When I explored the constructivist approach to learning, I really began to find direction in my inquiry. What is participation but a kind of play?

The constructivist model calls attention to the role of individual experience in knowing and learning. Three constructs emerge from the literature regarding constructivism and have implications for the learning environment. They are (1) learning is an active process, (2) the learner has prior knowledge, and (3) the learner takes responsibility for their own learning. This model supports Palmer’s subject centered teaching model, as well as Steiner’s will-based education. Constructivism puts experience as the central method of the class and the teacher as the facilitator of student inquiry. (Yager, 1991) The term ‘constructivist’ refers to the idea that learners construct knowledge for oneself–each learner individually (and socially) constructs meaning as he or she learns. Constructing meaning is learning; there is no other kind. “We have to focus on the learner in thinking about learning (not on the subject/lesson to be taught” (Cobb, 1987, International Encyclopedia of Education, Constructivism in Education).

The second adage of constructivism is widely divergent from Steiner’s philosophy. The second tenet is that “There is no knowledge independent of the meaning attributed to experience (constructed) by the learner, or community of learners.” (Constructivism in Education, 1987) Though knowledge through experience is a will-based education and a concept Steiner fully endorsed, his overall cosmological view of the nature of the human being allows for the idea that knowledge, or ideas, are ever-present spiritual realities.

Steiner stated that active participation in the classroom calls for the dynamic interplay between the active and the passive mind. In Waldorf education, he highlights both an active and passive state of learning like a process of breathing. “When the world is passive, we become active. When the world is active, we become passive,” stated Samuel Taylor Coleridge in Biographia Literaria. Steiner develops this idea by stating that teachers overcome the illusion that they are limited human beings, inviting them to imagine themselves as a process in the cosmos: ‘ . . a breath drawn by the universe.’

Reverence for the human being, especially for students, is the guiding principle behind Waldorf Education and Palmer’s educational practice. The respect this generates is present when teachers are able to listen to the in-between spaces between active and passive mind. English philosopher Owen Barfield’s guide, in terms of the learning process, is to learn to weave the “half-given, half-created.” By doing so, teachers can read the needs of the children and of the class like a hidden imprint that lies open for study and reflection.

I began to see how a strongly developed Waldorf system of oratory methodology, leaving room for Barfield’s ‘half-given, half-created’, could become a conscious act of balance between the presentation of material given by teachers and that of student creation through participation.Since Waldorf methodology emphasizes authenticity, connectivity, and multi-faceted participation in the classroom, Huzinga’s research on the nature of play proved to be an inspiration. Huizinga identifies the spirit of the play element in culture to be one that embraces a connection with divine spiritual forces with the realities of the present day. Huizinga’s ideas encouraged further research on the nature of play itself, one that allows for the element of play to be separate from cultural associations. Incorporating the sense for playfulness in each lesson expands upon Steiner’s assertion that:

With the child’s play, we can only create preconditions for an education. What is accomplished in play basically happens through self-activity of the child, through everything that cannot be confined to strict rules. Indeed, the essential, educational aspect of play is based on the fact that we call a halt to our rules and to all our arts of education and leave the child to his own impulses. When playing with external objects the child can try out whether this or that will work through his own activity. He brings his own will into activity, into movement. Because of the way in which the external objects behave under the influence of the will, it then happens that the child educates himself for life, simply through play, in a completely different way than through the influence of an older person or of someone’s pedagogical principles (Self-Education in the Light of Spiritual Science, p. 10).

An education for life through the element of play brings us to our essential humanness at every age.

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In 2008 I began to explore the balance between teacher presentation and student participation in subject material in order to leave room for what I call the unfinished lesson. My lenses were Steiner’s educational philosophy, contemporary educators, theorists and futurists.My experience as a teacher showed me the longings of both teachers and students for a meaningful learning experience.

“Vocation is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet”

F. Buechner, 1993, Wishful Thinking, p. 119

Steiner, founder of Waldorf Education, said that teachers have to be like artists in their mode of teaching and find the willingness to bring to birth integrity, adaptation and revitalization to the style and delivery of a holistic curriculum. He also stated that it is essential to relate to the child within their own being, while maintaining their inner authority as a teacher. Steiner’s suggestion to practice ‘seeing the children anew’ each day embodies the act and art of opening up as teachers to be able to develop the capacity to see the children anew each day, perhaps a spiritual practice, and certainly one of practiced observation. Steiner stated that educators must be able to transform themselves in such a way that enables students to wake up throughout the course of the lessons.

Author, educator, and education, community, leadership and spirictuality activist Parker J. Palmer

Parker Palmer builds on this theme of wakefulness by designing a subject-based model for teaching. He calls this model the ‘community of truth.’ “In the community of truth, as in real life, there are no pristine objects of knowledge and no ultimate authorities.” He also emphasizes that teacher authority becomes inner authenticity when teaching comes from the teacher within ourselves: “Deep speaks to deep, and when we have not sounded out our own depths, we cannot sound the depths of our student’s lives.”

He believes that teachers and students share in the learning experience through participation, likewise, Norwegian Educational Specialist David Brierley, identifies a teacher as an awakener and foundation layer. He believes that the activity of birthing what is not yet in the now, while laying a strong foundation of rhythm born out of the deep wells of imagination, calls for forging deep connections with students.

Futurist Daniel H. Pink

Waldorf teachers use storytelling as the centerpiece of the daily lessons. The imaginative content of stories is a strong modality for hearing and remembering information. Futurist, Daniel Pink reminds his readers that stories connect with the past, relate to the present, and guide society into the future. Other references to this evolutionary concept are found in Poetic Diction by English philosopher and scholar Owen Barfield. He suggests that within the power of the word lies the breadth and depth of the imagination.

Philosopher, author, poet, critic Owen Barfield

Barfield’s conclusion underscores the strong oratory tradition of teacher presentation as a method of inwardly engaging students in subject matter. His synopsis leads one to think that asking questions of students adds value to a more lecture-oriented method of delivery and that it augments the possibility of inner activity and participation in lessons. When speaking to the faculty of the first Waldorf School Steiner observed that, “There is a great deal of lecturing instead of teaching.” In his approach to teaching thirteen year olds, Brierley developed this strategy by taking an active interest in his students to such a degree that he began to see himself through his pupils:

Teaching involves a striving towards perfection that I will never experience. It depends upon a strong sense of identity on my part that is projected into a confluence with my pupils. Teaching involves the weaving of a fabric consisting of the pupil, the subject and the teacher’s sense of self. It is all too easy to lose heart if you are not a teacher at heart. (p. 72)

Participation is the key to transforming classrooms in communities of truth. My ‘Unfinished lesson’ became the portal through which I opened doors to new ways of understanding the practice of teaching.

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My film, Dying Into Becoming: How a Potter Mirrors Earth’s Evolution, began from this recognition. I wanted to explore how the potter, in a small human studio, reenacts something of the vast metamorphic processes of the earth. A pot is never only a pot. It is a conversation between cosmos and body, geology and gesture, fire and form. It is the earth remembering itself through human hands.

From the beginning of time, form has emerged through change. Particles became atoms, atoms became stars, stars forged heavier elements, elements entered planets, minerals, organic molecules, life, and eventually art. This is not a straight line of progress, but an immense unfolding of transformation. Creation is not finished. It is continually dying into becoming. Around us and within us, life is forming, breaking down, recombining, and rising again in new forms.

Clay carries this story more directly than almost any material I know. It is ancient, humble, abundant, and intimate. It is underfoot, in riverbanks, in mountain valleys, in places where water once moved or rested. Clay is formed when rock breaks down through weathering, erosion, water, pressure, and time. What was once hard and seemingly permanent becomes soft, plastic, and receptive. The mountain becomes workable in the hand.

This is one of the paradoxes of clay: it is born from decomposition, yet it becomes the basis of new form. It asks us to reconsider what we mean by decay. In the natural world, breakdown is not simply an ending. It is preparation. Rock becomes mineral. Mineral becomes clay. Clay becomes vessel. Vessel enters use, ritual, nourishment, memory, and beauty. The old life becomes available for the next life.

Across cultures, human beings have understood this relationship between clay and creation. Many religious and mythological traditions imagine humanity itself as formed from earth, dust, mud, or clay. In Genesis, the human being is shaped from the dust of the ground and animated by breath. In Greek mythology, Prometheus forms human beings from earth and water. In Egyptian tradition, Khnum shapes human children from clay. In Māori, Yoruba, Sumerian, Chinese, Hindu, and other traditions, we find variations of this same deep image: the human being formed from the living earth.

Whether one approaches these stories religiously, symbolically, or anthropologically, their persistence is striking. They suggest that human beings have long sensed an intimate relationship between our own embodiment and the substance of the earth. We do not stand outside creation. We are made of it. The potter knows this through the body. Clay under the fingernails is not a metaphor. It is a reminder.

In the film, I return to the shore of the Kootenay River, where I had found a natural clay deposit. There is something deeply grounding about kneeling beside the water and cutting away the soft upper layer of silt and bacteria in search of the clay beneath. The riverbank becomes a teacher. It shows how water has carried particles from one place to another, how minerals and iron have settled, how time has layered itself into the earth. Long after the water has moved on, clay remains where it was left behind.

This is secondary clay, carried and deposited by water. It is not pure in the way primary clay may be pure, found near the rock from which it came. It has travelled. It has gathered other minerals. It has been mixed by the world. In this way, secondary clay is more like biography. It has a history of movement, contact, alteration, and place. Perhaps this is one reason I am drawn to it. It has already been changed by relationship.

When clay comes into the studio, the potter continues what the earth has begun. Wedging removes air, distributes moisture, and brings the clay into a workable unity. The body leans into the material. The palms press, fold, turn, and repeat. There is rhythm in it. There is also discipline. The clay must become consistent enough to hold form, but not so controlled that its life is lost.

The wheel intensifies this relationship. Throwing is a continuous act of metamorphosis. The clay begins as a lump, then rises into a cone, descends, opens, widens, lifts, and becomes a cylinder, bowl, vessel, or sculpture. At every moment, it can change. A slight pressure from the hand alters the whole form. The inside and outside are touched simultaneously through the wall of the pot. The potter learns that form is not imposed from the outside alone. It is negotiated through pressure, moisture, speed, stillness, breath, and listening.

