Blossom Nursery School, San Rafael, CA
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From Susan Howard, WECAN Coordinator
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Dear colleagues,
As the busy school year comes to a close and summer training and professional development courses are just beginning, we hope that you will find a quiet moment to read about our developing work in association with one another.
Best wishes for a relaxing and rejuvenating summer!
With warm wishes to all,
Susan
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Restoring our Forces
Magdalena Toran
The WECAN board met recently for our spring meeting. We began, as we do every meeting, with a gathering of WECAN Regional Reps. These colleagues shared a picture of Waldorf Early Childhood education in North America. This year’s description of our schools and member programs impacted us deeply. It was a picture of very hardworking teachers, rising to meet the challenges and gifts of all that the pandemic brought - creativity, isolation, more time in nature, exhaustion, courage for new impulses, challenges with staffing, a great desire to undo racism in ourselves and our communities, parents feeling deeply grateful, parents needing extra support and connection, children so happy to be in school and children that are struggling. It was a powerful picture.
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News from the WECAN Board
Louise deForest, Board Chair
The spring WECAN board meeting is traditionally a time when we, as the Board, look towards the coming year and set priorities, focus our work, and create a budget that can carry as many of these priorities forward as possible. To do this, in part, we rely on our Regional Representatives and their insights into their regions and the challenges and successes in each one. Our conversation with most of the Regional Representatives just before our Board meeting touched us deeply and informed our conversations over the 4-day Board meeting.
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All year we have been working on our documents and policies and asking ourselves, do they reflect our mission? Are they inclusive? Do they support diversity, equity, access, and social justice? In the light of these questions, the Shared Principles are being revised and refined, in our Membership Committee, I.D.E.A. Committee, and Teacher Education Committee. All our documents are what we could call ‘Living Documents’, always growing, changing, and hopefully becoming clearer and more transparent. To help us in this process, the WECAN Board is now working with Alma Partners, who are guiding us in a self-auditing study of our organization, looking at our inner and outer gestures, our organizational culture, and our policies and procedures through the lens of our I.D.E.A. commitment.
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It is with great gratitude tinged with sadness that we said goodbye to Holly Koteen-Soule, a long-time Board member who retired from the Board at this meeting. She will continue her leadership of the Research Group and will undoubtedly share her thoughts with our early childhood movement in the years to come.
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Reconnecting to our Sources,
Rebuilding our Forces!
Holly Koteen-Soule
Parents, teachers and caregivers, not just in Waldorf schools, but everywhere, work hard to provide safety and protection for their children. In the best of times, this can be taxing, and in the arhythmic unpredictability of our current times, that task seems to have taken a far greater toll than usual on our life forces.
Many of us are aware of the reciprocal nature of our relationship with the children, of how their fresh forces and everyday joy can nourish us at the same time as we are working to create healthy spaces for their development. However, as we approach the end of another year of coping with ever changing conditions, and are beginning to take off our masks, new questions are arising.
Some of us have discovered that we have been wearing another mask beneath our physical mask. It might be a mask of “unwavering courage,” or a mask of “perfect calm,” or a mask of “effervescent delight.” All of these are qualities with which we want to surround the children in our care. If we allow ourselves to remove these secondary masks, many of us are finding deep exhaustion or even a sense of desperation, just under the surface of our consciousness.
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Birth to Three
Magdalena Toran and Heather Church
Gratefully, there has been wonderful activity in the realm of birth to three this last year. The Birth to Three coordinators focused on bringing colleagues together, which in retrospect, in this time of isolation and separation, was a healing impulse.
This year we began gathering with colleagues by area of focus. Meetings were held with childcare providers, parent child teachers and birth to three trainers. It is the intention in the fall to meet with homecare providers. These online meetings allowed colleagues who work in specific areas of birth to three to share common ideas and questions. They were also fruitful places for WECAN to listen deeply to the needs of the child, caregivers, and families of the youngest children. We look forward to continuing them in the year to come.
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Teacher Education Update
Ruth Ker, Teacher Education Coordinator
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What is the new normal? As most of the North American member institutes return to in-person trainings, this important question is being carried by all. WECAN’s Teacher Training expectations and curriculum guidelines remain as steadfast guidelines and much conversation is happening between North American member institutes at our monthly meetings and at the IASWECE international conversations.
As I write this, I know my colleagues on the Teacher Education Committee would want to express gratitude for the past year’s opportunities to become more collaborative here in North America as well as worldwide. We have begun to know each other better and, in many cases, have helped one another to raise consciousness around many professional, social, and health-related considerations. We are hoping that representatives from many of our North American institutes will be able to attend the IASWECE Teacher Trainers Conference in Vilnius, Lithuania from October 9th to 12th.
