An Acesta Inclusive Symposium

The Agenda

• 11am Registration
• 12.45pm Lunch
• 2 pm Festive introductions of the Section Leaders in Foundation Room
• 5pm A gift performance of ‘The Cat who Taught the Seagull to Fly’ by Pericles Theatre Company for the New Leaders (this performance will be in Ruskin Hall)
• 6.15pm Supper
• 7.30pm Aonghus Gordon will be giving an address ‘Rudolf Steiner Britain, the Scorpion and the Dove’ (this talk will be in Ruskin Hall)

Booking

The whole day conference fee with both meals and both performances is £54.50 – click here to book this option.

Conference Fee only (no meals) £25.00 – click here to book this option.

Each Performance is £10 on the door.

Anyone wishing to book ad hoc meals please call Emerson Reception (01342 822238) 24hrs before.

The Speakers

Background

ACESTA members have been looking at the work of social care and therapeutic education from multidisciplinary points of view and as a lens for a renewed understanding of the themes, troubles and attitudes we are meeting in our time and places. Over the last 10 years or so, we endeavoured to create occasions and platforms for many outstanding and very different people and professionals to come and work together, creating links between the Society, the School of Spiritual Science and the many different streams and ways of working in care and social therapeutic education as well as those in our care themselves.

The need to look at our world in multidisciplinary ways is of course not an isolated issue just for people engaged in Anthroposophical Care, Education and Social Therapy, but more and more a recognised fact of modern life.  At the same time the recognition of the need for bringing together conscious inner and meditative development with professional life is likewise no longer either exclusive or any the less important as time goes on.

The questions whether Social Therapy and Therapeutic Education did not solely belong to the Medical Section of the School of Spiritual Science, and where our work did belong, have occupied many people for quite some time over the last decades. Social Therapy and Therapeutic Education is a multifaceted happening: in special schools, colleges, villages, in various forms and organisations, social farms, gardens, theatres, cafes, bakeries, shops, cottage-industry or factories, in all the many different performing and artistic activities, crafts, sports and physical therapeutic activities etc. Recently Biodynamic social and educational therapeutic work has come to prominence as never before.

Often out of acute suffering, something new is born; Rudolf Steiner’s extraordinary gifts after the burning of the Goetheanum brought about the many practical movements and applications we have been celebrating these months and years: the new vocations for the healing of the human being, of the Earth, nature, the cosmos and their interrelationships. He gave advice and sometimes up to 5 lectures a day to all the different professional groups: doctors, priests, teachers, artists, scientists, special needs teachers and therapists; also to the members of the newly formed society after the Christmas Meeting when he gave the Foundation Stone Meditation, the karma lectures and the class lessons.

100 years on we can only stand astonished and awed at what one human being was able to accomplish in so short a period of time. May we be able to show our gratitude and hear his call, take into our hearts and souls the warmth and clarity needed to follow the path he tread before us: of healing, understanding and warm interest, finding and founding new living thoughts, arts, disciplines, relationships and responsibilities right across the board, across peoples, religions, continents, time and space.