This is where the work of M.C. Richards has lived in me for many years. She spoke of the play of opposites: in and out, up and down, dark and light, giving and receiving. On the wheel, these are not abstractions. They are physically present. The clay expands and contracts. The hand strengthens and softens. The form rises upward while the wheel turns horizontally. The potter must find the still point inside movement.

I often think of the heart and lungs when I throw. The pot is breathed into being. There is expansion and contraction, pressure and release, interior and exterior, all occurring at once. The potter learns that opposites do not necessarily cancel one another. They can create form when held in right relationship. A vessel holds because tension has been organized into balance.

This is also a human lesson. We live in opposites all the time: separation and connection, grief and renewal, earth and spirit, individuality and belonging, stillness and change. To live as a crossing point, as M.C. Richards suggested, is to recognize that human consciousness itself may be shaped through the ability to hold these movements without collapsing them into one another. The pot teaches this with astonishing simplicity. Wherever we touch life, we form it.

The firing brings the whole process into another register. In the kiln, clay undergoes a transformation that cannot be reversed. It loses physical water, burns away organic matter, tightens, strengthens, and eventually vitrifies. The soft body becomes stone-like. In geological terms, this echoes the long processes by which sediments are compacted, heated, pressured, and transformed into rock. In the studio, this transformation is accelerated through human intention and fire.

I have often said that all the earth is a kiln. Volcanic heat, pressure, magma, cooling, erosion, and reformation are the great ceramic processes of the planet. When I load a pot into the kiln, I am aware that I am placing it into a miniature earth-process. The clay originated in stone, broke down into workable earth, was shaped by human hands, and is then fired back toward stone. It returns, but not as it was. It has become something else.

This is the full cycle that moves me: volcanic activity to stone, stone to weathered clay, clay to vessel, vessel to fire, fire to stone once more. But now the stone carries human touch. It carries intention, form, imagination, risk, failure, and beauty. It carries the trace of the maker and the memory of the earth at the same time.

Glazing deepens this metamorphosis. A glaze is a surface, but not merely a surface. It is chemistry, mineral, melt, atmosphere, temperature, and chance. It can resemble water, moss, lichen, ash, glass, skin, stone, or sky. In the kiln, glaze becomes a liquid skin that fuses with the clay body. What was powder becomes sheen, colour, texture, depth. The pot enters fire one way and emerges as something not entirely predictable.

This unpredictability is part of the truth of the work. Pottery teaches humility because the maker never controls the whole process. We prepare, shape, dry, bisque, glaze, and fire, but the kiln has its own authority. The so-called kiln gods are simply another way of acknowledging that transformation is collaborative. Fire participates. Chemistry participates. Time participates. The potter is necessary, but not sovereign.

In this way, pottery becomes an image for becoming itself. We do not become more fully human by remaining unchanged. We become through weathering, pressure, softening, collapse, reforming, and fire. The phrase dying into becoming names this mystery. Something must end for something else to appear. The old form must break down enough to be reworked. The mountain must become clay. The clay must lose its softness to become vessel. The vessel must pass through fire to become durable.

Our time is asking this of us. We are living amid profound ecological, cultural, and spiritual fragmentation. We are being asked to see ourselves not as separate from the earth, but as participants in the same field of transformation. The landscape is not scenery behind human life. It is alive with us. It forms us, feeds us, weathers us, and receives us. To work with clay is to remember this kinship in a direct and bodily way.

This is also why I resist the idea that art is merely personal expression. Of course, the artist expresses something, but the deeper work is relational. The pot both gives and receives. It receives earth, water, hand, fire, and attention. Then it gives back use, beauty, nourishment, contemplation, and presence. It belongs to neither nature alone nor culture alone. It is both and neither. It stands at a threshold.

The potter’s studio, then, is not separate from the mountain, river, cosmos, or body. It is a place where these realities meet in miniature. The potter mirrors earth evolution not because she is grand, but because the process itself is grand. A human being takes part in the same movements that shape planets: compression, expansion, rotation, heat, cooling, fracture, flow, and form.

When I watch clay turning on the wheel, I see more than a vessel emerging. I see liquid movement returning to form. I see the earth’s long patience condensed into a few minutes beneath the hands. I see the macrocosm become microcosm, and the microcosm return to the macrocosm through image, function, and art.

The final pot is not an ending. It is a question made visible. How do we understand change as an evolutionary process rather than merely loss? How do we see our landscape as alive? How do we imagine ourselves as part of creation, not outside it? How can the act of making teach us to find connection within contradiction?

Perhaps this is what it means to become more fully human: not to escape the earth, not to dominate matter, not to stand apart in abstraction, but to enter relationship with what is changing. To find ourselves in the clay. To recognize that the processes shaping mountains, rivers, bodies, and vessels are not separate from the processes shaping consciousness.

A pot begins in death: rock broken down, clay dug up, earth displaced, water absorbed, form collapsed and remade. But through the hands, through breath, through fire, it becomes something capable of holding. It holds water, food, flowers, silence, offering, memory. It holds the trace of transformation.

And perhaps that is why I keep returning to clay. It tells the truth gently. Everything changes. Everything forms and unforms. Everything dies into becoming. But if we are willing to participate consciously, something beautiful may emerge from the fire.

How do we navigate a time when our very thoughts, our images, our photos, our actions and our voices can be rendered by a machine? We navigate the difference between truth and deception, whether or not it’s real or false. And I think that we have to find the courage to create out of ourselves, such as this podcast being created as I speak with all the imperfections, the breath, the pauses, the so’s, the um’s, that I’m intentionally leaving some of them in to let you know that it has not been created by a machine, that I am not reading a script from ChatGPT or anything else that comes out of a computer, but that I’m actually speaking out of lived experience.

Because if we don’t speak and act and work and write out of lived experience, how are we passing a legacy on to our children and their children and their children to come about what it means to be human, what an anthroposophia is, how to find our humanity in a sea of noise, confusion, chaos, lies.

I think that this time has us all reaching down deep, deep into our own authenticity, so that we can create out of our sense of both uncertainty and certainty, the fulcrum of ourselves and our self-awareness, out of our lived experience, out of our humanness. And why do we need to do this? Why? Because in order to live and leap into the future, we need to be able to recognize that we are, as Otto Scharmer put it in his work, Presencing, or the youth theory in his overall Presencing network, that we need to reach into the future and draw it down rather than draw from the past forward. We need to reach from the future forward into ourselves.

So what will our future look like for humanity if we’re not finding our fulcrum of experience in this sea of deception? And I think that for me anyway, I can recognize what is real with all the humanness, imperfections, the wabi-sabi of creation, as the Japanese would put it, the perfect imperfect. And so I look for the imperfection rather than the perfection as being the beauty of art, as being real, as being both courageous and vulnerable at the same time. And if that’s not the role of art in the world, I don’t really know what is.

They say that artists yearn for immortality and seeking the beyond in ourselves through our perceptions really encourages us to name our game and what we play in society. Whatever sphere that we are in, we have to realize that there is joy in the realization that we’re helping to form the structure of the new world. This is creative courage, said Rollo May in Courage to Create, which he wrote in about 1952.

And he said, however minor or fortuitous our creations may be, we can then say with joy, welcome old life. We go for the millionth time to forge in the smithy of our souls, the uncreated conscience of the race. Let’s hope and find great reassurance in his validation of creativity as essential for the needs of our times.

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I have spent most of my life with my hands in clay. That is not a metaphor, but a simple fact of biography. For more than forty years, clay has been the material I return to when I am teaching, making, thinking, or trying to understand something that words alone cannot quite reach. It has become, for me, not only a medium of craft but a way of entering into relationship with matter, process, time, and transformation.

Clay has a way of bringing things back to earth, literally and philosophically. It does not care how clever I am, how many ideas I have, or how quickly I want a result. It does not respond well to being rushed, dominated, or over-explained. Clay asks for something more honest: attention, proportion, patience, and a living relationship between breath, intention, and the material before me. When I am at the wheel, I know very quickly whether I am present or not. The clay tells me. If I am distracted, the form wobbles. If I force it, it collapses. If I hesitate too long, it stiffens. If I listen, something begins to happen.

This is one reason I keep returning to clay when I think about the future of the human being, especially now, in this strange and astonishing age of artificial intelligence. AI can summarize, generate, imitate, organize, and produce language at a speed that still surprises me. I use it, wrestle with it, and remain genuinely curious about it. At the same time, I distrust what happens when we begin to mistake speed for wisdom, pattern for presence, and information for knowing. A machine can describe a bowl, and it can probably design a beautiful one. But it does not know what it means to center clay, to feel the slight tremor before collapse, or to open a kiln and discover that the glaze has not done what one hoped. It can describe transformation, but it does not undergo transformation. That difference matters.

Social Soil and Studio Soil

I recently read Otto Scharmer’s essay, “We May Be Entering a Second Axial Age,” published in Noema Magazine. What stayed with me most was his phrase “social soil.” Scharmer grew up on a farm, and he uses the image of soil to describe the invisible ground from which visible social forms emerge. Just as the health of a plant depends on the life of the soil beneath it, the health of a culture depends on the quality of trust, relationship, attention, shared meaning, and moral imagination beneath its institutions.

That image makes immediate sense to a potter. Clay is not an abstract substance; it is earth with a history. It carries geology, compression, erosion, mineral memory, water, pressure, and time. Every clay body has a character formed long before it arrives in the studio. Some clays are short and difficult, some plastic and generous, some prone to slumping, cracking, or warping. Some hold a throwing line beautifully; others, full of grit and grog, refuse to behave politely. Over years of practice, a potter learns that what is underneath matters. Material has history, and form depends on the quality of the substance from which it arises.

