The Story of How the Taproot Teacher Training Began

EP81: Listen in as Jean talks with her mentor, Barbara Dewey of Waldorf Without Walls, about the story of how the Taproot Teacher Training for homeschoolers began back on Barbara's farm in 2007.  This summer training has been life changing for so many people. And for the past 16 years, it's honestly one of our favorite weekends of the year!

Find the Show Notes Here (www.artofhomeschooling.com/episode81)

Find details about the Taproot Teacher Training for homeschoolers here (www.artofhomeschooling.com/taproot)

Transcript

Jean Miller, Host 0:09

You're listening to the Art of Homeschooling podcast, where we help parents cultivate creativity and connection at home. I'm your host, Jean Miller, and here on this podcast, you'll find stories and inspiration to bring you the confidence you need to make homeschooling work for your family. Let's begin. Today I'm so happy to be joined by my mentor, Barbara Dewey, and we are talking all about the story of the Taproot Teacher Training. This summer training has been life-changing for so many people, and for the past 16 years, it's honestly been one of my favorite weekends of the year. So welcome back to the podcast, Barbara. Hello. Hi, Gene. It's good to be here. It's so great to have you. Barbara and I chatted way back in episode two here on the podcast. I had a conversation with my mentor when I first started out. And you can go listen to that. I'll put a link to it in the show notes if you're interested.

Jean introduces her guest and mentor, Barbara

Jean Miller, Host 1:42

I am going to give a quick intro to Barbara, and then we will dive in. So Barbara Dewey of Waldorf Without Walls consults with homeschooling families throughout the world, writes publications, provides training workshops, and spends her spare time enjoying her unique solar home and developing her farmland. Barbara, a master gardener, and her husband Quimby, a forest entomologist, lead workshops and field days on the environment and backyard food production. She is the mother four, grandmother of six. Do I have that right? And great-grandmother of two. Barbara holds an MS in Waldorf Education from the Waldorf Institute of Sunbridge College in Spring Valley, New York. And she's been teaching in various settings since 1960.

Barbara is the matriarch of Waldorf homeschooling

Jean Miller, Host 2:43

So impressive, Barbara. And most importantly, I think of you, I would describe you as really the matriarch of the Waldorf homeschooling movement. Because you were, as far as I know, you were the first consultant to homeschoolers.

unknown 3:02

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 3:02

I think so. I almost got kicked out of the teacher training at Sunbridge because I told them that's what I was going to do. And of course, homeschooling was a no-no.

Jean Miller, Host 3:12

It's so interesting how it's changed over the years because I had similar experiences at Waldorf homeschooling conferences where teachers were presenting, but you know, and they were accepting that we were trying to do this at home, but it wasn't fully embraced. Yeah. And it has changed so much over the years, which I am very happy to report.

Barbara describes her Taproot Teacher Training weekend

Jean Miller, Host 3:38

So, Barbara, I'm so excited to talk to you about Taproot today because you really started it all, right? So let's first describe to the listeners what is the Taproot Teacher Training? How would you describe it?

SPEAKER_01 3:55

Well, it's a chance for parents who are homeschooling with Waldorf philosophy to get together for a weekend with people who have some experience doing it over the years and compare notes and get ideas and make them realize that home is doesn't have to be a classroom. And how many things that are done in a Waldorf classroom are better done in a home because you have the real things right there to do it. For instance, making change and using money.

Jean Miller, Host 4:43

So much of those real life experiences we can weave in, right? And that's what one of the things I love so much about the Waldorf approach is that it's so hands-on, it's so experiential. Yeah. And so

Jean shares what Taproot is to her

Jean Miller, Host 4:57

to me, the Taproot Teacher Training is this lovely long weekend, right? A gathering of kindred souls, lots of fun. There's always so much laughter, which is really great. And I look at it as a combination of a retreat, time away from your usual. So a retreat, a homeschool training, and summer camp, all rolled into one. That's how I like to picture it. Yeah. So over 16 years ago, a wonderful group of parents gathered at Barbara's Taproot Farm for the very first ever Taproot Teacher training. And I think from the beginning, we've had it from really Thursday through Sunday, right? Like a long weekend. And parents get to be the student for once. Yeah, and it's always been a small group. As we're recording this, one of the things that we are so excited about is that this year in 2022, we will be back in person at Camp Asbury in Hiram, Ohio, for the first time in three years, which is just going to be so joyful. But even from the beginning, it's been a pretty small group. I mean, this year we might get upwards of, you know, maybe 50 people, including the presenters. But on Barbara's farm, we were around maybe 20.

