My journey into Steiner Education started before I was born, when my Dad and his sisters came to Australia in the late 60’s from Hong Kong. As a 9 year old, my father landed in Sydney and began attending a Steiner school which he describes as “an eye opening, truly magnificent school with master teachers and beautiful, down to earth people, who never discriminate”.

For myself growing up, I was inspired by the adults around me, the recorder makers, the ceramists, the felt hat makers, the sound healers and my mum, who was an early childhood educator. These influences led me to studying Steiner Education and completing a degree in Teaching in Darwin, NT in 2008.

My first work as a teacher was on Galiwinku (Elcho Island) in the Northern Territory, in a First Nations community where the people speak Yolngu, Bahasa Indonesian, as well as other First Nation dialects and English. I taught the senior students, but really they taught me, about their spiritual and cultural life- dancing, singing, ceremony, stories, cyclic seasonal acknowledgments of nature, food, painting and weaving. It all resonated with what I love about life and it felt health giving.

When I left, I spent the next 6 years touring music through remote Australia and in between tours teaching at Sophia Mundi and Collingwood College, as well as continuing learning from my anthroposophical colleagues and mentors.

To me Steiner education is a deeply nourishing curriculum that supports the unfolding of each human being at different stages of life. Everything we do has a purpose. We don’t learn instruments to become musicians we learn them to assist the right and left spheres of the body develop, singing helps with our breathing and lung growth. We are not trying to create artists through drawing and painting and knitting, we are trying to support the brain neuron’s blossom and calm the nervous systems of the children, who like us adults, live in an increasingly busy world full of all kinds of external pressures.

It’s a privilege to teach the Steiner curriculum, all areas are endlessly inspiring, and I feel deeply grateful for all the relationships I have formed with my past and present families, students, teachers, colleagues and mentors.

- Jess 

Class Four Teacher