So when Scharmer speaks of depleted social soil - the weakening of trust, relationship, meaning, attention, and shared reality - I understand this not only as an educator, but as a maker. A culture also has a clay body. If the human soil becomes exhausted, the forms above it weaken. Schools become more mechanical. Art becomes more marketable but less alive. Technology becomes faster but not necessarily wiser. People become more connected and more lonely at the same time. I do not say this as someone standing outside the problem. I feel it in myself too, in the temptation to move too quickly, to produce, post, respond, keep up, and turn even creativity into content. Clay interrupts this rhythm and asks me to return.

Portrait of Johann Wolfgang by Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Tischbein

Goethe and the Art of Beholding

Another figure I find myself returning to is Goethe. Goethe was not only a poet, but also a scientist of a particular kind. He was interested in a way of seeing that did not tear the world apart in order to understand it. His approach was patient, participatory, and exacting. He sought to behold the phenomenon deeply enough that it could begin to reveal itself from within.

That word, beholding, matters to me. To behold is not simply to look at something. It is to stay with it long enough that one’s assumptions begin to soften. It is a disciplined form of attention. A potter has to behold, as does a teacher, gardener, parent, or anyone who works with living process. In the studio, beholding may mean looking carefully at a cracked handle and asking what actually happened: Was it attached too dry? Was the wall too thin? Did the drying happen too quickly? Was there tension in the join? In teaching, it may mean looking at a child and resisting the urge to label too quickly. In culture, it may mean looking at technology and asking not only what it can do, but what it does to us.

This is where AI becomes interesting to me, not only as a tool, but as a mirror. It reveals what we value and what we are willing to surrender. Do we value speed over depth, output over process, imitation over transformation, or convenience over capacity? These are not abstract questions. They show up in the studio, in the classroom, in writing, and in the way we increasingly mediate our lives through technologies that can assist us, but can also dull the very capacities we need most.

Clay in an Age of AI

I am not interested in being anti-technology. That position feels too easy and, for me, not entirely honest. I use digital tools constantly for writing, teaching, marketing, research, and organizing the many threads of my work. The more important question is not whether we use technology, but what must be protected, strengthened, and cultivated as technology becomes more powerful.

If we outsource too much of our imagining, remembering, composing, questioning, and making, then something in the human being may begin to weaken. Rudolf Steiner spoke often about the development of inner capacities - imagination, inspiration, and intuition - not as vague spiritual sentiments, but as disciplined ways of knowing. Whether one approaches Steiner spiritually, philosophically, or educationally, I think this remains a vital challenge. Can we strengthen imagination rather than replace it? Can we deepen perception rather than flatten it? Can we use tools without surrendering the soul-forces that make us human?

Clay helps me ask these questions without becoming theoretical. It will not let me pretend. If I have not developed skill, the pot shows it. If I am not attentive, the form shows it. If I do not understand the material, the kiln shows it. Clay is wonderfully unforgiving in that way - not cruel, but honest. It reveals the relationship between intention and action, between imagination and discipline, between what I thought I was making and what I was actually capable of bringing into form.

Mädchen mit Blumen by Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Tischbein

The Long History of Clay and Human Becoming

There is something humbling about working with one of humanity’s oldest materials. Long before digital culture, industrial production, or even the written word in many places, human beings were shaping clay. Clay vessels held grain, oil, water, wine, medicine, ashes, and offerings. Clay tablets carried some of the earliest forms of writing. Clay figures bore traces of ritual, fertility, protection, memory, and mystery. In Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Indus Valley, China, the Americas, Neolithic Europe, and countless other places, clay appears close to the origins of culture.

The human presence remains in clay in a way that is almost unbearably intimate. A thumbprint can survive thousands of years. A coil, burnish mark, painted line, or slight asymmetry in a rim is more than a technical detail; it is evidence of presence. When I hold an old pot, or even look at one in a museum, I do not only see an object. I sense a person. Someone gathered the clay, formed it, fired it, used it, and lived with it. Clay carries the human story in matter.

This makes me wonder what traces we are leaving now. What will remain of this age of speed? What will carry our presence? What will show that we were not only efficient, but awake? These questions are not nostalgic. They are questions about cultural continuity, about the relationship between human beings and matter, and about whether the future we are building will still bear the marks of lived experience.

The Studio as a Small Island of Coherence

Scharmer’s essay also speaks to the need for small “islands of coherence” in a time of fragmentation. I appreciate this phrase because it does not ask us to solve everything at once. A studio can be such an island. So can a classroom, garden, conversation, handmade bowl, or local community where people still gather around meaningful work.

At eARTh Studios, I often feel that the real work is not only teaching someone to make a mug or throw a bowl. Technique matters deeply. I care about good handles, balanced forms, glaze fit, sound craftsmanship, and respect for the material. But beneath the technique, something else is happening. People enter a slower rhythm. They work with resistance. They attend to process. They make something through their own effort in a world that increasingly does things for them. They remember that they can shape matter, and perhaps, in some small way, that they can shape a life.

That is not a slogan. It is something I have watched happen quietly, one class at a time. The studio becomes a modest but real counter-practice to abstraction, speed, and disembodiment. It does not solve the technological or social crises of our time, but it cultivates capacities without which no humane future is possible.

Der Künstler mit seiner ersten Frau Marie Sophie am Spinett by Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Tischbein

Creative Intelligence

When I speak about creative intelligence, I do not mean creativity as decoration, self-expression, or personal branding. I mean the intelligence that arises when the whole human being is involved: when the head imagines, the heart cares, the body senses, the will stays with the process, and the soul searches for meaning. This is the intelligence I do not want us to lose, and it is the intelligence I want to keep cultivating in myself, my students, my studio, and my writing.

AI may become part of our lives in ways we cannot yet fully understand. But clay reminds me that the future of intelligence cannot be only artificial, computational, or predictive. It must also be embodied, moral, relational, and capable of beauty. It must be able to stand before the mystery of matter without immediately trying to dominate it.

Sometimes I think this is why I still love pottery after all these years. It continues to teach me that the world is not dead material waiting to be used, but alive with relationship. It also reminds me that the human being is not finished. We are still being formed.

Returning to the Wheel

When I sit at the wheel, I place myself before the clay and try to find the centre. Some days this is easy, and some days it is not. That alone is a teaching. Centering clay is not only a technical act, but a conversation between force and surrender. Too little strength, and nothing happens. Too much strength, and the clay rebels. The work begins when I find the living balance between the two.

Perhaps that is also where the future begins: not in rejecting technology, and not in worshipping it, but in finding again the living centre of the human being. This is the place where thinking, feeling, willing, imagination, conscience, and craft still meet. It is the place where earth becomes vessel, where the soul remembers itself through matter, and where intelligence becomes creative because it is alive.

Gänsefamilie und Fuchsfamilie by Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Tischbein

Notes & Inspiration

This piece was inspired in part by Otto Scharmer’s essay, “We May Be Entering a Second Axial Age,” published in Noema Magazine on May 12, 2026.

Scharmer’s image of depleted “social soil” opened a doorway for me to think about clay, culture, and the future of human intelligence from my own perspective as a potter and educator. His reflections on AI, social fragmentation, and the need to renew deeper human capacities resonate with questions I have carried for many years in the studio and classroom.

I also draw here from Rudolf Steiner’s understanding of the human being as a being of thinking, feeling, and willing, and from Goethe’s participatory way of knowing - a disciplined practice of beholding the world rather than standing outside it.

This is not a summary of Scharmer, Steiner, or Goethe, but a personal response through the lens of clay, Waldorf education, ceramics, and the continuing question of what it means to remain deeply human in a technological age.

Diane Walters

eARTh Studios , Nelson. BC

I have been brainstorming what it means to hold space for students in a way that is authentic and real. We hold space for others when we hold space for ourselves would always have to come from our own inner authenticity and our own ability to work in our lives. On that note, when I first became a teacher, I was a Waldorf teacher. I got into the practice of saying a verse or a meditation before the day started by putting the cloak of my own personal life, the concerns of my family, the needs of others in a way that was not related to the classroom at the door.

I picked up the professional hat that every teacher picks up when they come into their classroom before they open the door to the students. To help me do that, I found that a meditation or a poem was absolutely essential in pulling me into that necessary mindset. By working with the power of poetry, we remember what it means to be human, and it gives us the courage that other people have walked the path and talked the talk that we are talking and that we are aiming for in a way of working with meaningful social change.

A book that came my way is Teaching with Fire: Poetry That Sustains the Courage to Teach. I’d like to share a passage from a poem:

Look at Anything by John Moffitt:

“To look at anything, if you would know that thing, you must look at it long to look at this screen and say I have seen spring in these woods will not do. You must be the thing. You see, you must be the dark snakes of stems and ferney plumes of leaves. You must enter into the small silences between the leaves. You must take your time and touch the very piece they issue from.”

Another objective I made was to take a moment of silence just to myself before I opened the door, and ask this question, how do I reach my students today?

What do I need to listen to? It was just done as an open ended reflection or meditation in the morning. It was interesting because for many years I knew where my students were coming from. I knew their home environment and often knew their parents. It was a tight knit school. However, as I went on to work with the homeschooling organization called Self Design High, I did not know so much about my students and I had too many students to know everything about them from grade 10 to grade 12. However it is imperative to know where our students are coming from and what their home environment is. If I did not know, I needed to remember to ask because that is when we hold space for our students. We offer ourselves to be a container for this experience that they are having of us and their experience they are having of school. The more centered and grounded, we are inside of ourselves the better. It is as if our steadiness allows our students to lean into us for support, and our quiet presence can provide an environment in which they can be free to think, to live and to move to do this.

In the past I have talked about working with Earth, Air, Fire and Water, but really it gave me that picture of when do they need me to be a rock and when do they need me to be air? When do they need me to be more enthusiastic and more like fire and how do I be water for them so I can flow past their own anxieties? We can help our students by being responsive to them, not by first being ourselves, but leaving our cloak of ourselves at the doors, I said, and moving into being any one of the four elements being what they need us to be. By being aware and open, this level of holding space requires humility and conscientiousness. It is an ability to step out of the way. For us to honestly understand that this is not about us, our lesson or our goals for the students, it is about acknowledging our connections and how close we all are as human beings. Instead of working with what separates us, teacher, student, school, home, learning the known and the unknown, what I know what they do not, all of those separations can leave a gulf between ourselves and our students. Working with the connections and how close we all are works with the sense of belonging, which we all need, want and love. I began to see that every student that we meet and learn from and connect with is part of our human family.

