Educating Traumatized Children

Bernd Ruf

ISBN 10: 158420155X / ISBN 13: 9781584201557

Published by SteinerBooks, Inc, US, 2014

About this Item

Since 2006, international relief organisation Friends of Waldorf Education (FWE) has partnered with Steiner-Waldorf doctors, psychologists and therapists to carry out emergency education crisis interventions around the world. They've worked with traumatised children and young people in war zones and disaster areas in many countries, including Lebanon, China, the Gaza Strip, Indonesia, Haiti, Kyrgyzstan and most recently Japan, following the tsunami and nuclear disaster there.In this important book, FWE head Bernd Ruf explains what the organisation does, and how the principles of Rudolf Steiner's anthroposophy are put into practice in such challenging situations. He focuses especially on their work in Japan, exploring processes and experiences, including the anthroposophical understanding of trauma itself.Educating Traumatized Children offers much-needed insight into their little-known area of education and healing for traumatised children. This book will be valuable not only for those working in disaster and conflict areas, but for any teacher or parent who is caring for a traumatised child.

Seller Inventory # LU-9781584201557

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Educating Traumatized Children
• Publisher: SteinerBooks, Inc, US
• Publication Date: 2014
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 158420155X
• ISBN 13: 9781584201557
• Binding: Paperback
• Condition: New

About this title

Synopsis

“Emergency education relies on timeliness―on intervention at an early stage, at a time when silence, despondency, despair, and regression begin to set in. Emergency education is not trauma therapy. It is pedagogical prevention of trauma in the early stages of a crisis, and as such it attempts to ‘prevent certain developments by cultivating the right attitude and taking the right actions.... Our actions invite the benignity of the gods’ (Ita Wegman).” (from the preface)

Since 2006, specialists, doctors, psychologists, and therapists of Parzival-Zentrum Karlsruhe have taken part in emergency education crisis interventions, carried out by the organization Friends of Friends of Waldorf Education. They work with psychologically traumatized children and young people in war zones and disaster areas, including Lebanon, China, the Gaza Strip, Indonesia, Haiti, Kyrgyzstan, and most recently in Japan following the tsunami there and the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster.

Bernd Ruf, who heads these operations, describes in his book in various ways the basics of anthroposophically extended “emergency education,” including the anthroposophic understanding of trauma itself. In addition, he describes processes and experiences, focusing on recent experiences in Japan at the center of his descriptions.

Educating Traumatized Children offers much-needed insight into this little-known area of education and healing for traumatized children and young people. This book will be valuable not only for those working in areas of disaster and armed conflict, but also for any teacher or parent who is teaching or caring for a traumatized child.

“How do we proceed with such important matters so that, by cultivating the right attitude and taking the right actions, we might even prevent certain developments? Because that also is part of our task since Anthroposophy would be meaningless if we only practiced it privately for ourselves.” ― Ita Wegman (1933)

This volume is a translation from German of Trümmer und Traumata. Anthroposophische Grundlagen notfallpädagogischer Einsätze, Verlag des Ita Wegman Instituts, 2012.

About the Author

Peter Selg studied medicine in Witten-Herdecke, Zurich, and Berlin and, until 2000, worked as the head physician of the juvenile psychiatry department of Herdecke Hospital in Germany. Dr. Selg is director of the Ita Wegman Institute for Basic Research into Anthroposophy (Arlesheim, Switzerland), professor of medicine at the Alanus University of Arts and Social Sciences (Germany), and co-leader of the General Anthroposophical Section at the Goetheanum. He is the author of numerous books on Rudolf Steiner, anthroposophy, medical ethics, and the development of culture and consciousness.