FAMILIAR FACES (10th edition)



^{Hello DWS Alumni from the 70's and 80's! Welcome to our tenth edition of Familiar Faces. With DWS alumni spanning the globe, we thought it would be fun for you to see what everyone is up to and to have the opportunity to re-connect with your DWS community.}

^{*Note: class years listed are for graduation of the 8th grade and the names following the year are the class teacher at the time of graduation.}

Francina Graef

French Teacher and Class Teacher | 1972-1998

Arriving in Detroit in August of 1972 was definitely life-changing. I had driven across country alone in my VW much to the chagrin of my parents. I knew nothing about Detroit, nothing about Waldorf Education and had only set foot in a classroom twice as a teacher. At twenty years old, I began what would become a total transition into a most wonderful life, solely because I had heard a lecture by Werner Glas at my alma mater, Occidental College, in Los Angeles.

In my first year of teaching the students assured me that the last six French teachers had left and they figured I would too. Something inside me said “ not so fast” and I ended up staying in Detroit until now. I loved teaching French and languages had always been a huge part of my life. I grew up speaking Dutch and learned German along the way as well.

During my years at DWS I also taught two classes: one from 6-8 and the other from 1-8. Those were two fabulous times.Teaching children is a true journey in learning about one’s self, which is both enlightening and sometimes very challenging. Waldorf Education does not allow the soul to slouch.

Photo: 2nd grade French class, 1977.

Along the way I met my wonderful husband, Howard, and had two daughters, Johanna and Martina. Now I have four terrific grandchildren who are the light of my life.

When I finished with the 8th grade class, the next five years were spent caring for my mom who had Alzheimer’s. That too was quite a journey with this sweet, very European woman who survived a war and many other challenges. After that I completed a Master’s degree in TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages), but after two semesters teaching at the university level, I realized it was not for me! Give me children anytime!

Now in these retirement years, Howard and I like to travel, ski, read and spend every second we can with our families. I also love to do any kind of crafts, particularly quilting. I owe a huge debt of gratitude to all the students I met along the way who gave me so many life lessons. I also am ever grateful to Theo Buergin who gave that 20 year old a chance to learn what education should be, to Marianne Buergin who showed me why our hands are such a necessary part of this head, heart, hands education and Barbara Glas who introduced me to the world of color for which I am deeply grateful. To my colleagues who might read this, thank you for putting up with my foibles and showing me what love can do in this education.

Photo:

Back row: Howard, Colton and Cal

Front row: Kaia and Mia with Francina in Prince Wales Fort near Churchill, Manitoba, Canada (August 2022)

Astrid Kora Buergin

Class of 1975 | Dorothy Garrison, HS class of 1979

My life was closely intertwined with the Detroit Waldorf School until I was eighteen. My parents, Theo and Marianne Buergin, left Los Angeles when I was four to start the school in Detroit. Living next to the school building, experiencing my parents develop the school, was exciting and full of highlights.

One fond recollection was when the whole school, teachers, parents and children went camping in Ontario on the banks of Lake Huron. Looking back now, my strongest childhood recollection is being surrounded by so many talented and creative people. I had great teachers and friends galore and I loved every minute of it!

From 12 to 15, I was enrolled in the Waldorf School in Stuttgart, Germany. Being used to the small community school I had come from, it was quite a shock to me. At that time DWS had 250 students. This school, which Rudolf Steiner founded in 1919, had approximately 1200 children from 5 to 19 years of age. My class had 44 children and it had a parallel class with the same number of students. The first to third grades had three parallel classes! I made a development leap. What I greatly enjoyed was walking a half an hour to school.

My first profession is goldsmithing. This choice was greatly influenced by the handwork teachers at DWS. There were two whose energy and creativity I especially loved, Nicholas Morrow and Ann Bickel. My second profession is art therapy. I was in charge of the crafts and metal workshop at the Camphill Community in Geneva. A few years later, my French husband Christophe and I helped start a home for adults with disabilities and helped care for them in Kiel, northern Germany. We moved there so Christophe would have the opportunity to learn German.

We have lived in Dornach, Switzerland since 1995. I returned to making jewelry and co-own a boutique with two long-time friends: 

www.goldschmiede-arlesheim.ch. 

I love traveling and making music. I still take violin lessons and play chamber music with friends. My violin lessons with Alan MacNair were wonderful (on stage in the auditorium), and Eric Winter was the best piano accompanist!

Greetings and love to all, Astrid Kora

Photo captions:

1) Astrid in her jewelry store

3) Window display

4) Astrid with Christophe, 2019

Jim Johnson

Class of 1981 | Paul Gierlach

HS class of '85

Hello, fellow Waldorf alumni!

I was greatly privileged to make the journey from K through 12 at the Detroit Waldorf School. In the years since graduation I have developed a sincere appreciation for the style of learning that is encouraged and cultivated within the Waldorf community, emphasizing as it does the synthesis of disciplines (art and mathematics, music and language, science and history, etc.) as a means of achieving richer understanding and expression. Throughout my adult life I have used these tools to explore and problem solve in a wide variety of endeavors, particularly in my current role as Collections Manager at the Detroit institute of Arts (where I have worked for the past 25 years).

In the years before arriving at the museum I majored in Art History (with a minor in Photography) at Wayne State University, and spent a good portion of the 90’s and early 2000’s playing guitar in a couple of Detroit bands (here and here are links to a pair of YouTube clips), managing to tour a bit nationally and internationally along the way.

Traveling has happily continued as part of the work I do now, with courier assignments (suspended for a time due to the pandemic) offering regular opportunities to visit peer institutions all around the world.

Most importantly and closest to my heart - my daughter, Maija, turned 18 about 6 months ago. I very much look forward to seeing what course she charts for herself in the years to come.

I hope you are all well and enjoying yourselves greatly!

- Jim

Chris Vaneman

Class of 1983 | Paul Gierlach

I live in South Carolina with my wife Kelly, my daughter Tally (17), and my dog Biscuit (12). I’m a flutist and teacher, and currently Dean of the School of the Arts at Converse University. My performing career has been focused on chamber music. I’ve made a lot of arrangements of music for new combinations of instruments, worked a lot with composers on premiering new pieces, and performed in a lot of bars and coffee shops.

We moved here a shockingly long time ago, after stints in New York City and Brussels. Prior to that I’d gone to graduate school at Yale, undergrad at the Eastman School of Music, and graduated from the Interlochen Arts Academy (the year before our rather-more-famous fellow DWS alumnus Sufjan Stevens arrived) after having attended Detroit Cass Tech for a while.

I loved my years at DWS, where I learned curiosity and intellectual playfulness from Paul Gierlach and my wonderful classmates (here I’m recalling perpetually looking over Joshua Ligosky’s shoulder and making a note of what he was reading, so I could read it next), and appreciation bordering on awe for the various kinds of intelligence nurtured in the Waldorf classroom, some of which my classmates had in far greater degree than I did (here I invoke the image of Fran Altwies, her brows furrowed in dismay as she watches me grip a watercolor brush like a farmer preparing to beat a snake to death with a stick).

It’s only as I’ve progressed through adulthood that I’ve grown to appreciate just how important those years at DWS were to me. As often seems to happen at famous schools, I managed to get three graduate degrees from Yale without anyone bothering to teach me anything about pedagogy, so I had to figure out for myself via trial and error how to actually teach people stuff. After several years it began to dawn on me that almost every good idea I had about teaching and explaining things to people was essentially Waldorfian.

What made ideas stick in students’ heads was when I made them do “right-brained,” creative things to master analytical topics, work with pencils and colored pens in addition to computers, or explain to me how Chartres Cathedral’s façade is like a motet by the late-Medieval composer Philippe de Vitry. And sure enough, in recent years psychology-of-learning experiments keep documenting how all those Waldorf practices that felt in 1983 like they were just there to teach me patience and maybe a little humility (copying chalkboards full of text into a blank main lesson book with a smudgy fountain pen, just for instance) turn out to be the very best way to really digest new information.

The linked video is something of a Covid-project-as-family portrait. My wife, who played in early-music groups in Brussels and in rock bands in New York, is fabulously creative; she wrote this piece, Third Wheel, for flute, oboe, and well, third wheel. That’s Kelly on oboe, me on flute, and Tally who eventually appears as third wheel, and we shot it in our living room last summer.

Above: With Kelly and Tally at Yellowstone a few years ago.

YouTube link:https://youtu.be/CwLNHHfTKe4

Remembering Ray Barnett

Sports teacher from 1972-1976

She was very courteous, somewhat hesitant, when speaking with the teachers but, with that whistle around her neck, the students knew she was someone to contend with. Her daughter Valerie joined Theo Beurgin's first 7th grade class in 1971.

After DWS, Ray spent 20 years working for Wayne County with severely mentally impaired, non-ambulatory students. She passed away in 2000.

- Jerry Altwies

Photo: The DWS Alumni Resource Panel meeting in April with Rachel Ornstein, Andi Mahoney and Helena (Kehoe) Mitchell (class of '86) who is our Early Childhood Coordinator. 

*If you are interested in joining our next resource panel zoom, please contact Rachel Ornstein.

Save-the-Date for our next alumni zoom gathering on Sunday, October 16th with Francina Graef and an update on the library renovations.

Do you know other alums who might like to join this group?

Can we feature you in an upcoming edition? 

Contact: Claudia Valsi, DWS Alumni Outreach Volunteer Coordinator