A Drop of Light: Educating for the A-Ha Moment

by Liz Attwel, Josie Alwyn (Editor), Catherine Fenton (Editor), Emma Attwell (Foreword by)

Overview

A-ha! Working through a topic or question, a shaft of sudden inspiration hits. The cloud of fragmented ideas and thoughts clear as a whole picture begins to form coherently in your mind. What you have now worked out - in an unexpected, exciting eureka moment - will stay with you forever. All teachers seek this experience for their students. Liz Attwell explores theories of education to argue that traditional teaching, 'filling buckets', must be replaced by dynamic, progressive teaching that promotes active learning - not just 'lighting a fire', but knowing how to lay the sticks and finding the matches too. This progressive approach seeks to create a basis for inner awakening and original insight, in order for students ultimately to come to their own a-ha moments. In A Drop of Light, Liz Attwell presents her original research into the phenomenon of a-ha moments, offering a theoretical background as well as practical advice to give teachers the tools, lesson plans, anecdotes and inspiration to bring living thinking to their own classrooms. Goethe's approach and Rudolf Steiner's pedagogical ideas make an important contribution, but Attwell advises that teachers following Steiner's philosophy should enter into dialogue with educators from other backgrounds. Working together, enlightened teachers around the world can help schools and colleges to become true learning communities.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781855845756
Publisher:	Rudolf Steiner Press
Publication date:	05/25/2020
Pages:	176
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Liz Attwell (1960-2019) taught English at Michael Hall School, Sussex, for fourteen years. She studied English literature at Exeter University followed by a PGCE training in secondary English and drama with Dorothy Heathcote at Newcastle University, where she was introduced to "Process" drama and the concept of handing "the mantle of the expert" back to students. She taught in a comprehensive school and, in 1986, took the Foundation Year at Emerson College, Sussex, followed by Dawn Langman's Speech and Drama course and a stint of teaching at Edinburgh Steiner School. During the 1990s, Liz raised her three children and helped to save and restructure Tablehurst Biodynamic Farm in Forest Row. She completed a training in education at Emerson College and began her work at Michael Hall, where she helped to introduce Continuing Professional Development and Theory U change management, while researching the interface between mainstream technique and the epistemology that underpins Waldorf Education for an MA in Creativity in Education at King's College, London.

Josie Alwyn was born in London in 1951 and lived most of her life amid the South Downs in Sussex. She was educated at Lewes Grammar School and Sussex University, graduating with an MA in English Renaissance Literature and Drama. Doctoral research led her deeper into the classical and medieval streams of thinking that flow into Shakespeare's writing, which introduced her to the work of Rudolf Steiner. The beginning of family life in 1984 opened vocational pathways into Steiner education, first in the Brighton Steiner School and at the London Waldorf Teacher Training Seminar with Brien Masters, then at Michael Hall Steiner School in Forest Row as Upper School English teacher. Josie is currently codirector of the London Waldorf Seminar and a Steiner-Waldorf Schools Fellowship adviser.

Table of Contents

Foreword 1

Introduction Towards Progressive Education 2

Part 1 The Essays

Chapter 1 Practising Goethean Science Whilst Studying English Literature or, Riding the Magic Carpet 7

Chapter 2 Two Modes of Thinking and Steiner's The Science of Knowing 20

Chapter 3 The Act of Knowing and the A-ha Moment in the Classroom 35

Chapter 4 Creating the Conditions for Living Thinking in the Twenty-first Century 49

Part 2 A Practical Guide

Cultivating the Conditions for A-ha Moments and Living Thinking in the Classroom 85

Part 3 The Diary

Introduction to the Diary of A Steiner Teacher 101

Elizabeth Barrett Attwell's Diary 105

Appendix 1 Compare and Contrast the construction of 'Otherness' in Frankenstein and Regeneration by Laura Manning 148

Appendix 2 Compare and contrast the significance of windows in Frankenstein and Wuthering Heights by India Ashe 150

'With Grace' Ellie Fuller 155

Notes 157

Bibliography 165