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>Waldorf School Science Teachers endeavour to create within the students a sense of wonder, both for the world and its environments and for the creative place of the human being within this world.
Teachers use the content of evolution, scientific thought and discovery as a training of students' individual powers of judgement and discernment and, in general, to assist them to see Science as a pursuit of truth.
They strive to enable the students, to understand more fully the natural and technological processes of which they are a part, so that they can participate more fully and responsibly in life and society, and to provide opportunities for students to gain practical skills in the use and operation of significant areas of science and technology.
The content is taught over three or four weeks in a classroom setting (Main Lesson). The method is unique to Waldorf schools where the theme is taken up each morning for 110 minutes. This time is divided up into three main stages, each having a different activity. A new topic begins with class participatory experiments, descriptions or drawings led by the teacher at first. Here the aim is to prepare the content in such a way that each student has a rich significant biographic experience, free from explanation.
A second stage of the lesson is where the experience is recalled and characterised, but again not explained. A description and perhaps drawing of the event or experience is expected of the students, beginning in the lesson and then finished for homework. The explanatory, conceptual work only happens on the subsequent day so that there has been a gap between the experience and judgement process leading to a concept. This is come to via a process of question and discussion, which connects the content as widely as possible, back to the world and to human life. The question activity is important in the process and the students are expected to bring the experiences of the previous day now into an integrated connection. This demands of them activity not passivity in their thinking.
The afternoon laboratory lessons are devoted to the activities
of the limbs, in particular bringing the order of thinking into
the limb activity chaos. The classes are run not with a teacher
standing at the front, but within the room, participating and helping
the students with their own projects which might be glass blowing
in the lab, winding a wire coil or painting a plant landscape in
the bush. Here the thought process precedes the activity … as
a plan, a sketch, or a guide for the physical activity. The emphasis
is on the bringing of conscious thought activity into the more
unconscious, process of physical will.