CONSTRUCTING CHILDHOOD AND TEACHER AUTHORITY IN A WALDORF DAYCARE

Abstract

Waldorf education, an alternative pedagogy imported to the USA from Germany in 1921, is rarely researched yet popularly conceptualized as a space of unusual educational freedom and creativity. However, viewed systematically through the lens of critical ethnography and discourse analysis, the Waldorf approach is quite the opposite, governed by rigid routines and adult control of children's bodies, activities, and language. Drawing upon the critical sociology of childhood and combining observational and interview data from a nine-month ethnography, I argue that Waldorf education's central tenet of ‘protecting childhood’ is fundamentally about adult control and a deficit notion of young children. Specifically, I use critical discourse analysis to illuminate how pronominal use in the teacher's discourse serves to justify her authority and deficit constructions of child development. The article concludes by considering the ways Waldorf education might be made more egalitarian by incorporating multiple conceptions of child development in its pedagogical practice.

KEYWORDS:

• Waldorf education
• power
• pedagogy
• positioning
• constructions of childhood

Notes

1. Transcription conventions, modified from a combination of Goodwin and Goodwin (1987), Gumperz (1982), and Schiffrin (1994):

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Additional information

Marguerite Anne Fillion Wilson is Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Human Development at Binghamton University, specializing in gender, human development, social justice, and education. Her research focuses on private schools as sites of potentially radical pedagogy as well as spaces in which the patterns of dominant forms of education might be reproduced, with a particular focus on how alternative educational spaces could reframe dominant modes of constructing childhood. The research on which this article is based was conducted while she was a PhD student in the School of Education at the University of California, Davis.