Ruhi Tyson
NORENSE funding: 25.000 NOK in 2017  

Background and motivation for the project
The aim of this project is to discuss how Alasdair MacIntyre’s (2011) concept of a practice can be helpful in empirical research on Waldorf education when combined with a case narrative approach. It is especially concerned with the virtues and goods of Waldorf education as practice that are otherwise difficult to surface and that are covered by the concepts of Bildung and practical wisdom. This is generally motivated by a lack of documented history of practice in teaching, something Shulman pointed out in 1987 (Shulman 2004). Specifically, it is motivated by a need to begin articulating Waldorf education as a practice by those participating in it. Such articulations of enacted and experienced curricula can contribute both to the development of the practice from the ground up and to opening it to outsiders. In both cases it hinges on the cases being ones in which the practitioners themselves judge that the practice comes close to its ideal state, ie. the cases need to be about unusual success or richness. The article draws on the results from my recent PhD thesis (Tyson 2017) and develops them further in relation to Waldorf education.

Research question
How can the use of case narratives to articulate Bildung and practical wisdom in Waldorf educational practice contribute to both research and development?

Sources, methods and theoretical perspectives
Theoretically this inquiry is located in the context of phronetic social science (Flyvbjerg 2001) where the aim of research is to contribute to the wisdom of practice rather than to the formulation of generalizable theory. Conceptually the article draws on the traditions of Bildung and practical wisdom to both interpret case narratives and in guiding informants on what to narrate. Furthermore it draws on MacIntyre’s concept of a practice as a way of situating the cases in a more theoretical framework. Methodologically the approach is oriented towards the collection of case narratives of unusual success or richness, a kind of extreme and paradigmatic case approach in Flyvbjerg’s terminology (2001). In order to illustrate and drive the argument I will also present some case narratives taken from the Waldorf educational context.

Flyvbjerg, B. (2001). Making social science matter. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
MacIntyre, A. (2011 [1981]). After Virtue. London: Bloomsbury.
Shulman, L. (2004). The wisdom of practice. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers. Tyson, R. (2017). The rough ground. Narrative explorations of vocational Bildung and wisdom in practice. Dissertation, Department of Education, Stockholm University. Link: http://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:1063292/FULLTEXT02.pdf

Publication
Tyson, Ruhi. (2018). Exploring Waldorf education as a practice through case narratives: A framework for empirical research. RoSE – Research on Steiner Education, 9(1).  Link to article.