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From the Membership Office
Laura Mason, Membership Coordinator
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We’ve been happy to be working actively with schools, centers and home programs on membership applications and renewals again this school year. Those who have completed processes since we last reported in January are listed below.
The following programs have completed an Associate Membership application process and been accepted as new Associate Members in WECAN. Congratulations and welcome!
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Star Seedlings Family & Childcare Centre in Guelph, Ontario. Star Seedlings has been serving children from toddlers through kindergarten in a year-round childcare setting since 2019. The program includes a nature kindergarten.
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Treasure Garden Nursery School in Fair Oaks, California. Treasure Garden has been providing Waldorf-inspired in-home care since 2002.
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The Unity School in Raleigh, North Carolina. The Unity School was founded in 2020 and has a mixed-age kindergarten as well as first and second grades.
The following programs have moved from Associate to Full Members in WECAN. As Full Members, they now stand as representatives of Waldorf early childhood education in North America.
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Blossom Nursery School in San Rafael, California. This home program joined us as an Associate Member in 2019 and we’re delighted they’ve taken this next step in membership so soon.
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Santa Cruz Village Preschool in Santa Cruz, California. This home program has been serving children in Santa Cruz since 2002 and has been an Associate Member of WECAN since 2013.
The following programs completed Full Member renewals in 2022:
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The Apple Blossom Waldorf School and Family Center in Wilton, CT
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Great Oak School in Tomball, Texas
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Rudolf Steiner School of Ann Arbor in Ann Arbor, Michigan
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Sandpoint Waldorf School in Sandpoint, Idaho
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Waldorf Academy in Toronto, Ontario
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Waldorf School of Palm Beach in Boca Raton, Florida
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Waldorf School of Princeton in Princeton, New Jersey
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The Waldorf School of St. Louis in St. Louis, Missouri
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Treasure Garden Nursery School, Fair Oaks, CA
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The Unity School, Raleigh, NC
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Regional Rep Update
Laura Mason, Membership Coordinator
Many thanks to the 20 regional reps who served our programs throughout another challenging year. We are all deeply grateful for your work!
Special thanks to Rachel Turner who has been serving the Pacific Northwest Oregon sub-region since February 2020. We wish her the very best as she moves on to other endeavors!
We are happy to announce that we’ve found a new volunteer to fill Rachel’s role. Please join us in welcoming Beth Daly as the new regional rep for Oregon in the 2022-23 school year. Beth has been a kindergarten teacher at Eugene Waldorf School since 2012 and is also the early childhood director for Waldorf Teacher Education Eugene. We are delighted to have her joining us in June and are confident she’s just the right person to take up this important volunteer role.
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Inclusion, Diversity, Equity and Access
Lynn Turner and Leslie Wetzonis-Woolverton, Co-Coordinators
It is hard to believe the 2021-2022 school year is coming to its end. Our plans regarding DEI will continue to unfold and blossom through the summer and into the new school year. We have had the pleasure of working alongside many WECAN Board members, our fellow WECAN I.D.E.A Committee members, and Susan Howard in our continued work toward greater Inclusion, Diversity, Equity and Access since early fall. Collegiality and collaboration have been inspiring to all of us.
Current Early Childhood research studies show how bias develops as early as infancy, and we know that addressing ongoing DEI questions is crucial. Our Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, and Access work remains essential as we open our awareness with a much wider lens and scope to face the world today. The challenging work is our own inner development and striving. As educators, we need to work deep into ourselves to bring to every young child true, rich, and seen reality. We deepen our understanding of race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender identity, ability, religion/spirituality, nationality, and socioeconomic status.
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Summer 2022 Professional Development and Teacher Education Courses at WECAN Member Institutes
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WECAN NEEDS YOUR SUPPORT!
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WECAN'S current process of growth and transformation is asking much of us, and we need your support as never before. Thank you to all who have made donations to WECAN during this spring campaign!
If you have not yet donated, please contribute to our Annual Spring Appeal! Gifts to WECAN are tax deductible.
Please give online today or call our office at 845-352-1690 to make your gift over the phone. Help us to nurture the care and education of young children as a foundation for the future!
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WECAN and AWSNA are joining our colleagues in the international Waldorf movement to raise funds to support Waldorf communities in Ukraine during this time of great suffering and violence.
Click here to donate, and in the drop-down menu, select “Freunde/Ukraine Relief.” Donations are tax-deductible.
