Course Tutor:
The Heart Spaces course is a year-long, part-time program that takes place on Saturday afternoons online. There are eight sessions per term for four terms. There are 32 sessions of 3 hours each and fees are $1680 per year ($420 per term). To help build social hubs you are encouraged to form small geographical clusters and attend online sessions together.
This course offers a nurturing space to develop as a creative, authentic educator and parent through a range of experiential learning techniques, groupwork, discussions, facilitated processes, lectures and reflections. It also serves as professional development for experienced educators to renew and recharge their forces. It provides very practical and imaginative essences of Rudolf Steiner’s insights into human development.It facilitates the development of creative storytelling skills over four major projects.
You are provided with opportunities to develop skills in a variety of crafts such as dollmaking, puppetry, felting, silk dyeing, papercrafts, making moving pictures and shadow theatre. We regularly practise movement, singing, painting, drawing and claywork.
More than 85 % of our graduates have either found work in Steiner Early Childhood settings, Family Day Care or Bush kinder. Some were in mainstream settings already and have transformed the way they work with children. Others are involved in Steiner educational roles, further training, or in community child care services.
The program is run by Carol Liknaitzky, who has been an adult educator for the past 40 years, and has extensive experience in the early childhood sector, human and child rights and works in a variety of settings including universities and remote communities in Africa and Australia. She has been running the Heart Spaces Course in Australia for the past 10 years. For more information and to enrol please go to: https://www.heartspaces.com.au/early-childhood-courses
Testimonials
‘One may think one is enrolling in a child-study course, but it is so much more than that. It is a place of playful, yet deeply reflective self-learning and understanding - inner work can actually be fun, pleasurable, creative, engaging and socially inclusive! On the way to discovering the joys of relating with children, I feel I have uncovered and retrieved my own happy and vital inner child - the greatest blessing.’ (SL: 2020)
‘Carol presents Steiner Education in a way that is relevant for our current world. Her course is a breath of fresh air that prepares us to meet the challenges of our time with courage in our hearts.’ (RB: 2020)
The nuts and bolts of the course
- Open and accessible to anyone, parent or educator who wishes to take this journey
- Each term has 8 Saturdays of 3 hours each with content, exercises and group discussions
- Attendance at least 80% of the course and all projects completed for certificate
- The Heart Spaces Early Childhood course fee: $1680 per annum ($420 per term)
Course content
Term 1: Understanding the essentials of how young children develop and learn and what supports whole child development in a healthy way.
- Holistic approach to Early Childhood and the 3-fold and 4-fold windows of human development
- Listening to Nature Speaking
- Learning through Play
- Storytelling 101: Creating a nature based original story for very young children with felted puppets
Self-development: The principles of being a responsive, respectful, reflective and creative educator.
Activities: Felting, Claywork
Term 2: Setting the scene
- Nourishing the senses and creating an enabling environment for children
- Music and movement
- Language - expressing, connecting
- Child Contemplation – deep observation exercise
- Storytelling 102 Create an original story with songs and rhymes using a moving picture
Self-development: Developing self-confidence and embodying learning and insights in movement.
Activities: Making a moving picture.
Term 3: Knowing myself
- My life story, my gifts and challenges
- Healing my inner child/releasing my creative self
- Working as a team member/group dynamics
- Seven qualities of adult behaviour
- Learning deep listening skills
- Storytelling 103: The fairy tale, as a path of development for the soul. Create a healing tale for challenging behaviour for one of the children you are with.
Self-development: The principles of building partnerships, welcoming diversity, understanding the self.
Activities: Making a shadow theatre, props, sets and puppets for the original story
Term 4: Going beyond: macrocosm - microcosm
- What happens when we/children sleep?
- The pathway between death and a new birth
- The education process from Class 1 onwards as a mirror of the cultural development of humanity
- How to create circles, celebrations, festivals, including birthdays in different contexts
- The connection between the Earth’s evolutionary process and humankind
- The mission of illness
- Helpful meditation exercises for overcoming stress and nervousness
- Creating a new ritual/celebration with story, song, poetry, movement towards a new dreaming
Self-development: The importance of Self-care, nourishing our well-being and finding balance. Weekly journal entries on insights, learnings and research questions from the sessions and readings.
Activities: painting, papercraft