Navigate today's complex world with clarity and confidence through "Starlight Rays in Darkened Times," a dynamic seminar series designed to illuminate contemporary issues from a fresh, thoughtful perspective. Expert educators, researchers, and seasoned Waldorf professionals guide participants through working with critical topics such as educational resilience, curriculum differentiation, climate consciousness, emotional development in digital contexts, community synergy, and the evolving role of Waldorf education. Participants will gain practical tools and strategies that could enhance their work directly with teens, tweens and adolescents.
This series empowers teachers, school administrators, therapists, leaders, parents, and individuals invested in progressive education to foster meaningful transformation and create nurturing environments capable of meeting today’s unique challenges for those age groups. Participants will insightful frameworks for nurturing courageous, independent, and adaptable learners who can thoughtfully engage with the world's most pressing questions.
Join us in shaping the front of Waldorf education to meet the urgent demands of our times—cultivating compassionate, courageous, and conscious change-makers for the future.
Upon completion of all 12 classes, participants will receive a certificate of completion for the full Starlight Rays Professional Development series with 20 hrs of attendance.
This series can be applied towards completing the Waldorf High School Teacher Education Program (WHiSTEP) Year 1.
Your high school teacher education journey advances here.
September 13 ~ Martyn Rawson: Future-Proof Capabilities
September 20 ~ Melissa Farrell & Daniel Baker: Dialogue on Curriculum Innovation: What Ails Thee, Malcolm X?
October 4 ~ Marisha Plotnik: The Earth as a Living Whole: Learning to Understand Climate Change
October 25 ~ Alison Davis: Demystifying Differentiation
November 8 ~ Sven Saar: Resonance: The Synergy of Individual & Community
November 15 ~ Liz Beaven: Climbing Aboard the Yellow School Bus: Waldorf Schools & the Pull of the Deep Structure of Schools
December 6 ~ Nathan Wilcox: Revisiting & Reconsidering Betty Staley's Classic Models in the Light of Our Modern Moment
December 13~ Neil Boland: What Is It We Want Waldorf Education To Do?
January 10 ~ Cedar Oliver: Reality On Demand: Emotional Development & Human Rights in the Virtual Age
January 24 ~ Constanza Kaliks: Learning for a Common World in Present Times
February 7 ~ Generative Collaboration
February 21 ~ David Barham: Teaching in a World on Fire: Creating Brave Spaces in Tumultuous Times
Learn more about the courses you will be taking and the instructors teaching them.
Preparing Young People for an Uncertain Future
The world is changing faster than education systems can keep up. Traditional models of schooling—including conventional Waldorf education—are increasingly ill-suited to meet the demands of our time. To thrive in the future, young people need more than academic knowledge. They require learning dispositions such as resilience, courage, intercultural competence, and the ability to collaborate in addressing “wicked problems”—complex issues with multiple causes, diverse stakeholders, and no clear solutions.
Equally important is the capacity to make situated judgments and take responsibility for one's actions. These are not skills that can be effectively taught in traditional classrooms, no matter how inspiring the teaching or noble the curriculum. Instead, future-ready skills emerge from authentic learning experiences, where transformative learning occurs through what Aristotle called aisthesis: sensory experiences that lead to deep personal change.
Waldorf education offers some opportunities for such transformative moments, but the question remains: is it enough? In what ways can we go further to equip young people for the future they face? This is the question we will explore.
Dr. Martyn Rawson started teaching at York Steiner School in 1980 as a grade teacher. He then taught English, History and History of Art in Stuttgart. On returning to the UK he taught these subjects and was school leaders at Michael Hall School. In 2003 He returned to Germany, where he has taught high school. He currently teaches in a Waldorf high school in Hamburg. He has also been involved in teacher education and published widely on Waldorf education, including academic books and articles. He is Senior Research Fellow Alanus University and Honorary Professor at the National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan.
The Earth as a Living Whole: Learning to Understand Climate Change
How can we teach adolescents in such a way that they feel a connection to our Earth and her climate, and able to act responsibly for her wellbeing? Essential for this goal is understanding Earth’s processes as a living whole, an understanding that can grow through meaningful, embodied encounters in every aspect of science.
Marisha Plotnik has been engaged with Waldorf education as a student, teacher, administrator, and adult educator. A focus of her work is creating dynamic, collaborative, learning communities where new ways of thinking are developed through meaningful encounters. Marisha holds degrees in Physics, Education, and Private School Leadership, and is a graduate of the CfA’s WHiSTEP program, where she now serves as a faculty member. Having concluded 30 years of high school teaching, she is now a full-time researcher and educator at the Nature Institute.
