Frode Barkved
NORENSE funding: 37.000 NOK in 2017 (25.000 for writing the article and 12.000 for translation to English)

Background and motivation
As a Waldorf teacher through twenty years and as a lecturer at the Rudolf Steiner University College (Oslo, Norway), for ten years, the question of the relationship between the ideas and views on history coming from the anthroposophy and the teaching practise has been of great interest for me. In a master thesis, which I finished in May 2016, I worked with Steiner’s concept of history in relationship both to the current educational and historical discourse, and to how the teaching of history is described in the Waldorf curriculum and practised by waldorf teachers. Questions and problems which came out of the master thesis:

1) The culture epoch’s theory and Rudolf Steiner’s concept of history – the relationship between anthroposophy and Waldorf education.
2) History teaching in Waldorf Schools in relationship to the global – and multicultural society and the question of eurocentrism.
3) The complexity of Steiner´s views on history, and how Waldorf teachers relate to and reflects on this.

Research question
How can conceptions of history expressed in Rudolf Steiner’s works relate to curricula and teaching in today’s Waldorf Schools, and how do experienced waldorf teachers reflect on this? Can their reflections and a closer examination of the issue have an impact on the development history teaching in Waldorf Schools?

Methods and theoretical approaches
Connected to the master thesis I made five qualitative interviews/conversations with experienced Waldorf teachers. In the interviews, the teachers told about how they relate to Steiner´s concepts of history and how they use motives form the curriculum to form their teaching. In the interviews I had Jennifer Mason’s (2002) words in mind, when she writes that through working with qualitative research you can discover dimensions in the social world ”including the texture and weave of everyday life, the understandings, experiences and imaginings of our research participants, the ways that social processes, institutions, discourses or relationships work, and the significance of the meanings that they generate”. For me the words life, understanding and experience was of special importance in the interviews I did. The approach to an answer to the research question is based on interviews, curricula and theory. In the research article, I will look closer to central aspects coming from these qualitative interviews together with curricula, theoreticians in the anthroposophical-academic field (including Bartoniczek, Edlund, Heisterkamp, Lindenberg, Mazzone, Stabel and Zech), as well as Steiner´s works. The article will also include relevant aspect on the themes coming from current historical discourse (including Burke, Crossley, Kjeldstadli, Lund, Foucault, and Hanegraaff).

Publication
Frode Barkved. (2018). Views of history and history teaching in Waldorf education. RoSE – Research on Steiner Education, 8(2). Link to article.