ABSTRACT
Waldorf/Steiner Education promotes social reform through a critical pedagogy based on a unique ethnopaediatric model of and for child development. Drawing on observational and interview data from a school-based study in the United States that refused to segregate medical and educational anthropology, and using various critical theory lenses (critical pedagogy, postcolonial theory, and biopedagogy), I explore tensions between teacher authority and the ideal of student freedom, as well as between the Waldorf Education system's social aims but private status. I demonstrate how apparent paradoxes within the Waldorf worldview self-resolve when seen in light of both the curriculum's underlying ethnopaediatric framework and some critical understandings of Waldorf Education itself. These understandings destabilise mainstream critical theory's definitions of ‘biopedagogy’, highlighting the question of which (whose) worlds to prioritise in scholarly pursuits. Moreover, findings suggest that accepting paradoxes in one's data – even seeking them out from the start or adopting an epistemological expectation of them at any new field site – holds great promise in terms of enabling us to better accommodate, ethnographically, the worldly nature of human being and becoming.
