Leif Tjärnstig
NORENSE funding: 150.000 NOK in 2013

Background and motivation for the project
This is a PhD project placed at åbo Academy, University in Finland, started in September 2013. The research interest and the project purpose rests upon an assumption that the pedagogical aims and thoughts that stem from Rudolf Steiner have persisted until today and been transmitted mainly through a culture of teaching praxis traditions within the community of Waldorf schools. Therefore, it suggests that viewing Waldorf education as a (soon) one-hundred-year-old continuous educational praxis can elucidate how original pedagogical intention has developed, deepened and re-contextualized itself throughout its history of pedagogical praxis. Philosophical views on professional praxis also suggest that praxis in itself carries norms, traditions and values concerning the attentiveness and sense of implicit virtues of professional action. From this view, the pedagogical visions, principles and ideas from the beginning of Waldorf schools in 1919 have been subject to continuous renegotiation in terms of their educational culture, norms, values and ethics. This renegotiation is done throughout the history of innumerable individual teachers in their intersubjective teaching practice; in tacit intuitive pedagogical actions; in the countless interactive micro- decisions that are made every day. This is seen as the making of teacher’s professional teaching praxis knowledge. Theodore Schatzkis concept of ”teleoaffective structures” that permeates and constitutes praxis knowledge is in this central. The profession of teaching is in this perspective regarded as a living culture, a praxis of human interaction in which renegotiation of interaction, interrelations, ethics, human values and beliefs creates professional knowledge and its history of pedagogical practice

Research methods and analysis
The methodology is based along the research tradition of Stimulated Recall Interviews (SRI). The research project encompasses seven SRI sessions carried out over a period of eight months. Empirical material used in this research project is assembled through video filming a group of four experienced Waldorf teachers reflecting on their own teaching activity from filming lessons of their own. In each reflection session, selected short video sequences are dealt with in which the interaction between teacher and class or pupil takes unexpected or problematic turns. Viewing these situations and discussing them together with the group of teachers, the intention is to uncover and make explicit their ethical deliberations as well as the underlying values that constitute the teacher’s pedagogical Praxis. The analysis process focuses on narrative sequences in the teachers’ dialogue. Analysis strategies are built on ”concentration of meaning” and thematic structures of ”sub-discourses” of the research question that are ”internally bound together by a coherent topical trajectory and/or a common activity”. The analysis and discussion is carried out within three different thematic perspectives. These perspectives are enunciated through adductive reading and reasoning of selected works from Rudolf Steiner’s educational lectures, parallel with reading transcripts from the SRI sessions.

Results and conclusions
Tentative results indicate that participating teachers’ beliefs, values and personal ethics and mission underpins the judgmental capacity in pedagogical interactions. The analyses also indicate that the teachers’ acting and decision-making are not solely informed or controlled by sets of norms, beliefs and values. Teaching activity, pedagogical interactivity, instead produces educational and human values and educational interactive ethics. The research will result in PhD theses in the form of a monograph. Estimated delivery of the thesis is late Autumn 2016 

Publication

Tjärnstig, Leif. (2020). Didaktisk praxis i waldorfskolan. En didaktisk analys och bildningsteoretisk tolkning av fyra waldorflärares pedagogiska tänkande och förhållningssätt. (PhD). Åbo: Åbo Akademis förlag. Link to pdf.