Bernd Ruf co-founded the Waldorf School in Karlsruhe, where he also taught for 20 years. He is Director of the Parzifal Centre, a special needs education centre, and Managing Director of aid organisation Friends of Waldorf Education, where he heads emergency education crisis interventions in war and disaster zones. He lectures around the world.
Waldorf Today, March 14, 2022Our book reviews are arranged many
weeks in advance. I had no way of knowing that current events in
Europe would make the review of Educating Traumatized Children all
the more relevant.
Teachers and parents will both sense the relevance of this book in
the modern educational landscape. Trauma, much as we might hope to
relegate it to the purview of special educators and therapists, has
become a daily facet of life.
Gone are the days when only one or two children in a class were in
need of "special help."
Bernd Ruf found his calling at the time of the 2006 Lebanon War.
Since then he has facilitated the development of "Emergency
Education." He and teams of teachers, doctors, psychologists, and
therapists have taken part in crisis interventions around the
world. They work with psychologically traumatized children and
young people in war zones and disaster areas.
Bernd Ruf presents an anthroposophical understanding of trauma
itself. There is a an extensive examination of psychological trauma
and healing the frozenness of trauma. The book contains many
vignettes of their trauma work and concludes with emergency
education as threshold education.
Although the book is written primarily out of the experience of
emergency educators in trauma situations, I would imagine that many
classroom teachers and parents would find much they recognize in
their "normal" world.
Five stars. Great book.--David Kennedy, Waldorf Today
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