SPEAKER_01 6:30

We were limited to 20, plus the presenters, but they had to sleep on the floor on mats, some of them, when we had 20.

Jean Miller, Host 6:39

Yeah. So when we when we first started at Barbara's farm, it was an even smaller group, and it was truly farm life, right? Like we would get up and go gather eggs from the chickens and you know, hike down by the pond. That was always a really, really fun experience.

Jean asks Barbara what inspired her to start Taproot

Jean Miller, Host 6:59

So my question for you, Barbara, is what inspired you to start this training?

SPEAKER_01 7:06

Well, there we needed a training for homeschooling parents because the experience that a lot of people, including Jean, had going to Sunbridge or the one in Ann Arbor or the one in Boulder, they were speaking to people who had a classroom with 24 children. And when the homeschoolers asked questions that involved homeschooling, the teachers had no idea how to answer them because it was not part of their experience. So at one point, Gene Campbell had a small training for parents at Toronto Waldorf School. And we slept on kindergarten mats in the kindergarten for that, unless we paid for a rather expensive hotel. And even the presenters were sleeping on mats in the kindergarten room.

Jean Miller, Host 8:01

I remember that experience.

SPEAKER_01 8:13

So after doing that with Jean for a couple of years, and not many Americans could go, it was a little easier to get across the border then than it is now. No way could you do it now. But she agreed that if if I presented at hers and she presented at mine, we wouldn't charge each other. So I started one on our farm that made it easier for Americans to come to. And they slept, some of them had beds, and some of them brought tents, and some of them just slept on mats on the floor and in one of the houses. We did have three houses available here. My own house and my daughter's house, and she wasn't living there at the time, and my son's house, who wasn't living there at the time either. So we did have a fair amount of space, but it still didn't sleep 25 or 30 people. Yeah. Yeah. We had we we cooked our own meals. Everybody had KP duty. We had a kitchen manager usually. The first few years, it was my granddaughter, who is now a chaplain in the Navy. Full duty, she starts this weekend. Wow. So that's where she has gone, of course, a lot of years, 16 years. She's 32 years old now and is a minister in the Unitarian church and and now a chaplain in the Navy. But she was our kitchen manager and she made sure everybody came to KP and that they cleaned up afterwards and all that stuff.

Jean Miller, Host 9:52

Yeah. I remember one summer my daughter Lila came and cleared. She did it. Yeah, she she did it with was it with Robin? I think so. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 10:03

Yeah. That those were the days.

Jean Miller, Host 10:06

Those were the days. So much fun. And I was not a presenter the first year. I came actually as a participant that very first year when Jean Campbell came. And then the next year I became a presenter, presenting some workshops about the grades. And there really was a need and continues to be, I think, a need for a training aimed at homeschoolers as opposed to classroom teachers.

Homeschoolers as facilitators rather than teachers

Jean Miller, Host 10:36

Because homeschooling is not school at home. It's very different, I think, than education, not schooling. That's exactly. You know what? I say that to so many homeschooling parents I talk to in my one-on-one sessions and in my in my membership. I love to say instead of describing ourselves as teachers, let's think of ourselves as our job is to facilitate activities, experiences. It's really much more about experiential learning because I think when we start thinking, okay, we're going to teach this thing, then we get very controlling.

SPEAKER_01 11:17

And your kids go.

Jean Miller, Host 11:19

Yeah, they do. They just gloss over, their eyes gloss over, and they they aren't uh they aren't as engaged. And that's one of the things that has drawn me so much to the Waldorf approach from the beginning is this idea of the lively arts and that we can bring in poetry and music and movement and painting and drawing and all storytelling, all of these very active and engaging ways of bringing the learning. And that's the magic of Taproot is that the parents get to experience that for once. Instead of reading about it on a page and then trying to do it with your child, come to Taproot and we can be the teacher and you could be the student for once. Yeah, beautiful thing. So we talked about starting in the summer of 2007. I think there were some years. I remember one year where there were only seven participants. Do you remember that? Yeah, we couldn't even pay ourselves. It's crazy. So Barbara had the training on her farm for, I should have looked this up, but at least what, 10 years, nine years? Yeah, it was about nine or ten.

