The Anthroposophy device: the case of Waldorf pedagogy in Brazil
Using a Foucauldian genealogical approach, this research looks at Waldorf pedagogy, one of the strands of anthroposophy, the "spiritual science" created by Rudolf Steiner at the end of the 19th century. Having arrived in Brazil in 1956 at the hands of a German couple who had emigrated to São Paulo - Melanie and Hans Schmidt - Waldorf pedagogy has seen an enormous growth in the number of schools and students in the country. In fact, the first Waldorf school in Brazil, the Higienópolis School, started with less than fifty students, but by 2019, this number had passed seventeen thousand, distributed in almost three hundred schools. In this sense, understanding that the field of social relations - including that in which school education takes place, between teachers and students and between those responsible and educational institutions', for example - is permeated by unequal power relations and by techniques that reflect the dynamics of power and knowledge, this documentary and bibliographical research aims to answer the question: what discursive technologies can explain the vigorous growth of Waldorf pedagogy in Brazil over the last six decades?