Schooling through the Artistic Process of Learning

Celebrating the End of TSHE and the Continuing Journey of Kairos

By Karine Munk Finser

This summer marked a significant transition for us: the graduation of the seventh and final cohort of Antioch University’s Transdisciplinary Studies in Healing Education (TSHE) program, which I had the privilege of directing since 2014.

TSHE grew in close collaboration with Camphill’s Academy. From the beginning, Camphill teachers brought their experience and wisdom to the program: Jan Goeschel and Rüdiger Janisch in the early years, followed by the late Carsten Callesen. We invited Becky Rutherford, Penelope Baring, Maria van den Berg, and many others. Over the years, TSHE became a place where education, healing, art, and human development could meet. We were fortunate to learn from wonderful teachers, including Jaap van der Wal, Michaela Gloeckler, Torin Finser, Signe Motter, Tonya Stoddard, James Dyson, Lakshmi Prasanna, Bernd Ruf, and many others over the years.

It has been my privilege as Director to teach so many students and to experience how each cohort received the same core curriculum, while also benefiting from different special instructors. TSHE grew into a school for the deepening of the soul in preparation for human encounter. Our students came to us from many walks of life: Camphill, Waldorf education, the arts, therapy, and community building, all unified by the wish to work with active, empathetic practices.

TSHE helped inspire the creation of the CfA’s Kairos Institute Art Therapy Program, which began in 2022. Many TSHE graduates have gone on to study at Kairos, and six of this year’s graduates are currently Kairos students.

What connects these two programs?

Perhaps it is the conviction that education is not simply about filling human beings with more knowledge. It is about creating the conditions in which new capacities and new life forces can arise within us—and therefore within our encounters with one another. In Kairos, this happens through schooling in Art Therapy and working with the competencies of iARTe, Medical Section, Goetheanum. TSHE, in turn, prepares students to take on leadership and innovation, renewing our communities with healing impulses. Both programs include training in becoming trauma-informed, trauma-sensitive, and trauma-responsive.

Healing in a World of Need

The fourteen TSHE graduates brought these transformative capacities into their human encounters. The evening before their graduation, they shared artwork, poetry, and eurythmy. Their joy was infectious, and they ended the evening with a South African song of prayer that filled the room with warmth and gratitude.

The following day, they walked up the stairs to the Pine Hill stage to receive their stoles and congratulatory cards. They have one final class and capstone to complete before receiving their M.Ed.

Transformative Schooling

Both programs ask something of the student beyond acquiring concepts and professional skills. They ask students to school themselves—to develop capacities to perceive, to encounter, and to respond.

We have learned that the heart will become an organ of perception and that, in the future for which we are preparing now, we will not be able to walk by someone who is suffering without wanting to do something. The heart will be the place where thinking, feeling, willing, and moral intuition unify. When the intellect is warmed and transformed by the heart, knowledge can become wisdom. Perception can become relationship. And relationship can become responsibility: service based on love for humanity.

The world needs this kind of education. It needs human beings who can bring knowledge together with compassion; who can meet suffering without turning away; who can perceive the living qualities within nature and within another human being; and who recognize that their own inner development can become a source of healing.

As one program comes to a close, another continues to grow.

We are grateful for all that TSHE has signified for so many, and for the many people whose lives and work have been shaped by this program. And we are excited to welcome a small number of new students into Kairos: people with a background in art, whether as Waldorf teachers, artists, healing educators, or others who feel called to develop themselves toward the work of art therapy.

You are warmly invited to join us. The next public offering is The Organic and Psychospiritual Basis of Mental Health with Dr. James Dyson — four Saturday afternoons beginning September 26, details and registration here. This year’s Kairos sessions open to the public, and the form to register for any of them, are here.

There is no commitment to join the program. Feel welcome to come greet us!