Waldorf World Languages & Cultures Teacher Education

Sunbridge Institute’s Waldorf World Languages & Cultures Teacher Education certificate program is a short-term certificate program for current or aspiring grades 1-8 Waldorf world language educators. The program is designed to equip these educators with the tools needed to implement Waldorf-appropriate methodologies in their classrooms and to successfully blend those methodologies with the latest and most research-based methodologies in the facilitation of languages—including methodologies that have the delivery of CI (Comprehensible Input) at their core.

The program consists of a three-week, on-campus summer session, with a one-week observation of an experienced Waldorf world language educator required by the following June.

Participants will have the opportunity to play the role of a student in a Waldorf-appropriate and acquisition-driven Spanish classroom—half the time as an early grades student, half as a middle school student—with program director Constanza Ontaneda, MA, serving as your language teacher. This will give you the unique opportunity to observe how to approach language instruction as a teacher (regardless of the language you are or will be teaching), while at the same time experience language learning from the vantage point of a grades student at different stages of development.

You will familiarize yourself with The Six Principles of Language Acquisition and understand why it is imperative to have those as the foundation of your practice. You will also explore the non-academic aspects of being a Waldorf world language educator, delving into topics such as festivals, field trips, DEI-informed pedagogy, trauma-informed pedagogy, best SEL practices, classroom and time management, facilitating language for different levels within the same class, giftedness, and twice exceptionality.

A full AWSNA-member institute serving the Waldorf movement since 1967, Sunbridge Institute is located on the campus of the historic Threefold Educational Foundation in New York’s Hudson Valley.