This interactive presentation invites teachers to stand at the intersection of two bustling roads: differentiation and soul economy. Through phenomenological experiments, artistic explorations, and discussion, we will examine some of the basic principles of deep learning and differentiation and imagine how they could be practiced in our classrooms in a way that respects the time and energy of the teacher.
Dr. Alison Davis has been teaching since 2006 and became a Waldorf teacher in 2014. She hold degrees from the University of Kansas, the University of Notre Dame, Stanford University, and Antioch University, but she sees her willingness to be like Rumi and gamble everything for love as her greatest credential. She is the author of numerous literary and scholarly publications, as well as two collections of poetry: Wild Canvas (Finishing Line Press, 2024), and A Rare But Possible Condition (Saddle Road Press, forthcoming).
The Waldorf School impulse was thought of by its founders as one that facilitates the healing of the social organism. Following the catastrophe of WWI, many societies sought for a way to establish societal harmony - some turned to fascism, others embraced socialist or capitalist narratives. None of these have been successful in attuning human beings with their intentions and their social challenges. The skills and dispositions often characterised as "soft" are now more needed that ever - what contribution can teachers make in facilitating the development of kindness, confidence and sensitivity in their students? How do our graduates become agents for change?
Sven Saar gained his Waldorf Teaching diploma as a very young man. After moving to England, he worked as a class teacher for 30 years, eight of those in Germany. He also taught in the High School, specialising in history and drama. Now he works full time in Teacher Education and is on the faculty of several courses and universities in the UK, Germany, Australia and the US. Sven gives lectures and seminars internationally and works as an active mentor and advisor to schools and teachers in many countries. He is a co-founder of The Modern Teacher: Education as Art (UK) and co-ordinates the Waldorf 360 platform for High School teachers
In 1998, education and social commentator Joseph Chilton Pearce spoke of his serious concerns about schools and education and his support for Waldorf education as a hopeful alternative. However, he added: “Waldorf is beginning to modify and accommodate, little by little.…in order to survive.” What does his concern mean 27 years later? What does it mean for high schools that are particularly susceptible to external pressures? What changes have our high schools made in order to survive? We will take up this question together, examining the impact over time of often small modifications and accommodations. We will explore how we can work with the imperative for innovation and change yet maintain and protect the enriched, transformative education that Steiner intended: an educational impulse that is needed more than ever to help our young people prepare for an unknowable future.
Liz Beaven, EdD, has been involved in Waldorf education for almost 40 years with a range of experience that includes class teaching, school administration and leadership, teacher education, higher education, lecturing, writing, and research. She is a parent of two Waldorf alumni and grandparent of four Waldorf students. Liz took an early interest in the expansion of US Waldorf education into public schools, where she has been engaged for 30 years. She is the Executive Director of the Alliance for Public Waldorf Education, a member of the Pedagogical Section Council, and serves on the Trust for Learning’s Ideal Learning Roundtable. Liz holds a doctorate in educational leadership and a certificate in Waldorf school administration.
Let's join together to celebrate the wisdom of Betty Staley by revisiting and reconsidering her developmental markers in the light of our modern moment.
Nathan Wilcox has taught English, history and drama at the Waldorf School of San Diego since founding its high school in 2008. He holds a Bachelor of Arts in English from Pomona College in Claremont, California, and Jesus College in Cambridge, England. He completed his Waldorf High School teacher training in literature at Rudolf Steiner College under the direction of Betty Staley and John Wulsin.
In this session, I will share some thoughts of the varied purposes which have been allotted to Waldorf education, and ask if these remain unchanged in the 2020s.
Over the last forty years, Dr Neil Boland has taught in Waldorf education from early childhood to postgraduate. He works at universities in New Zealand and Taiwan and is active in teacher education and further education more widely. Neil’s research interests include the localization and contemporization of Waldorf education, looking at how impulses respond, and do not respond, to changing circumstances, cultures, and geographies.
Researchers continue to confirm negative health effects of excessive screen time, especially in childhood. Now a new body of research is revealing that overuse or misuse of educational technologies can also impinge on students’ autonomy by powerfully manipulating emotions, behavior, and unconscious beliefs. These risks raise ethical concerns beyond the impairment of learning, impacting fundamental human rights, emotional development, and ultimately the capacity to form a truthful sense of reality. As technologies of manipulation rapidly gain power and widespread use—including in Waldorf schools and our families’ homes—how can we protect students’ sense of self, access to reality, and ability to “give purpose and direction to their lives?