Most teachers are adept at seeing the big picture. We have got our unit block plan, our main lesson, whatever you call it. We have got our big goals, the big idea behind the practice of education. We can get caught up in the hectic pace of all of that, of assessments, of reports of delivery. We feel compelled in a way to immediately distinguish what is important and what is not important. That assessment is an easy one to make when we are mired in the daily grind of our classrooms, our school life or our home environment, if you are a homeschooling parent. However, everything related to student success seems significant and everything else seems comparatively trivial. In the end I realize that what is most precious in this life, in our classrooms and in our hearts cannot be measured in success or influence. The most noteworthy events in our classrooms are often the least seen or the least momentous, and yet they can be the most meaningful. They are the magical moments in which we are connecting with our students through inquiry, personalized assistance or having a light bulb moment in the classroom, which can be spontaneous. To experience those fully, we need to open ourselves to their existence. These moments are not measured by what goes into it as a recipe, but rather by our actions and reactions to it. Since these moments come and go really quickly, they need to be noted and savored and they stick with us when we recognize the impact they have had on our mood and our day and our lives. In recognizing such moments, we find that we have evolved a little bit as people and that our students have also evolved around us and more have changed in some positive way.

I think of someone I know in Vancouver, British Columbia, who is a teacher, librarian in one of the largest high schools in the city, and she told me a story a number of months ago about a student in the school who has a behavioral designation and was a spinner. He could not sit at a desk and he constantly twirled himself into a spin, often resulting in his removal from all the classes to the library. After some time in the library, Denise began to see past his belligerent attitude and classroom behavior. She thought his level of intelligence was off the chart, but he did not have a gifted designation. She began the process cooperatively with the vice principal to have him tested for gifted status. She told me that he came out in the 99 percentile. Holding space for this student did not stop there, however.

I called her today to review the story that she told me in the fall, and she said that she went to visit him at his home last week.

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When I returned from my recent pilgrimage through Portugal and France in search of the Divine Feminine, I was still carrying the journey in fragments. There were images from churches and caves, Black Madonnas and Magdalene chapels, stone stairways, train stations, unexpected encounters, and the strange inner weather that accompanies a journey taken for reasons that are not entirely practical. I had gone looking for something ancient, elusive, and feminine — not as an idea, exactly, but as a presence that has moved through art, myth, devotion, landscape, and the hidden layers of European spiritual history.

When I came home, dear friends invited me over. They did not ask for the short version. They sat me down and asked me to tell them the whole story, play by play. It took hours. I spoke about where I had gone, what I had seen, what had moved me, what had disappointed me, what had surprised me, and what I still did not understand. They listened with a kind of quiet attentiveness that changed the experience of the journey itself. Their questions slowed me down. Their curiosity helped me remember details I might have passed over. In the act of telling, the pilgrimage became something more than a private sequence of events. It became a shared narrative.

That evening has stayed with me almost as much as the journey itself. There was something deeply human in it: the return, the gathering, the listening, the retelling. My friends were not simply receiving information about where I had been. They were helping me understand what had happened. By listening, they entered the story. By asking questions, they changed its shape. By giving their attention, they allowed the experience to become more fully known.

This is the part of storytelling I have been thinking about. Story is not only what happened. It is also what happens when experience is spoken aloud in the presence of another human being. A story becomes different when it is received. It gathers relationship. It becomes less solitary. It begins to reveal meanings that may not have been visible while we were still moving through the events themselves.

Personal narrative, in this sense, is not simply autobiography or memory. It is one of the ways human beings make knowledge from experience. We live something first, often in fragments. Later, through telling and retelling, we begin to understand what the experience carried. This is especially true of journeys, losses, encounters, childhood memories, spiritual questions, and those moments that disturb or enlarge our sense of who we are.

Across cultures, story has long served this function. Before knowledge was divided into subjects, disciplines, or professional categories, it moved through voice, memory, image, place, gesture, and repetition. Stories helped people remember where they came from, make sense of what had happened, and offer guidance to those coming after them. They could carry practical knowledge, moral insight, humour, grief, warning, cosmology, family history, and cultural memory all at once.

This is also where my interest in anthroposophy, feminine wisdom, and storytelling meet. In anthroposophy, imagination is not treated as a decorative addition to knowledge. It is understood as one of the capacities through which human beings perceive meaning. A story does not hand us a concept in a finished form. It gives us an image to live with, return to, and slowly understand. Feminine wisdom, at least as I have come to approach it, often moves in this same way. It is carried through relationship, memory, body, intuition, care, and the quiet transmission of experience.

On my pilgrimage, I was looking for traces of the Divine Feminine in sacred art and place. Yet when I returned, I found another aspect of the feminine in the act of being received. The listening circle, the questions, the patience, the willingness to let a story take the time it needed — all of this felt like part of the same search. Knowledge was not being extracted. It was being held.

That is what personal narrative can do when we approach it with care. It allows a life to become legible, not all at once, and not always neatly. It gives form to what might otherwise remain private, scattered, or half-understood. It also reminds us that our stories are never entirely ours alone. They are shaped by those who came before us, by the cultures we inherit, by the places that form us, and by the people willing to listen when we return.

Divine Feminine Gallery

Perhaps this is why stories continue to matter. They are not simply records of the past. They are living vessels of meaning. They carry origin, uncertainty, longing, contradiction, and change. They help us ask, again and again, the questions that follow every pilgrimage, whether outward or inward: Where have I been? What has changed in me? What am I now carrying forward?

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Photo of Banksy’s 2026 statue in London - south view by APK

We are living in an age of extremes. Political polarization, environmental strain, and social fragmentation have become part of the atmosphere we move through daily. Everything feels amplified. Opinion hardens quickly, attention is constantly pulled outward, and many of us are left trying to find some inner ground beneath the noise. I often find myself turning things off simply to recover a sense of proportion and quiet.

And yet, in the middle of this, I keep returning to the idea that art matters profoundly right now — not as entertainment or escape, but as something essential to remaining human. When I say “art will save the world,” I do not mean it sentimentally. I mean that art offers a way of living with complexity without collapsing into simplification. It reminds us how to hold tension, how to listen, and how to remain in relationship with ourselves, with others, and with the world around us.

The word art comes from the Latin ars, meaning skill, craft, or a fitting together. That etymology feels important to me because so much of contemporary life feels as though it is pulling apart. Art, by its very nature, works with relationship. A weaver depends upon tension between horizontal and vertical threads to create cloth. A painter needs contrast between light and shadow. A potter works constantly with expansion and contraction, pressure and release. The creative process does not eliminate opposites; it works through them.

M. C. Richards described this as “the play of opposites,” and I have thought about that often in my own studio practice. Clay teaches this immediately. If I force it, it collapses. If I hesitate, it wobbles. The vessel only rises when firmness and yielding are held in balance. It strikes me that this is also true in teaching, parenting, community-building, and perhaps in democracy itself. Nothing living survives through rigidity alone.

Photo of The Representative of Humanity between Lucifer and Ahriman by Rudolph Steiner

Rudolf Steiner described the human being as standing between opposing forces — between excessive materialism on one side and disembodied abstraction on the other. His sculpture The Representative of the Human Being, still standing unfinished in the Goetheanum, expresses this visually. The human figure stands poised between extremes, not erasing them but mediating them. I have always been moved by the fact that the sculpture remains unfinished. There is something deeply truthful in that. Human beings are unfinished. Culture is unfinished. Perhaps art matters because it helps us participate consciously in that process of becoming.

The word create comes from the Latin creare — to grow, to bring forth. That distinction also matters. Much of modern culture is built around production, efficiency, and output, but creation is slower and more relational than production. Growth cannot be forced without consequence. The same is true of human development. Creativity asks for patience, uncertainty, and attention.

I was reminded of this again while rereading The Courage to Create by Rollo May. One of the central ideas in the book is that creativity requires the courage to live with uncertainty. We often want immediate clarity and predictable outcomes, but the creative process rarely offers that. To create something meaningful — whether a work of art, a classroom, a relationship, or a life — requires a willingness to remain present in the unknown long enough for form to emerge.

The word inspiration carries something similar within it. It comes from inspirare — “to breathe into” — rooted in spiritus, meaning breath or spirit. To be inspired is not simply to have an idea. It is to breathe something in. I think this is why creativity can never be entirely individualistic. We are shaped constantly by landscape, memory, relationship, history, and atmosphere.

In my own life, inspiration is deeply connected to place. I grew up surrounded by stone and minerals through my parents’ rock shop, and I still feel shaped by the mountains and rivers of the Kootenays. The clay I work with was once mountain itself — fractured, weathered, carried by water, and transformed over time into material capable of becoming vessel. That process feels strangely parallel to human life. We are shaped by pressure, fracture, and experience, yet under the right conditions we can still become something capable of holding meaning.

This is one reason art remains so important culturally. It reconnects us to relationship and shared experience. The word community comes from communis — what is held in common. Art creates those shared spaces almost invisibly. A concert hall holding collective silence before applause. A poem that gives language to something another person could not articulate alone. A handmade bowl passed between people at a table. These are small things, perhaps, but they matter because they restore a sense of participation in something beyond ourselves.

Banksy’s vandalism continued on traditional oil paintings, sourced from banksy.co.uk

When I think about artists who have shaped culture in this way, I think of Georgia O’Keeffe enlarging a flower until we were forced to truly see it again. I think of Maya Angelou giving voice to dignity and resilience in the face of injustice. I think of poets like Charles Finn, whose work emerges from silence and somehow carries that silence within it. None of these artists “solved” the crises of their times. What they did was preserve and deepen our humanity within them.

This is why I believe art matters now more than ever. Not because it replaces politics, activism, or practical work, but because without beauty, imagination, silence, and the discipline of making, we lose the interior ground from which wise action arises. Art forms human beings, and formed human beings are capable of forming a more human world.

