Art and the development of dialogic skills: an ethnography of art in Waldorf teacher training

Waldorf Schools emphasise the use of art in education. This interdisciplinary dissertation demonstrates how Waldorf teacher trainees are prepared to work with art in the school classroom. It does that by documenting the ways that three different art media are introduced to students in a Waldorf teacher training programme in Cape Town, and those students' responses and experiences in working with those media - relying quite heavily on students' oral and written comments about those experiences. The data presented come from the writer's own involvement as a teacher trainer cum researcher who has adopted an ethnographic-style approach to data collection and analysis. The data show that a primary goal of introducing Waldorf teacher trainees to art is to develop what is here described as a dialogic capacity - an ability to be able simultaneously to immerse oneself in the teaching process and to stand back and reflect on everything that that process involves so that, as teachers, they are able to be flexible and open to change. That this can be done through cultivating a teacher's feeling for art through requiring its practice, it is argued, helps to bridge an apparent paradox in Rudolf Steiner's work between his call for practising art for its own sake and his recognition that art should be practised in schools to facilitate the development of the individual