News from Curative Education in Taiwan

A year ago the Association for Curative Education and Community Development was founded in Taiwan as an association for anthroposophical curative education, social therapy and related fields of work. At the turn of the year 2019/2020 Jan Göschel from the leadership team of the Council attended a board meeting and the first annual meeting of the still young association in Taichung. The meeting took place at the inclusive Chameidi Waldorf School, whose founder Yu-Ying Lu currently chairs the association. The two Council delegates from Taiwan, Hsiao-Ni Chen and June Yu, are also active on the Board.

Directly after the annual meeting, the participants of the Curative Education and Social Therapy Training cohort finishing in 2020 presented their project work, to which the participants of the following training course were also invited. This second group then immediately followed up with one of their course modules, accompanied by Becky Rutherford from Camphill Academy. Thus the New Year’s Week became a series of intertwining encounters of an large part of the curative education movement in Taiwan.

Conversations with Jan Göschel also took place on the sidelines at two universities, both of which have affiliated experimental Waldorf schools. At the renowned state National Tsinghua University there is a Centre for Waldorf Education in the Faculty of Education which is run by Prof. Horn-Fay Cherng and cooperates with the Seminar for Waldorf Education at the Free University in Stuttgart, the Waldorf Seminar Hamburg, the Institute for Waldorf Education, Inclusion and Interculturalism at the Alanus University in Mannheim and the Camphill Academy. The aim is to expand the curative education work on offer there, both in the training courses and in the inclusion and curative education development of the model school. At the private Mingdao University, a university with predominantly application-oriented bachelor’s and master’s programmes, inclusive educational concepts are also discussed – also in connection with the impulse of biodynamic agriculture, for which there is a small anchor in the Faculty of Sustainable Agriculture. June Yu, who teaches there, is particularly interested in developing a school concept that is closely linked to agriculture as a place of learning, a ‘farm school’.

It is also planned that the Association for Curative Education and Community Development in Taiwan will host a trainer and initiator conference for the Asia-Pacific region to be held in 2022 – probably on the campus of Mingdao University.