This understanding sits at the heart of why I began Anthropotter and why I continue developing my ceramic work, including my current Rose Grail series inspired by the Divine Feminine. Increasingly, I feel that our culture does not need louder certainty. It needs deeper formation. It needs spaces where people can remain thoughtful, relational, and creatively alive.

One of the 7 Murals painted by Banksy painted in Ukraine after the war started. banksy.co.uk

Perhaps this is ultimately how art “saves” the world — quietly, through daily practice. Through attention. Through care. Through the shaping of meaningful forms from fragmented experience. Every birth is art. Every garden is art. Every conversation shaped with care is art. The way we listen, the way we hold silence, the way we shape words before speaking — all of these are creative acts. Art is not separate from life. It is life brought consciously into relationship. And perhaps that is what we need most right now.

Photo of Banksy’s Girl with Balloon uploaded by Miguel Discart

Podcast background is a photo of Banksy’s painting from Paris painted in 2018

How do we hold the wealth of curriculum? We need to relate on a personal and a communal level to emerge the invisible; to emerge what we have already taught which has gone into the background in order to activate future lessons by deepening the present moment.

Teachers ultimately work with the concepts of time and space. With time, we are looking at the past, present and future of all the subjects, the lessons that we have taught, the days, the months and the years, the personal biographies of our students, my personal biography as a teacher and how that relates to what I am teaching now. We are always in the present moment dipping into the past, dipping into the experiences and the decisions and the visions and the outcomes that we make, whether it be yesterday, two months ago, two years ago, 20 years ago. If we are the product of all that, the children are certainly also a product of all that they have been taught. How do we work with that in a present way? How do we create a living experience of what we have done in the past in our current subject lessons? How do we bring it into context?

We can then build anticipation for the future in our present lessons by planting seeds, but looking at working with the future in the now.

What are the goals of your lesson, your plan, your unit block and where do you want your students to be by the end of the month? By the end of the season? By the end of the year? Where do you want them to be in a year from now? That is dipping our hands into the future, bringing it back and carrying the current lesson plan into seeding those future lessons.

I began to directly, consciously implement the future seed into my daily practice in teaching and working with space and how a symbolic red thread weaves through space. I looked at interconnectivity, the school that I was working with, that I work with, the preschool, the kindergarten through throughout the elementary school grades. I had to know where they came from and how I could connect with what the other aspects and divisions of the school were working with and how I could work with the parents, the board and the administration. Not to mention how I could work with other teachers in creating an interconnected thread that was common between us.

When we are working with the red thread in space, our common threads are united curriculum planning and events between school spheres, between different divisions and how just even the smallest invitation to do so, can create stronger connections and warmer, empathetic reactions to one another, which can last for days and months, weeks and years.

I do not know why I call it the red thread, it just came to me, but when I looked up the red thread, I realized that Asia and many other cultures in the world use the red thread as a sign of loyalty and fidelity. It is often used as an engagement bracelet. I thought about that because for me, engagement is at the core of my work. What is it to engage, to marry, to bond, to make a commitment to how we weave that red thread? That bracelet of fidelity and loyalty to our students, to one another in our colleagues, to the parents who support us teaching their children, to the board members who often put in volunteer time to keep our schools running. How do we thank them? How do we let them see that we see that thread? How do we weave that tapestry that began to be more and more of a question? As I began to look at the past and renewing past learning, of course, I came to where have we come from? What is the history of the school? What are the biographies of the faculty? What are the roots of the curriculum?

If you are a homeschooling parent, you can adapt everything. to the history of the homeschooling movement, to the biographies of the people that you are working with in teaching and leading you to teach your children and the roots of the curriculum that lies behind everything. What have the children learned that can be present now? How do we work with imaginative recall in our lessons, or if you are an administrator, agenda follow up? I think we often, as teachers, keep forging ahead without looking back into the past and pulling back and recalling what we have taught the children and what was the most important thing to let that be, an act of inquiry that does not have our answers, but the responses of the students that we teach. How do we take that forward into enlivening our present day learning styles, where are we now? What if you were to work with the image of a tree, if the past is to be the roots, what are the stems and stalks of the curriculum? What is the emergent inquiry that we are working with? How are we activating inspired content and experience?

However, when I think about teaching in the present, it is usually what we are doing every day, the kids are noticing us. We are on a stage and it is very much like being in live theater. Most teachers would tell you that it also became something more. I realized that movement was key and how I work with where we are going?

How are you branching the curriculum and my subjects out like a tree? How are you bringing possibility in the unknown into the lessons? How are you expanding it and planting seeds for what was to come and what those seeds might be? In other words, how are you teaching into the future? We often think that we were waking students up, but how do we actually teach so that they can just get embedded as imaginations and as seeds and then go to sleep to be picked up again?

When I think about taking time in our hands as teachers, I think about the story of the three Norns, and they were the three giantesses at the bottom of the Yggdrasil tree in Norse mythology. It was interesting that the origin of the name Norn is derived from the word meaning to twine. Twining the thread of fate, they weave a web. They are responsible for shaping human destinies. I think that that could be a tagline for being a teacher: responsible for shaping human destinies. In a way where the Norns weave the past, the present and the future together as we make our way through our curriculum and our lesson plans. The web of the word which was spelled W-Y-R-D that the Norns’ represented the interconnectedness of the past, present and future, but it also represented the interconnectedness of what the Norse thought of as the microcosm in the macrocosm. The larger picture in the smaller picture. I began to think, with the larger picture, that I was shaping human destiny. Now the smaller picture is now I got grade four students in front of me. I got sixth grade six students in front of me. I’ve got kindergarten students in front of me. A grade 12 student in front of me. This being what I have, how was I going to be responsible for that in the future? It brought nothing short of, of course, student inquiry and student engagement. The Interdisciplinary Curriculum Seal, and how we work with interdisciplinary education in everything that we do, whether we realize it or not. If we do not, we should be.

One of the other aspects of the Norns and the task that they have, which was to help Yggdrassil, which is the tree of life, stay green and healthy, they carried water from the well and they had to collect earth or clay that lies around the well and pour it over the tree of life of Yggdrasil and if they failed to do it, the ash tree would have started to rot. I began to think, metaphorically, what is the nutrient that would be equal to the water of life for the tree of life? What is the tree of education? What is the compost that we need to work with in the tree of education? It is recognizing that education is inquiry and emerging interest, I think, is how we really look at how we create an environment from old life and bring it to life anew each day.

We have a tendency to drill academic content such as the multiplication tables into the students. Recollection of the times tables or to drill grammar, nine parts of speech, let’s memorize, reiterate and regurgitate. I think that that would be the comparison to organic and non-organic food. It is there, it works, and you can eat it. You can teach it, but what is the living life force? What are the enzymes behind our curriculum? What is this idea of new life born of old? I think, well, it comes through that moment, that in-between place, that what you have learned is taking shape and is not quite born yet, is still living as a sprout, as a possibility within the human being and it is still sleeping. How do we carefully tend the roots of those seeds that we ourselves have planted in the children so that they do not become dry and dead roots that might still hold the tree up, but not be able to give it nourishment in life, for if it is not giving nourishment to the students and life to everything that we teach, what is our task? I find it interesting that this trio of Norns worked with what once was, what is coming into being and what shall be in Norse mythology can have significance for teaching and for learning and what it means to learn from the tree of life itself.

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Welcome to my Anthropotter podcast series, my name is Diane Walters and I’m a potter and a teacher and have been for over 42 years.

Every potter knows where their still point is and I’ve been really looking at the anthropomorphic aspects of being a potter and working with the living earth and finding our connection to the earth and how we fashion that into a creative process and out of so doing we become more and more ourselves.

From the beginning of time, cosmic evolution has created: from particles into atoms, atoms into galaxies and stars, stars into elements, elements into molecules, molecules into life, and life into art. Its change and diversity rolled into one.

All creation is an ongoing metamorphosis all around us and inside of us. It is the essence through which life itself develops, and that expresses itself wherever life is. It is the art behind life.

The connection between a potter and her clay goes back to humans on the planet, cross-culturally, around the globe:

According to the Quran, God created humans from clay.

In Jewish folklore, a golem is an animated anthropomorphic being that is created entirely from inanimate matter, usually clay or mud.

In Greek mythology, Prometheus molded humans out of water and earth. In Sumerian mythology, the god Enki create a servant of the gods, humankind, out of clay and blood.

And in the Epic of Gilgamesh, Enkidu is created by the goddess Anru out of the clay to be a partner for Gilgamesh.

In Egyptian mythology, the god Khnum creates human children from clay before placing them in their mother’s womb.

And according to Chinese mythology, Noah molded figures from the yellow earth, giving them life and the ability to bear children.

In the Babylonian creation epic, a goddess created humans from clay.

And according to Hindu mythology, the mother of Ganesh, Parvati, made Ganesh from clay and turned the clay into flesh and blood.

And in the Hawaiian tradition, the first human was made of muddy water and his female counterpart was taken from his side parts.

The Yoruba culture holds that the god Obatala likewise created the human race from clay.

According to Genesis 2.7, and the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and humans became a living soul.

The Maori people believe that the god of the forest created the first woman out of clay and breathed life into her.

According to the Inka mythology, the creator god formed humans from clay on his second attempt at creating living creatures.

In the Korean narrative, humans are created from red clay.

And I was recently introduced to the story of Sky Woman by a Mohawk friend of mine, who is a woman who falls out of the sky and becomes the living earth as she lands on the back of a turtle. Humans are made from her belly. So when a clan member meets another clan member in the Iroquois nation, they often say, what kind of clay are you from?

My name is Diane Walters. I am from Edmonton, Alberta, the land of shale and clay.

And it’s also the home of Plainsman, the source of where I buy my clay that I work with in the studio.

I grew up with parents who owned a rock shop and I spent my entire life looking at rocks and minerals, digging them out of the earth and becoming fascinated with the sedimentary rock formations of the earth and all manner of rock that we would mine and pick and break open and discover and name and classify.

And now I’m still doing that, but I’m doing that in my pottery studio. And as I name and classify the minerals that go into my clay bodies, then I’m also naming and classifying the minerals and chemicals that go into my glazed bodies that fit over the clay like a glove.

