Marius Wahl Gran
NORENSE funding: 37.000 NOK in 2017 (25.000 for writing the article and 12.000 for translation to English)

Background and motivation
The article will be about the use of the blackboards in Waldorf education today. The blackboard still has a central position in the daily practice of Waldorf teachers. I find the topic relevant, because it is also connecting Steiner Waldorf education to research, practices, and concepts on education in general and also making clear the connection between art and pedagogy. 

Research questions
How is the blackboard used by three teachers in Waldorf school classrooms? What experiences and reflections do teachers have in using the blackboard? Pupils perspectives and experiences are included only indirectly through observation and interviews with teachers.

Sources, methods and theoretical perspectives
Three ideas structure this research project. The first is the teacher’s blackboard activity as a form of performance. The teacher is here understood as a performer who performs chalkboard activity in front of pupils. The chalkboard activity is here categorized under the term performance (Benschnitt, 2007). Performance means that there is an interaction between the artwork, the person performing, as an act of dancing, singing, painting etc. and an audience. In this way, the borders between artworks, performers and spectators can be diminished. If this border is reduced, the audience can partake more actively in the artwork. What characterizes a performance is that a unique one-time event occurs in the presence of people.

In the second category, the blackboard is understood as a surface where the teacher makes site-specific images and texts. Here is the term unique (Benjamin, 2013) is used as a category. Benjamin’s concept is here applied in relation to when teachers draw pictures by hand with chalk on the blackboard. The concept highlights the uniqueness of the created images and text representations in a specific educational context.

The third category is based on the materiality of the blackboard and its significance for the human relations to the blackboard in an educational context. Aspects that the blackboard has in itself as a blackboard and the materials related to this, such as sponge and chalk are taken into account. Here is the concept focusing feature (Sørensen, 2009) is central. The blackboard is in this context regarded as a focal point in the classroom, with its own voice. Blackboard features, materials, and the relationships between blackboard, teacher and pupils are therefore central in this context. Teaching materials like blackboards are in this sense viewed as invisible partners in educational activities.

The research questions are related to how three teachers are practising blackboard use when teaching at Waldorf schools. Video observation was chosen as one of the methods for the study. The starting point was to collect visual data material as a basis for further analysis and get a foundation to later conduct interviews with the teachers who were observed. The observed teachers taught in classes with pupils belonging to three different age groups. I filmed each teacher at two instances, in two consecutive days where they taught the same subject. For analysis, I selected such events from the video recordings where there was a large chalkboard activity by the teacher. Based on sequences from the video observations, interview guides were prepared. The questions were designed to be related to the three categories of theories. Before the interviews began, each of the teachers silently watched small clips from their respective films.Publication
Gran, Marius Wahl. (2018). Tabula rasa – the performative and unique materiality of the blackboard. RoSE – Research on Steiner Education, 9(1). Link to article.