online participants have reported that they felt the audio portions of the conferences conveyed more warmth and personal connection than did lectures that they had heard in “live” gatherings. If we’re going to be online and using the Internet in this way, we all have to work that much harder to meet each other spiritually.
I pour a great deal of myself into the recordings, and I can certainly feel that aspects of my being are being drawn upon when the conferences are in session. For many weeks four or more online conferences are in session, simultaneously, 24/7, and I know that a part of me is present in every one.
Another “social” aspect of the online conferences is that they are international in nature. This summer we will not only have participants from North America, but we will be joined by colleagues in the UK and Ireland, China and the Mideast, and a number of other nations. In our winter, the conferences serve the summer preparation needs of teachers in Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. In this respect, online conferences can meet the realities of our global society in a way that live conferences do not – and what is more global in scope than Waldorf education?