As a potter, I’ve learned more about myself through the act and art of creating from clay than from any other aspect, I think, of my life. I’ve learned to move through the transformation from one shape into another.

Every potter knows that there’s an interplay of tension which goes from strength to softness when you find your own still point and the still point of the clay. It’s the heart of the pot.

When you open the clay, widen the bottom and bring up the side of the cylinder or the bowl, you’re touching the inside and the outside at the same time with that wall, and there is the same consistency, the same even grain, the same plasticity, the same moisture inside and out.

What you do discover is that as the pot rotates on the wheel, you can touch it at just one point, at any point, and the whole thing changes form. It’s a continuous flow.

Wherever we touch life, we form it, MC said.

It’s an old teaching that human beings are a microcosm of the universe. We actually move in opposite directions simultaneously, in and out, up and down, dark and light, giving and receiving.

The crossing point is that threshold place where both movements coexist. To feel the possibility of living in oneself as if one were a crossing point is perhaps a part of a new quality of consciousness.

Every step comes along in its own time to carry us to the next step. Everything happens in order that the next thing may happen. When we encounter crises, we seek the new thing. What is so fantastic is that we have at the same time total diversity, and total relatedness. We can be both totally separated and yet intimately connected.

Many of the words you have just heard and will continue to hear comes from my mentor and teacher, MC Richards, who I worked with for six years as her last apprentice.

She wrote Centering in Pottery, Poetry, and the Person in 1962, and her words are eternal.

Some of the atoms which led to galaxies and stars and heavy elements are known to the potter as feldspar and silicates, iron and nickel and magnesium, which are also found in meteorites and asteroids and the body of many of our planets. So to take cosmological evolution into the pottery studio, is to know the source of creation behind art.

The geological connection between what is going on in the life of a pottery studio and what is going on underneath and above the earth is a fascinating one.

It’s like the primary rocks and minerals of the earth’s crust crystallized from magma and the, of course, which comes out of volcanic activity, every kiln firing works with the idea of what igneous and metamorphic processes out of magma comes from.

It occurs when the heat of the kiln melts all the glazed materials on the wall of the clay or the wall of the pots, and it transforms these materials into a liquid stage or magma.

So we have a mini volcano going on in each and every kiln firing. The metamorphic processes are reenacted when the heat of the kiln fire bakes the soft clay-bodied minerals into an impermeable material. So from stone into magma, back through the kiln firing, back into stoneware. So on a miniature scale, there’s a universal drama of the earth’s formation, which is reenacted with every kiln firing.

I find it interesting that I fire my kilns and most of my work to the same temperature as lava is when it comes out of a volcano, which is between 1,093 Celsius and 1,260 degrees Celsius, which is the final temperature of the stoneware kiln fire.

William Bryant Logan, in his book, now out of print, called Dirt, the Ecstatic Skin of the Earth, identified what clay is in this way. The clays, unlike their parent rocks, have no inaccessible interior, but instead a very large,reactive surface. They unlock the potential weighting in raw matter.

Clays stack, wrap, pile, and exfoliate. like leaves and sheaves of paper. In fact, experiments have shown that a single gram of clay powder can have a total surface area larger than a football field. But clay is more than an empty book. It is encoded with a vast array of possible meanings.

Each layer of clay is a matrix of molecules that is well-ordered but marked with a succession of dimples, holes, and ragged edges.

In other words, each layer of clay is a template with tendencies.

Thank you for listening to my Anthropotter series.

You can also find us at Earth Studios Nelson on Instagram or Facebook.

In the meantime, stay creative. Share your thoughts in the comments, what does clay mean to you?

“We are most human when we play.”~ Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man

In a world of algorithms and “The Singularity,” how do we protect the fragile connection to our own hearts?

By Diane Walter

Delving into what makes us most human is no longer just the work of artists and philosophers: it is the mandate of every parent and teacher living through the “Digital Revolution.”

As technologies rapidly change and the world realigns its systems and economy, an age- old question has become vital: What does it truly means to be a human being?

At the forefront of the future of Waldorf education is the effort to maintain the values of love, trust, imagination, and common sense. These are not just “soft skills”; they are the core resilience children need to meet an uncertain, exponential future.

We are told that Artificial General Intelligence is the new standard of excellence. The transhumanist concept of the “Singularity”, where man and machine merge, is gaining ground.

But human intelligence far surpasses artificial intelligence. The deeper capacities of the human spirit thrive in the insightful dialogue and creativity; things an algorithm can simulate, but can never truly possess.

“We cannot change the world by tinkering with the outside; it can only be changed from within, and we are its within.” ~ Owen Barfield

I believe a balance can be found. By teaching through artistic processes and play we counter the trend of digital subservience.

Continue Reading in the Perspectives Journal

Diane’s exploration of “Authentic Intelligence” is just one facet of this year’s journal. By downloading the full publication, you will also find:

• Michael Schmidt (Ontario) reflecting on our post-Covid attitudes and how we can readjust to an open-hearted, forgiving embrace of one another.

• Tim Nadelle (Ontario) looking farther afield at Steiner’s indications for the remainder of the “Consciousness Soul” era and the guidance of the Archangel Michael.

• Extended Insights from Diane Walters on the nature of play, the “half-given, half-created” classroom, and the “Grail of Becoming.”

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I believe that the heart of humanity is to be found through natural rhythms of human development. Our dependence on screens makes online education gravitate towards fostering abstract and technical concepts that lack a deeper connection with our humanness. A level of technical proficiency and access to technology is required to access information which is presented in a format only loosely connected to human relationship. I believe that it’s imperative to bring warmth of heart and cultural meaning to all forms of education. Today, our human story will be greatly influenced by how we choose to educate our children. One of those ways is through story. Stories are our birthright and the means by which cultures across the globe have taught upcoming generations with wisdom and guidance. They’re the backbone of human imagination and collaboration. These two significant traits that we’ve developed since the Paleolithic age.

Steiner repeatedly spoke of how images are the turning point and the turning point of knowledge. That’s why we work with images behind the alphabet to create stories that teach our children to remember every subject from geography to mathematics in many Waldor schools. Pedagogical stories, which are stories created to affect human behavior and have been used and created for over one hundred and fifty years. I know because I’ve collected a lot of them dated between eighteen ninety five and nineteen twenty and are incredible insights into pedagogical development and how you can really work with behavioral strategies and changes through the story for young children. Taking it to the next level of an artistic process allows us to integrate those pictures through our inner life. How do we create and teach to the inner life of children, not the outer life, is to really work with the element of the heart. Waldorf education strongly develops the life at the heart, along with the development of body and mind through artistic endeavors.

The view that the actual process of becoming human, which is a work in becoming wholly oneself over a lifetime, is centered in the experience of the human heart, in all its frailties and vulnerabilities, capacities, triumphs and achievements. Thinking with our hard forces cultivates the capacity for inspiration. As a potter, I can say that the hard forces that are commonly held very close in the art world is a way of thinking through your medium of the art. I think through my clay. It’s a new kind of intelligence, a deep soul level of intelligence. All mediums of artistic expression can open the child and all of our hearts and soul to an inner experience of deep feeling. Music is essential to the development of the finer tones of our hearing and ability to rise above ourselves through sound, drawing and painting, poetry, song, instrument, sculpture and work, knitting, sewing, beadwork, spinning, weaving felting, woodwork carving, clay, stone, metal are all components of art. They’re all components of art which fill the soul with finer qualities of our human experience and the gift of wonder. They also cultivate our hand intelligence, which brings fine motor skills to balance. In this digital age, these human capacities are essential modes for inner expression and emotional resilience.

I teach pottery to many adults, and I’ve done so for the last 11 years on a weekly basis, and I’ve really noticed that the adults that are now coming into my studio under the age of 30 are really lacking in an awareness of what their hands can do and how their hands can hold the clay. When I ask what they do for a living. It’s almost 98 percent digital. So I think they know why they’re there. In fact, one girl said, you know, I’m a graphic designer. I really don’t care if I make pots. I just need to be here. They know what it is to center oneself through your hands and what hand intelligence is for the whole human. How do we bring that to the children beyond a digital screen world, beyond our love affair at the moment with digital technology? Don’t get me wrong, I’m fascinated by all the digital technology can give me and can do for me as a business person and as a teacher and as an interested person in the world. The world’s my oyster. I have no problem with that. It’s just the question of how do we bring balance? How do we bring our ideas and thoughts through to expression? By creating forms for ideas to live in and be seen is the quintessential process of human invention and purpose.

In our virtual realities, where we can invent and alter ego, a virtual avatar, which exists only in the realm of thought, is robbing our children and youth, I believe, of necessary skills to thrive in the natural world. So what does that look like? Well, if you’re a homeschooling parent, working with building projects, using any medium such as gardens, clothes, cooking, baking, or anything made by the children themselves gives rise to hand intelligence and confidence to create what is needed for themselves in the world and in the classroom. I would say the projects are limitless, and as many elementary and junior high school teachers know into the secondary school system, it’s a little harder there to really work with hands-on projects as much as possible. So when I develop a lesson, I’m always thinking about the heart of the concept I intend to create. Usually I go into a story of what the concept was and how it began to be invented in the world. The history of architecture, the history of mathematics, the history. It all has a human story behind it. When you give that human story behind mathematics, behind architecture, behind any level of the sciences, the beginnings of human invention and purpose, we’ve got a reason, we’ve got a hard force.

Soon after, the children try to recreate that in one project or another, whether it be at home, that they then present through video format or in the classroom situation where they’ve got a buddy to work with and they can put their hands to work, bringing that concept to Earth, and bringing it down. This fosters an inner resilience through the outer outward. Fostering inner resilience through our deeds was once a given. Now it needs to be a conscious choice in educating our children. Social media is educating our children to a higher degree, and algorithms are increasingly influencing the nature of our desires and interests and lifestyles. You have to ask ourselves what our moral definitions of success or how we raise our children to be good human beings and members of society is up for discussion, and we need to discuss it rather than give way to machine intelligence over the capacities of the human heart. So that brings collaboration to mind, how do we bring that level of human encounter to the classroom?

