Where children naturally belong: colonialism, space, and pedagogy in Waldorf kindergartens

ABSTRACT

How do assumptions about where children naturally belong reinforce colonial productions of the human? This paper presents research from a study examining how North American Waldorf educators navigated the colonial legacies of common-sense understandings of childhood. I focus on the ideas about childhood that emerge in a belief that Waldorf kindergartens are ideal places for children. The pedagogical space of the Waldorf kindergarten is built on intuited assumptions about children being close to nature, family, and home. I bring together childhood studies and anticolonial theory to argue that these assumptions are not neutral or ahistorical, but instead originate in colonial stories of the human structured by settler geographies. This paper explores how relying on these assumptions ultimately meant that participants had to negotiate the racism and ableism embedded within their origins, illustrating larger implications for other educators who navigate dominant Western understandings of childhood that organise pedagogy and pedagogical spaces.

KEYWORDS:

• Waldorf
• colonialism
• childhood
• pedagogy
• settler geographies

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. I pair family and home in this paper, despite the distinction between the two, because of the way that they were conflated by participants of this study. The ways that these terms were used suggested an understanding that both stood in for the central environment that played a role in shaping the child outside of school. For the purposes of this paper, I found that it was instructive to see how they, paired, interacted with childhood in the ways participants evoked them.

2. This time-limited authority was juxtaposed with a permanent authority over those who were considered unable to possess rationality, including the mentally ill, mentally disabled, and enslaved people (Arneil 2012; Bernasconi et al. 2005; Brewer 2005). Holly Brewer’s (2005) work in particular highlights the ways that the adoption of this liberal understanding of childhood was partially accomplished through its use in reinforcing white supremacy, such as justifying slavery within developing representational democracies. See also Meiners (2016).

3. Allan, along with all other participants’ names in this paper, is a pseudonym. Some personal details have also been changed for confidentiality.

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada