AUT - Study Steiner at AUT University
Study Steiner at AUT University
Steiner education recognises the child as a being made up of body, soul and spirit.
Long-term healthy physical, emotional and intellectual development of the children requires teachers to recognise how these aspects of the child develop through childhood, and to support the child’s development with the appropriate curriculum and teaching.
Effective teaching and learning in Steiner schools is grounded in Steiner’s theory of human development. Both teaching and learning are artistic works calling on the creativity of the teachers and the active involvement in artistic, practical and academic work of the learners.
Steiner early childhood teaching
From birth to about seven years of age, children learn through doing. Children are therefore afforded plenty of opportunities for free, creative play in a Steiner Kindergarten.
Children learn good habits through imitation, so it is important that the teacher models good patterns of behaviour for students. A foundation of trust and security is built through ‘the three Rs’ – reverence, rhythm and repetition – at this stage of the child’s development.
Steiner primary school teaching
From around the age of 7 to 14, imitation is replaced with a wish on the part of the children to want to look up to a loving authority. In assuming this role, the primary school teacher must strive to be a paragon of fairness, consistency and consideration.
Education at this stage seeks to bring to the children imaginative pictures that may grow with their growing thinking capacity, rather than abstract facts. There is a strong emphasis on aesthetic development and the teacher needs to be an artist: both in the creative way in which they bring the curriculum content to life, as well as in the music, art, story and drama that plays such an important role in the Steiner philosophy.
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