I believe that we’re all educators, we’re all students, whether we term ourselves mentors or learners, parents or teachers, the world is an offering on every level of human understanding, place and time. We’re living in a time of unprecedented change. If we do not want to be swept off our feet or simply led by algorithms, we need to find our still point of quiet certainty in which to breathe, live, create and educate our children into an emerging future which still holds core human values at the center of our purpose and our directive. It’s really about being human, and rising to the highest of our human striving, our hearts to intelligence and our ethical deeds in this world. Teaching into the future means building and creating deep ties and creative relationships belonging to our place and our time. It’s a whole approach to learning, one which calls for interest, attention and presence of mind. How can we build these deep relationships, not around ideologies, but around the real world challenges that we face? I think that growing our capacities for thought, stories, stillness, art, human connection and finding the inner voice of our spirit gives us the power to reshape the future as it emerges.

Jennifer Gidley, who I follow on LinkedIn, wrote a short book where she said that we need to imagine a world where we look for the good and ensure the education, health, environment, agriculture and all aspects of society are based on the simple understanding that we have many common grounds that are intrinsic to the core of being human rather than the insecurities and biases that currently dominate. We can change the narrative and create a future view that is full of optimism and potential, where the obstacles and insecurities that are raised today have moved from our lexicon and only remembered as a way from the past that we have left behind. This is the view for individuals, communities and the whole society that unites us and allows us the capacity to seek ways to work together. This creative and modern educational vision offers one way forward to consciously facilitate the emergence in children of more life promoting integral, spiritually aware forms of consciousness. Similar to the Tin Man, transcendence is within our reach if we have the courage. In order to write and tell our stories about a human heart centered world of love, belonging and wisdom, I believe our children depend on our imagination of our future, which holds what it means to be truly human at the core of it, or we risk losing our freedoms to the colonizing forces of artificial over authentic intelligence.

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In an age we are calling The Digital Revolution; Waldorf education, among others, continues to hold core human values related to human development at its heart. We are seeing technologies rapidly grow in the world, moving to realign its systems of governance, education and economy in this deep change, the age-old question of what it truly means to be human is vital. At the forefront of the world of education is the effort to maintain the values of love, connection, trust, imagination, collaboration, and common sense. I hope to bring a few of these tools to light in an effort to cultivate core resilience, to meet the emerging future, or at least a future that I want to live in. We are living in times of great transition, uncertainty and exponential change, the ground has shifted, and we need to find new ground to stand on, distinct from that of a reductionist, mechanistic view of the human being. We are simply not just machines. An education grounded on the view of human beings as evolving towards a greater degree of consciousness, development and potential requires a holistic and multifaceted, rather integrative living approach to learning. As an educator, I try to sense and actualize what the emerging future is in order to best serve students who will come of age and be directly guarding humanity in the near future.

I just attended a K-12 core digital teaching education reimagined course by the British Columbia technology sector. In it, I learned that the future of robotics, among other forms of A.I., are exploding in the job market. As I began to look at this, I realized that in order to expand and explode the digital revolution, children and youth and then later adults are in a position of sitting in front of a digital device. In order to engender more digital creations, so as I began to learn more about artificial intelligence, which has been a subject of my research for a number of years, I realized that the advent of AI and the Internet of all things, is definitely on the quest of the human threshold. I was drawn to remember as I was looking at big data and all that is entailed in big data and the digital revolution, which seeks to assimilate humanity really into a grip of algorithmic control by taking ownership of our data and turning it into profit with the help of sophisticated data analytics. They are now effectively manipulating user’s behavior en masse, which is then sold to the highest bidder.

This is no surprise, but what was surprising to me is our human response to it. Many people seem to think that this level of assimilation is at par with human evolution rather than a human devolution of our individual and collective moral values. Cell phone smartwatches, smart glasses are on the rise and here to stay until they are replaced by bionic eyes and body parts, thus incorporating the human with the machine more and more, I began to feel like David with a slingshot facing the giant and the giant instead of Goliath, was big data and big tech. I am not a Luddite, I am not looking backwards. My work at Teaching Into The Future is really to create a human centered future of holism where our humanity is at the core of all that we do. That is what my path as an educator has always been about. Technology is not the problem. The problem is the lack of our awareness of our individual and collective humanity that we are not or failing to consciously consider when we design and expand our technologies when profit trumps human morality.

A few years ago, I read David and Goliath by author Malcolm Gladwell. He told us that the giant is blind and cannot see what is in front of him, which was namely a small boy with a slingshot. I asked the question, well, what is bigger than the big data of artificial intelligence, what is in our slingshot and where is A.I. blind? I realized that the answer began to come in little waves. The integration of the human capacity for love, self-reliance, and to transcendent creativity through artistic processes. It is our very humanness that big tech algorithms cannot see, the balance between our humanity and our technologies lie in the values that we live by, and we impart to our children, whether we are parents or teachers or both. We could think of it this way, dramatic though it may be, it is like a question of learning through life or death. The life pole in learning, in education, brings a level of freshness, a vitality for growth, curiosity and laughter, play, rhythm, story, nature, a sense of community, a sense of belonging, imagination, the arts, connection with one another.

Attention, warmth, and movement; Rudolf Steiner held these ideals to heart by saying, “We must not let the children receive from us finished ready-made ideas, feelings and capacities, but ideas, feelings and capacities that carry within them all the possibilities of growth.” The death toll, on the other hand, brings reduction, cold fact cemented concepts, dubious corporate interests, algorithm’s screen time disconnection, social isolation, destruction, virtual realities, and avatars, not to mention what is coming around the corner in the merging of humans and machines. This death toll can be seen in what former Google strategist James Williams called the absence of aloneness. He argued that the threat to human freedom has emerged in the systems of intelligent enticement, originating in algorithms that increasingly direct our thoughts and actions. Williams states that as digital technologies have made information abundant, our attention has become the scarce resource in the digital attention economy, which is what they are calling it. The attention economy technologies compete to capture and exploit our media attention rather than supporting our two goals.

To go back to what American transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “You are your attention,” which he said in Self Reliance, considered to be his most influential work, that to believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you and your private heart is true for all that is genius. Speak your latent conviction and it shall be the universal sense for the most in due time becomes the most. Once again, that Mobius strip that I talked about in reaching for a connection between the teachers and the students, between teaching and learning. Being with your thoughts requires alone time, thinking time. When allowing children to engage with the distractions of the attention economy, they risk losing touch with the experience of what it is to be truly alone with their thoughts. We risk losing to big data the richness of our interior lives, let alone our human heart-based connection with others. Williams also wrote, “The experience of empty space allows for the growth of imagination and independent thought, the ability to form ideas without being swayed by mass opinion. Moreover, virtual connection impedes our ability to connect and empathize.”

In the age of COVID, going into year three of lockdowns around the world, we must ask ourselves how we manage our virtual connections. We have learned that we can rely on algorithms to increase our business sales, our personal preferences and computational learning structures because everybody is wanting to learn, teach and shop online. However, I think that when we are working with children and youth, it is important to recognize that we need to give them the empty space as much as the filled place of knowledge or gnosis of what true genius is, is to have the children dive down deep into their own selves and begin to explore how they think and how they feel about the world as they emerge in it. Otto Scharmer, who is a pioneer of the presenting institute, stated that according to studies, fear, depression and anxiety disorder grow in rough proportion to the use of social media. The more social media you consume, he said, the more at risk you are, particularly as a young person.

I liken this to the Wizard of Oz, this Tin Man who was searching for a heart. When he finally found it, it was through human encounter that enabled him to find love and purpose. Waldorf education, among others, holds a vision for the human being as a consciously evolving species. This model affirms life giving in life, creating principles through the realm of human experience, of goodness, of the beautiful, through art, nature and of truth, based on the human striving to become one with the earth and sky and all things in between. This vision lies in the transformation of our thinking, our feelings, and our deeds. Scharmer, who was once a Waldorf student himself, said that if we want this moment to give rise to a future that is different from the past, what core capacities do we need to build and cultivate now? Rudolf Steiner, the founder of World of Education, talked about education in terms of learning through the head, in the heart, in the hands by cultivating a genuine human intelligence. He said that “Waldorf Education really strives to bring about a transformation of our thinking or feeling in our will into higher capacities of thought, emotional resilience and capable endeavor in our actions,” which works with beneficial, collective and collaborative change.

To develop our capacities of speaking and listening to the center of ourselves into the periphery of our world is rather, once again, like breathing through key signatures of expansion and contraction in our being. We can teach through the breath at home or in a classroom setting. What are expensive activities and learning modalities, what are contractive, leading us back into the core of ourselves for reflection and insight? Learning and teaching through the metaphorical heart and lungs has the capacity to bring about emergent, fresh insights into our educational experience. Human intelligence far surpasses computational intelligence, though there are people who would argue that, but I am asking you what the deeper capacities of genuine human intelligence are and whether they are based in the light of insightful dialogue. We must emphasize creative approaches as a community of people with diverse interests and capabilities. When we engage and collaborate with others on any level, at any and every age, and it brings the light of imagination to the fruit of our conversations and engagements, that is when a catalyst for change will occur.

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How do we educate for the development of students as human beings where the emphasis is based on laughter, joy, heart based interest, and active participation as a key to unlocking all learning? Academics plays a role but there is so much more and academics is based in life force not dead conceptual thinking. Teaching is a creative act. Behind teacher or homeschooling parental presentation is the desire to engage and engender curiosity about a given subject. How do we manifest student participation in the learning process itself? Student inquiry delves deeper and deeper into the questions themselves and teaching then becomes an ‘unfinished lesson’ The goal is to enhance student participation in the learning process itself. I am inspired by the reflections of the extraordinary educator Parker Palmer:

I am a teacher at heart and there are moments in the classroom when I can hardly hold the joy. When my students and I discover uncharted territory to explore, when the pathway out of a thicket opens up before us, when our experience is illuminated by the lightening-life of our mind-then teaching is the finest work I know (Palmer, P., 1998, p. 1).

