Waldorf -inspired education and at -risk students: A qualitative case study of the T. E. Mathews Community School

Using ethnographic methods, this case study investigated the adaptation of Rudolf Steiner's Waldorf pedagogy used at T.E. Mathews Community School in Yuba County, California. T.E. Mathews serves thirteen to eighteen year-old at-risk students, many of whom are on probation. The student body includes numerous Hispanics, including students whose families have been in the United States for many generations and Hispanics whose families are recent immigrants. Waldorf education is an interdisciplinary, arts-integrated form of schooling that equally values affective, somatic, and cognitive development and views education as having an important role in developing each. This study examined how Waldorf was adapted for this population. Particular attention was paid to the challenges of adapting these methods. The Waldorf methods were discovered to be effective in helping students develop self-efficacy and engagement in learning. The arts gave the students an entry into learning material by using cognitive capacities other than linguistic and logical/mathematical. Interpreting content in ways that made it personal, through artwork or through other imaginative means, enabled the students to take ownership of the material. The adapted Waldorf methods helped the students overcome some of their traditional obstacles to learning. The Waldorf methods were discovered to be somewhat effective in encouraging positive emotional growth for these troubled students, but were insufficient to counter the influence of some of the powerfully negative elements in their lives. The ways in which Waldorf pedagogy provides opportunities for the educational system to side-step conflicts about authority and to leverage the hidden curriculum in positive and powerful ways were examined. Finally, obstacles to this type of educational alternative "going to scale" were analyzed. The adapted Waldorf program is expensive and puts substantial demands on the teachers. Waldorf applied to at-risk students can be viewed as subversive because it runs counter to the educational trends for at-risk students and is built on values and a worldview that conflict with the foundational values and worldview of mainstream education and society. Whether Waldorf for at-risk students will go to scale is dependent upon whether society has the political will to embrace such a subversive stance and fund it.