Dick “Cedar” Oliver
A science, math, technology, digital arts and design teacher in Waldorf high schools and middle schools for over 20 years, Cedar is also the author and co-author of numerous books and software titles and has worked with scientists, mathematicians, engineers and artists around the world. He attended the University of Maine and the University of Michigan in addition to the HiStep Waldorf Teacher Education program and 5-year Spacial Dynamics training. He currently serves as a visiting teacher and faculty mentor at several U.S. Waldorf schools and is a faculty member at CfA’s Waldorf high school teacher education program.
Over the past seven years or so, our core faculty has developed strong, generative relationships which allow us, generally, to collaborate effectively. Collaboration has become increasingly central to how we integrate the horizontal and vertical curriculum. We also find that in our pedagogical reflections, class studies, curriculum trip development, festival innovation, retreat planning, student events, and in maintaining the overall wellbeing of the high school body, we rely on a way of working that assumes a creative engagement with each other. In sharing a bit about what has worked so far for us, we hope other Waldorf high schools may feel a stronger collective potential for this delicate art of education.
Laura Guinan
Laura Guinan has been the visual arts teacher at the Emerson Waldorf High School in Chapel Hill, NC for 17 years. Along with teaching drawing, painting, printmaking, and sculpture, as well as a variety of media-specific techniques, Laura enjoys helping students hold a broad and integrated picture of their burgeoning art skills through the lenses of art and architectural history. She has developed a passion for cross-disciplinary collaboration with her colleagues in both the sciences and humanities. Inspiration to integrate art and art making as a vehicle for deeper learning and discovery has led to co-teaching classes as diverse as Environmental Justice, Native Geography, and Islamic studies (to name a few). During her tenure, Laura has served on EWS’s College of Teachers; Board of Directors; and as high school faculty chair.
Amy Sutherland
Amy Sutherland has been teaching English literature at the Emerson Waldorf School since 2013. Her passion is helping students create energetic, clear and vibrant writing that contributes a drop to the vital and endangered project of voicing human empathy and finding soul recognition. She finds joy in watching students broaden their perspectives- and learn to tell their own stories- as they journey through her literature classes. Recently returned from a senior trip to Ireland, Amy feels particularly inspired by the self-discovery found through critical reflection, a notebook and a new landscape. As high school co-chair, Amy works to foster open, trusting relationships among the high school faculty, creating an environment where new faculty members feel supported and heard, and there is a shared sense of trust and collaboration among all faculty.
Catherine Reyes
Catherine Reyes is the Life Sciences and Chemistry teacher at Emerson Waldorf High School, where she has taught for eight years. With a deep commitment to interdisciplinary learning, she has helped develop collaboratively-taught courses, such as Environmental Justice and Native Geography, which invite students to explore the complex intersections of science, history, culture, and the arts. At the heart of her work is the cultivation of ecological thinking - an awareness of the deep interconnection between all forms of life and the social systems that shape our world. Catherine believes students must be empowered to question dominant cultural narratives and to act from a place of love and responsibility toward all of life. She emphasizes that no ecological issue is without a social dimension, and that students must be equipped to understand the ways environmental issues intersect with race, class, gender, and power. Her goal is to help students develop a sense of agency and belonging within a community of care, anchored in love for the Earth and a commitment to its well-being. Catherine holds bachelor’s degrees in Materials Science & Engineering and Literature from MIT, and a PhD in Bioengineering from Georgia Tech. Prior to her work in Waldorf education, she has worked as a research scientist, an independent grant writer, and the Director of Education at an engineering research center at Duke University, where she led programs in undergraduate and graduate education and developed hands-on STEM curricula for local schools.
Gareth Dicker
Gareth Dicker has been teaching physics and math at the Emerson Waldorf High School for the past eight years in Chapel Hill, NC. With a background in robotics, he is interested in questions of how human spirituality and culture are evolving in light of accelerating technological upheaval. His passions for musical improvisation, esoteric study, and various forms of movement (eurythmy, capoeira, rock climbing), inform his work. Over the past several years, he has been involved with the North American and Global Youth Section, with the Brightmoor Makers in Detroit, and with the Living Arts Collective in Durham, NC.
Eric Meckley
Eric Meckley recently finished his eighth year as History and Humanities teacher at the Emerson Waldorf High School. He teaches semester long track classes in US History I & II, US Government, Econ & Social Studies, as well as Main Lesson Blocks in Colonial History, Ancient China, World History through Philosophy, Transcendentalism, and Academic Writing. He has taught (and co-taught) a number of electives including photography, graphic novel, radical printmaking, Weird Fiction, and Debate and Argumentation. Eric has a BA in interdisciplinary studies from The University of Chicago and a Master of Divinity from Duke University. He began teaching at Emerson while a full-time student in the PhD program in English and Comparative Literature at UNC-Chapel Hill. Eric eventually left the program with a second master's degree, trading the isolating, narrowly focused individual research of the Ivory Tower for the collaborative, artistic, interdisciplinary Waldorf classroom. He is focused on working with colleagues to find ways for material to be echoed, deepened, and reiterated across disciplines by drawing connections between history, literature, science, math, and the arts.
