O paradoxical pioneer! Repurposing Steiner education in collage and scribble

Steiner might be considered the prototypic pioneer from a previous century, whose alternative education vision continues to have huge international appeal and status. Yet Steiner’s “pioneering” views of education are open to interpretation, given each Steiner school is independent and encouraged to be responsive to its own context. Via the creation of an ironic visual collage work, ‘pioneer' is examined as a paradox in itself, like a seemingly contradictory or absurd statement that is found, on investigation, to be true. A paradoxical person therefore combines contradictory elements, like the main characters of Cather’s novel O Pioneers! (1928) detailing both immigrant women’s entrapment and their pioneering emancipation from patriarchy. Exploring examples of Steiner’s global reach, such as storytelling in Steiner schools in New Zealand and the embedding of indigenous narrative knowledge in education (Burnett ,2015), the danger of superficially rendering ancient cultural forms of knowledge to fit with western ‘scientific’ understanding is critiqued. Terms used universally and with apparent innocence in early years education- such as ‘holistic’- are a case in point. Disrupting both what is meant by pioneer-led, ‘literate’ forms of communication such as educational tracts and curricula, this piece resists with the artistically pioneering and disruptive practices of scribble.

© 2024 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
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