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With many thanks on behalf AWSNA and the WECAN Boards,
Susan Howard, WECAN Coordinator
Rebecca Moskowitz, AWSNA Executive Director, Advancement
Melanie Reiser, AWSNA Executive Director, Membership
Stephanie Rynas, AWSNA Executive Director, Operations and Member Resources
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Birth to Three in Education and Care: Rudolf Steiner, Emmi Pikler, and the Very Young Child
Edited by Heather Church
Birth to Three in Education and Care: Rudolf Steiner, Emmi Pikler, and the Very Young Child shares its title with the theme of the first conference of its kind to be hosted at Sophia’s Hearth Family Center and Training Institute in Keene, New Hampshire. The keynote speakers, who have devoted their life’s work to understanding the young child, to what the child’s needs might be, and how we, as conscious adults, can welcome them most warmly into their physical bodies and onto their paths as human beings, explored how Emmi Pikler and Rudolf Steiner inform educators’ work with very young children. In Waldorf early childhood education, we are so very fortunate that these two deeply sensitive, insight-filled streams have found each other, and that these four wise teachers, and those who take up their indications, continue to work with and for young children so that developing humans might be as free as possible to choose a path in life, to be who they came here to be, with the least hindrances and the greatest resources.
Coming Soon!
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Loving care for the child under three
By Helle Heckmann
Taking the child’s need as her point of departure, Helle Heckmann sets aside mainstream expectations. Twenty-first century pressures on families, imposing long working days on parents and much absence from the family and home, create the classic problem of our times: while creating economic safety and security for their families, how can we give the best we can to the children we love, while also satisfying our personal needs as well as the demands of society? This book offers perspectives from several adults who care for young children in diverse ways.
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The Picture Language of Folktales
By Friedel Lenz
Fairy tales speak in a visual language—but what do these pictures speak of? In The Picture Language of Folktales, Friedel Lenz looks at fairy tales and their original images as part of the development of human consciousness. The characters of these stories are human beings living within two worlds—one which is physically visible and experienced through bodily senses and another that is not visible but nonetheless sensed. Friedel Lenz’s consideration of these twenty-five tales, originally collected and retold by the Brothers Grimm from 1812 to 1857, offers the possibility of limbering up our thinking and feeling to allow the pictures of these stories to speak. WECAN extends deep gratitude to Clopper Almon for this translation.
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Eurythmy in Kindergarten - A contemporary approach to speech and movement
Eurythmy in Kindergarten is a beautifully illustrated answer to the question, “Why eurythmy in kindergarten?” This unique, artistic form of movement, with its deep connection to the formative power of speech, is especially important for young children’s speech development, which is increasingly under threat in our times.
This lovely booklet is written for kindergarten teachers, eurythmists, students in training programs, and parents. We have sent a sample copy to each WECAN Member program and encourage you to order more for your colleagues and parents!
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Child of Nature
By Rikke Rosengren
Nature has a unique potential as a platform for children to grow and experiment. Child of Nature emphasizes children’s curiosity, their natural need for movement, and how to optimize the possibilities for children’s development outdoors. Parents, teachers, and caregivers will learn practical ways to give children the chance for adventurous play and sensory stimulation, and thus to support a pedagogical foundation for education that is based on children’s healthy development. Beautifully illustrated with over 180 color photographs and drawings.
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WECAN 2022 Early Childhood Resource Catalog
Copies of our current Catalog are complimentary, individually or in bundles of five.
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Upcoming Events
Nurturing Our Inner Life:
Developing Our Spirit So It May Enter into Full Freedom in Life
June 22, 23, 24 - Online AWSNA keynotes are open to the public, free of charge.
Care1: International Birth to Three Conference: "I feel good in your eyes"
Dornach, Switzerland, June 15 - 18
It is becoming increasingly clear how strongly maternal experience and professional support during pregnancy and birth affect the child. In this upcoming conference we will share our experiences, strengthen our relationships, and work together on central questions about the healthy development of the young child.
World Association of Puppetry and Storytelling Arts Summer Conference
July 28 - 31 Live at Hawthorne Valley, Harlemville N.Y. or streaming virtually to the comfort of your home.
Wisdom, wonder and enchantment ~ featuring a festival of puppet performances, workshops, and keynote presentations!
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Join WECAN by becoming an Individual Member!
Membership benefits include:
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A subscription to the Gateways Journal (includes the Fall 2021 and Spring 2022 issues)
- WECAN News Updates
- A 10% discount on WECAN book sales
- Discounts on registration fees at WECAN Conferences
- Regular email messages that include reports on activities, conferences, and events within WECAN and IASWECE (the International Association of Waldorf/Steiner Waldorf Early Childhood Education).
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