The work of the Waldorf high school educator is to help adolescents slowly move toward forming independent judgments. Teachers are rightly nervous about being perceived as “political” or unfairly swaying students with their personal opinions. Nonetheless, we must create space in our classrooms to talk about challenging and potentially polarizing issues. How can Waldorf teachers bring topics such as abortion, transgender individuals, the wars in Ukraine, Gaza and elsewhere, the political reality in the US, income inequality, climate change, and more in ways that leave students safe to explore their own perspectives and free from having to conform to teacher, parent, peer, and community views? How do we achieve the balance in presenting information and fostering healthy student dialogue, discussion, and debate? How to help students find areas of agreement that allow for building consensus and community, without giving up individual beliefs? This final session will be a Starlight Rays community exploration after initial input from the presenter.
David Barham, M.Ed.
Executive Director of Center for Anthroposophy since August 2024 and Director of CfA’s Waldorf High School Teacher Education Program (WHiSTEP) as of 2022, David has worked in four North American Waldorf schools, including one in Mexico, both as a class and high school teacher. Before joining CfA, he taught humanities at the Maine Coast Waldorf School in Freeport, ME, for more than a decade. In the fall of 2021, he was appointed to AWSNA’s Leadership Council as Leader for the Northeast/Quebec region. David continues to teach, write, and consult with various Waldorf schools.
“They've been a consistent spark for innovative thought and action in my work.”
Shawn Lavoie, Faculty Chair Youth Initiative High School, Viroqua WI
“These seminars sparked meaningful conversations about the evolving role of education. They encouraged deeper reflection on cultural influences, the balance between technology and human intelligence, and the importance of mental health in young adults. Discussions on innovation and experiential learning offered fresh perspectives on how to make education more engaging and relevant. Overall, they were thought-provoking and inspiring, helping us think about how to honor the past while shaping the future of teaching.”
Jennifer Méndez/ Colegio Waldorf Guatemala
“This seminar series was both eye-opening and deeply relevant. Each session sparked meaningful reflection on how we can better support adolescents in today’s world. The conversations were engaging, practical, and inspiring offering fresh ideas while reinforcing the heart of Waldorf education. I walked away with new insights, useful tools, and a deeper appreciation for the role of teachers in guiding young people. I highly recommend these seminars to anyone working with teenagers!”
Jennifer Méndez/ Colegio Waldorf Guatemala
“I think these types of seminar are super helpful for practicing teachers. It’s important to hone our craft and these seminar add to our enrichment.”
Nicole Scheurer, Waldorf School of Orange County
“Overall, the seminar series was a valuable learning experience for me. The discussions were insightful and thought-provoking, expanding my understanding of important educational topics. I truly appreciated the depth of knowledge shared and the opportunity to engage with a larger Waldorf community.”
Elise Woodward, Waldorf School of Orange County
“It is so valuable to get time with like-minded educators during the academic year. Each and every session presents one with something to either ignite and/or continue a thought process.”
Jane Christensen, Washington Waldorf School
“As we navigate the evolving landscape of education, it has never been more important to deepen our understanding of the transformative power of Waldorf high schools. The Starlight with Darkened Rays series, offered by Center for Anthroposophy, provides a vital opportunity for educators, administrators, parents, and supports of Waldorf high schools to come together in a spirit of inquiry and renewal. Through this series, we have the chance to explore critical questions, broaden our perspectives, and engage in meaningful conversations about the future of Waldorf education. By sharing ideas and deepening our collective knowledge, we strengthen the foundation of our schools and reaffirm the essential role of Waldorf high schools in cultivating young minds and hearts. Whether you are a teacher seeking inspiration, an administrator committed to fostering a thriving school community, or a parent eager to understand the depth of this education, Starlight with Darkened Rays offers a space to learn, reflect, and grow. I wholeheartedly encourage you to register for this series—together, we can illuminate the path forward for Waldorf high schools and the students they serve.”
Brooke Natzke, AWSNA Leadership Council
“I'm excited for the next round!”
Bill Ogonowski, Emerson Waldorf School
“Starlight Rays are so needed!”
Constanza Kaliks, Co-Leader Pedagogical section
