Overcoming Powerlessness -Building Shared Strength to Meet Shared Crisis - stART international in Crisis Zones.

• In Event: Harnessing Waldorf for Arts-based Trauma Pedagogy Across Borders: Opportunities & Challenges

Abstract

Purpose
Founded in 2008, stART international is a humanitarian emergency and development organization based on the principles of Waldorf education. The stART-team consists of experienced Waldorf pedagogues, therapists and artists with pedagogical/therapeutic knowledge and training in trauma-related subjects. A signature feature of the stART team is its transdisciplinary work with traumatized communities in national and international crisis zones to restore individual stability of children, youth and families and strengthen social coherence. Another is to engage in national and global social arts projects (Schiller, 2023&stART-international.org). From its founding up to 2025, the stART team has carried out over 200 emergency aid operations in countries ranging from Haiti and Libya to Ukraine, Philippines, Nepal and the Middle East and in its own country home of Germany and 11,000 people have had further training in courses and workshops by the organization's website report (stART-international.org). In their strategic design, the stART international team builds from the work of Waldorf founder Rudolf Steiner conjoined with thinking of the contemporary artist Joseph Heinrich Beuys (1921-1986), and the work of modern scientists including Levine (1997) and van der Kolk (2014) on resilience and trauma-therapy , to probe ways of “letting art teach” in the words of Beuys (Biesta 2017) . In their work, stART aims to transfer scientific knowledge into practical, mainly artistic tools for everyday educational and therapeutic work in a transdisciplinary fashion.

Specific focus of this paper is deep analysis of two stART YouTube Tutorials “Social Art” & Community & Partner Work” to examine how such a set of strategies moves from art therapy into art education curriculum, thereby bringing into education a key process under Eisner’s (2002) analysis as to collaborate is a key component of arts education as defined by Eisner (2002) and an explicit goal of the National Core Visual Arts Standards (NCCAS, 2015).

2.Theoretical Framework
The study employs the Conceptual Framework of Siegesmund et al (2024) , Tyack & Cuban (1995), Scott (1995), Labaree (2020), and Eisner (2002).

3. Methods
The study employs an organizational case study (see Yin, 2003) design.

4. Data Sources
Data sources include stART YouTube Tutorials; interviews with co- founder and Executive Director; curriculum materials; start data on requests for collaboration.

5. Results
While full data analysis is still underway, preliminary findings include the following:
Evidence of the power of the resilience-strengthening team building work supported by stART international and evidence the perceived high value of stART methods and practices signalled by the mounting requests for stART services in crisis zones across the globe.

6. Scholarly significance of the study
The study probes the bridge from artistic therapy to art education, further strengthening pathways for arts to move from periphery to core in Eisner’s words (Eisner 2002). Also, it invites further investigation into how, under the weight of collective crisis, the “grammar of schooling” (Tyack & Cuban, 1995) can begin to shift and its pillars adjust (Scott, 1995), to allow arts to be seen as ‘must have’ rather than ‘nice to have’ for adult and student learning.

Authors

• Ida Oberman, Alanus University of Arts and Social Sciences

• Barbara Schiller, stART Internationa E.V.