Where children naturally belong: colonialism, space, and pedagogy in Waldorf kindergartens

Abstract

ABSTRACT How do assumptions about where children naturally belong reinforce colonial productions of the human? This paper presents research from a study examining how North American Waldorf educators navigated the colonial legacies of common-sense understandings of childhood. I focus on the ideas about childhood that emerge in a belief that Waldorf kindergartens are ideal places for children. The pedagogical space of the Waldorf kindergarten is built on intuited assumptions about children being close to nature, family, and home. I bring together childhood studies and anticolonial theory to argue that these assumptions are not neutral or ahistorical, but instead originate in colonial stories of the human structured by settler geographies. This paper explores how relying on these assumptions ultimately meant that participants had to negotiate the racism and ableism embedded within their origins, illustrating larger implications for other educators who navigate dominant Western understandings of childhood that organise pedagogy and pedagogical spaces.