Sankofa & Janus: Making Positive Progress in the Future, Retrieving the Past

Starlight Rays in Darkened Times: Seminars on Contemporary Topics

with David Barham

The Waldorf approach to adolescents requires a Sankofa or Janus-like willingness to look to the past, specifically to the rich inspiration we can take from Rudolf Steiner’s teachings on adolescence. Here we can learn that adolescence is a transitory stage –– like a river flowing between the banks of childhood and adulthood. Puberty marks an end to the beautiful and idyllic paradise of childhood, while adolescence signals the start of a long, slow path toward physical, emotional, social, intellectual, and spiritual maturity.

But for those of us teaching the oldest students in our Waldorf schools, we would be failing miserably in our mission if we were to look only to the past (not to mention being laughed out the classroom door). The Waldorf teacher who works with adolescents must look as keenly to the present and the future as to the past. The adolescents in our care want to know we find meaning, joy, and grace in the world into which they have chosen to incarnate.

Like Janus and Sankofa looking at the old and new year, the Waldorf high school teacher needs to create a bridge between anthroposophical anthropology and the practical life of teaching today: put differently, to bring together a reading of the child and a reading of the world.

We look to what Steiner offered in 1919 so as to be imbued with the power of imagination needed to anticipate the true demands of a young person in 2024-2025 struggling over contemporary issues of equity, power, gender, climate, authoritarianism, artificial intelligence, and the ever-present search for meaning.

A work this big, this powerful, this important––reading the developing needs of young adults and the changing world they are about to enter––requires of us to radically re-till the soil of the past to prepare it for the seeding of an unknowable future.

David Barham, M.Ed.
Director of CfA’s Waldorf High School Teacher Education Program (WHiSTEP) as of 2022, David has worked in four North American Waldorf schools, including one in Mexico, both as class and high school teacher. Before joining CfA, he taught humanities at the Maine Coast Waldorf School in Freeport, ME, for more than a decade. In the fall of 2021, he was appointed to AWSNA’s Leadership Council as Leader for the Northeast/Quebec region.

A graduate with a master’s degree in Waldorf education from Antioch University New England, David recently completed a CfA certificate program in Waldorf Leadership Development. His undergraduate degree at Tufts University was in English and Religion.

An ardent folk singer and guitar player, David came to anthroposophy first as a biodynamic farmer, then as a worker at a Camphill village before signing on as a class teacher.