Northern CA Waldorf Teachers Conference 2026

Emergency Pedagogy for Everyday Trauma: How Emergency Pedagogy May Be Integrated into Our Teaching and Educational Structures to Support Today’s Children, with Keynote Speaker, Bernd Ruf

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Contemporary life in California and in the rest of the developed world has become increasingly engaged in nerve sense-based work and activities through digital technology. We have become more sedentary, using our bodies less and undermining the health that comes from the integration of body, heart, and mind. Through online platforms, we are exposed daily to apps and algorithms that manipulate us emotionally and physiologically, reducing our ability to focus and to have mastery over our own minds and feelings. In many ways, the amazing advances and discoveries of our time are having overwhelming and compromising effects on human well-being. These effects are being absorbed by children, accumulating into a kind of everyday trauma.

As Waldorf teachers, our work evolves and changes in relation to the environment around us. Children entering our classrooms are expressing the conditions of modern life, making it crucial to adjust our educational practices to meet them where they are and to find ways of guiding them in a more positive direction. Bernd will share his many years of experience in helping children traumatized by war and natural disasters, demonstrating how the principles and practices of emergency pedagogy may be useful in contemporary Waldorf teaching and school life.