I suspect that an educational methodology centered on Inquiry is paramount to teaching into the future, whether it be in the classroom or in a home based learning environment.

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In contemporary education, intelligence is often measured through speed, testing, and production. Learning is quantified through performance indicators, outcomes, and standardized benchmarks.

These systems reflect a deeper cultural assumption: that knowledge is something to be delivered, measured, and verified.

Yet throughout the history of education, another understanding of learning has existed: one that sees knowledge not simply as information to be transmitted, but as wisdom that unfolds within the human being.

Within this older tradition appears the figure of Sophia. Sophia, meaning wisdom in Greek, has long represented a form of intelligence distinct from analytical reasoning. In philosophical, mystical, and early Christian traditions, Sophia is portrayed as living wisdom, a presence that works through perception, relationship, and moral insight. Rather than domination or control, Sophia represents attentiveness, receptivity, and the capacity to perceive deeper meaning within experience.

For educators and artists alike, this image raises an important question:
What if teaching itself required a different form of intelligence, one that aligns more closely with Sophia than with mere information delivery?

Sophia as Living Wisdom

In Western intellectual history, Sophia represents more than knowledge. She symbolizes wisdom integrated with moral perception and human development.

Rudolf Steiner frequently addressed this distinction between knowledge and wisdom in his lectures on education. He emphasized that true education must address the whole human being thinking, feeling, and willing—rather than the intellect alone.

As Steiner observed:

“Education is not a matter of imparting knowledge but of awakening the forces that already live within the human being.”

~Rudolf Steiner

This perspective transforms the role of the teacher. Teaching becomes less about transmitting information and more about creating the conditions in which understanding can arise.

Sophia, in this sense, represents a principle of teaching grounded in perception and attentiveness to human development.

The Feminine Principle in Teaching

The idea of the feminine principle in education is not primarily about gender. Rather, it describes a mode of engagement characterized by receptivity, attentiveness, patience, and relationship.

Historically, Western education has tended to privilege what might be called a masculine epistemology: analysis, proof, categorization, and competition. These capacities are valuable and necessary. Yet when they dominate educational systems entirely, other forms of intelligence are often marginalized. The feminine principle introduces a complementary way of knowing.

It values:

• listening before evaluation

• observation before judgment

• patience with developmental processes

• relationship as a pathway to understanding

Steiner emphasized that education must respect the natural unfolding of human development rather than forcing learning prematurely. He wrote:

“The task of the educator is not to shape the child according to external standards, but to help what is already present within the child to unfold.”

~ Rudolf Steiner

This approach requires a teacher capable of perceiving the interior life of the student, not merely their measurable performance.

Art as a Pathway to Wisdom

Art education provides one of the clearest ways in which the feminine principle can operate within teaching. Art does not primarily function through explanation. It works through experience, perception, and participation. When students draw, sculpt, or work with clay, they encounter a process that cannot be reduced to purely intellectual instruction.

Clay in particular reveals something profound about learning. Clay does not respond to force. It responds to relationship. Push too quickly and the wall collapses. Move too aggressively and the form distorts. The material requires attention, patience, and responsiveness.

In this sense, clay teaches a form of intelligence closely aligned with the wisdom of Sophia. It cultivates:

• perceptive awareness

• patience with process

• sensitivity to balance and form

• integration of thinking, feeling, and willing

Steiner recognized the essential role of art in education precisely because it engages the whole human being.

“Art must become the basis of education.”

~ Rudolf Steiner

When art becomes central to learning, education begins to address not only the intellect but also the moral and imaginative capacities of the student.

The Rose Grail: Art as Philosophy in Form

These ideas about wisdom, receptivity, and the development of the human being have also shaped my own artistic practice as a potter.

One body of work that emerged from this exploration is the Rose Grail line: a series of carved vessels that integrate the symbolism of the rose with the contemplative qualities of the vessel itself.

The rose has long been associated with Sophia and with Mary Magdalene in mystical traditions, representing the unfolding of consciousness layer by layer. Unlike many symbolic forms, the rose carries both beauty and protection. Its petals open gradually, revealing depth over time.

This image offers a powerful metaphor for education. Human development, like the rose, unfolds slowly and organically. It cannot be forced open without destroying its form.

The Rose Grail vessels are carved with roses and glazed in layered colour—reds, whites, and yellows moving across the surface, held by soft ocean lines along the exterior. The interior remains satin ivory: luminous, quiet, and still.

This contrast is intentional.
Movement outside.
Stillness within.

The vessel becomes an image of the human being.
Structure on the outside.
Interior space capable of holding something deeper.

Teaching as the Work of the Vessel

The vessel itself offers a powerful metaphor for the work of teaching. A vessel is not valuable because it performs, it is valuable because it holds.

Education, at its best, cultivates the interior capacities of the human being: the ability to receive insight, to perceive meaning, and to integrate knowledge into wisdom. The role of the teacher is therefore not only to transmit information, but to help shape the vessel capable of receiving understanding. This requires attentiveness, patience, and the ability to perceive the developmental rhythms of students.

In this sense, teaching becomes an art closely aligned with the feminine principle: an art of holding, guiding, and cultivating potential.

Rebalancing Education

The challenge for contemporary education is not to abandon analytical rigor or intellectual standards. Rather, it is to restore balance.

Education requires both principles:

● the analytical clarity associated with the masculine tradition of scholarship
● the receptive wisdom associated with the feminine principle of Sophia

When these capacities work together, teaching becomes more than instruction. It becomes guidance in human development. Teachers become not simply providers of information but stewards of human possibility.

The Relevance of Sophia Today

At a time when education systems are increasingly driven by metrics and performance indicators, the image of Sophia offers a needed corrective.

Wisdom requires more than efficiency.
It requires time, attention, and relationship.
Teaching guided by Sophia does not reject intellectual rigor.

Instead, it situates rigor within a broader understanding of human development. In this sense, the art of teaching becomes exactly that—an art.

An art of perceiving.
An art of guiding.
An art of helping wisdom unfold within the next generation.

And perhaps this is why clay, art, and the image of the vessel continue to resonate so deeply in education. They remind us that learning is not simply about producing results. It is about shaping human beings capable of wisdom.

References

Steiner, Rudolf. The Education of the Child in Light ofAnthroposophy
Steiner, Rudolf. The Kingdom of Childhood
Steiner, Rudolf. Practical Advice to Teachers

When I reflect on why education matters, I inevitably return to a simple truth: education is not about filling young people with facts or filling screens with information. It is about the human being who receives, who becomes, who grows. Education is, in its deepest sense, an invitation into a life of curiosity, courage, empathy, and connection: qualities that are awakened in the human heart long before they are measured on a test.

In recent years, I’ve come to see our current systems pressed under the weight of efficiency and digital distraction. We’re surrounded by screens and speed, and while technology can support access to information, it easily eclipses the human experience: the rhythms of feeling, of listening, of being present with another human being. What is at stake in education today is not merely what children know, but who they are becoming.

I think about stories, the way they have shaped cultures across continents, long before algorithms shaped our attention. Stories connect us to meaning. They carry memory, tradition, and wisdom. When we teach through story, we are acknowledging that learning does not happen in isolation from life. Stories invite children to see themselves as part of a larger human journey, to feel the pulse of human striving and imagination.

In my own work, I have seen how hands-on creative activity brings students into direct relationship with their world. When a child builds a form with their hands through gardening, sculpting clay, weaving narrative with mathematical thinking, they inhabit ideas. They bring abstract concepts down to earth, not as doctrines, but as lived experiences. I’ve watched adults enter my pottery studio and discover a kind of quiet presence they rarely find in their digital lives. They instinctively know what it feels like to think with their hands, to be centred in felt reality.

I do not dismiss technology, I recognize its value as a tool when wielded with intention and human insight. But technology must never lead education’s moral compass. If we allow screens and algorithms to define what matters most, we risk sidelining the essential qualities of human resilience and presence. What we truly need is a balance that honours how children learn as much as what they learn.

Balance calls us to attend to the inner life of learners: their capacity to concentrate, to imagine, to engage in collaborative work, to feel deeply and to think clearly. These are not commodities purchased through technology; these are cultivated in classrooms, gardens, workshops, kitchens, and circles of conversation. They are cultivated in moments when a teacher notices the spark of an idea in a student’s eyes or when a learner discovers the satisfaction of bringing something material into completion.

Education, for me, will always be about belonging to a community, belonging to a tradition, and most importantly, belonging to oneself. When we teach into the future, we are teaching into a living present that acknowledges our shared humanity.

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The play of a younger child is esteemed to be of great value in Waldorf schools, but the question turns to how the element of play affects middle school students in learning strategies. Futurist Daniel Pink celebrates play as a fundamental human trait which, when actively engaged in, promotes and fosters empathy, joy, well-being and connectedness with life. What does that mean for the teacher in the classroom?

Martin Derris wrote of the significance play can have on schooling. The sensitivity, openness and trust involved in play, he writes, can find full humanity in community and thus become a seed for developing social capacities. This reinforces the work of Steiner who based the core of pedagogical development on the ability of the class teacher to imbue content in a lively and engaging manner while developing the integrity of a liberal curriculum.

“Living thinking” are warmth and light processes in the mind and heart of the teacher. Light and warmth when actively practiced while engaging students is at the core of educational practices which have come alive. A true teacher possesses a capacity for connectedness through the very heart and spirit of the teaching profession. The three main themes behind engaged learning are: (1) to impart diverse teaching strategies (2) to allow student autonomy, and (3) to develop strategies for teacher/student connection. Children who are highly engaged are likely to receive additional positive support from their teachers so that student self-perceived autonomy can influence instruction. These practices bring about positive effects and less obvious boredom in the classrooms of the engaging teachers.”

When the teacher is a facilitator for student learning and works deeply out of the empathic and intuitive faculties described by Steiner, Palmer, Barfield, and Zajonc, they set the stage for active engagement in the classroom or online. The balance between teacher effectiveness and student self-determination encourages a deep connection of relationship between the students, teachers and subject matter. Palmer’s statement that “Truth is an eternal conversation about things that matter, conducted with passion and discipline,” brings teaching through light and warmth possible.

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