Creative ‘Stuff’ in the Steiner Kindergarten: How Steiner Educators Understand the Art Materials They Work With

Abstract

This chapter focuses on the ‘stuff’ that is used in Steiner early years settings to facilitate young children’s creative expression. I apply a social semiotic lens to this investigation, considering the affordances of popular materials in Steiner classrooms, while also drawing on the post human concept of entanglement, which highlights the constant intra-action between human and non-human agents in the creative process. I report data from an interview study with three Steiner kindergarten teachers, in which they shared and explained the materials that were most important to them in the creative expression of the children that they worked with. Their responses demonstrate how the Steiner vision positions some materials as helping children to maintain a dreamy state of being, while others are perceived as prompting a damaging premature intellectual awakening. The findings also show how Steiner practitioners have a special vocabulary around materials that helps them to make inspiring points of connection between the cosmic and the mundane in their work with children.