SPEAKER_01 12:31

I'm I don't remember either.

Jean Miller, Host 12:33

Yeah. And then we moved to the Cuyahoga Valley Environmental Education Center. So Barbara and I both live in Ohio. She lives more in central Ohio, and I'm up in Cleveland on Lake Erie. So we moved to the Cuyahoga Valley, which is in between us. And then we were there for three years, I think. Yep. And then we moved to Camp Asbury in Hiram. And a camp, a summer camp, is such a perfect spot for us. So we are so excited to go back there this year for the first time in three years because we've been online during this pandemic. And now we're going back to

Favorite memories from past Taproot weekends

Jean Miller, Host 13:14

camp. So let's talk about some favorite memories. What are your some of your favorite memories or moments from Taproots past that come to mind?

SPEAKER_01 13:27

Well, one I think is getting up in the morning and picking lettuce and tomatoes and things like that for our meals, because we have big gardens here. Another one is one of our presenters now, whose oldest child is going to college this year, came one of those first years with her infant and three other children, and they camped up on top of the hill, and she washed out diapers under a pitcher pump. And now she's one of our best presenters, and just has so much experience with homeschooling. It's just amazing. Yeah. So that's a happy memory.

Jean Miller, Host 14:12

And that baby is probably the one who volunteers to be the student in her demonstration videos, which is so much fun. Many, many things.

SPEAKER_01 14:24

Yeah, he's about 12, 13, 14 years old, something like that.

Jean Miller, Host 14:29

Yeah, yeah. So that's Rebecca. And it's great to have her on board because she is so good at teaching math and science. And I tend toward the language arts and history, right? So that's really fun. And I remember one summer when your dog star got skunked. And we're trying to keep star out of the farmhouse and the barn and the and the solar house and and star would have nothing to do with that. So I think we all smelled like skunk that whole weekend.

SPEAKER_01 15:06

It didn't go away.

Jean Miller, Host 15:09

Didn't go away. And I there's so many things about taproot, but I love getting up early. And this is true even now at Camp Asbury. Just getting up early and going outside at your place. It was out on the front porch of the farmhouse. And at Camp Asbury, there's a beautiful deck off the retreat center overlooking the forest and the and the fields, and there's a lake. Beautiful. Go out there with more a morning cup of coffee. It's so much fun. And then for me, the big circles, the morning circle that we do with the whole group is so incredibly magical and opportunities to sing beautiful rounds and do spiral walks and all kinds of wonderful fun activities. Yeah. And of course, yoga and nature walks and campfires and all the amazing workshops, which are really, really a beautiful thing. And we have such an amazing team now. We have a Taproot team of I think a dozen people, including presenters and assistants. Yep. Yeah. So that has grown over the years. And almost everyone on the team originally came to Taproot as a parent, right? As a homeschooling parent. Yeah. As a homeschooling parent. So that's that's so wonderful.

Jean asks Barbara what she loves the most about Taproot

Jean Miller, Host 16:28

So what do you love the most about Taproot?

SPEAKER_01 16:31

Just seeing people feel better about themselves and what they're doing and how they're doing it. It's so easy as a parent to just feel like, oh, I'm not very good at this. And oh, but they kind of boost each other up and laugh at each other's mistakes and and just have a really good time doing it. And I think that's what means as much as the learning that takes place, is the camaraderie among these people.

Jean Miller, Host 17:03

Yes. Oh my gosh. And and then, as you as you mentioned, a sense of confidence that comes from really mostly realizing that there's no one right way to do this, right? There's so many ways to bring these wonderful activities to your home and to gather with parents from, I mean, we've had parents as far away as Washington State, Puerto Rico, California, British Columbia, you know, all over uh North America. And it is quite a gathering. And by the end of the weekend, that's so true. I think there's almost a transformation that people experience in their own journey as the leader in their families, right? And in their homeschools. Yeah, such a beautiful thing. Well,

Jean shares what Barbara is presenting at Taproot 2022

Jean Miller, Host 17:59

so for Taproot 2022, if you if those of you listening are listening in real time, we're recording this in the spring of 2022. And Barbara will be presenting workshops on kindergarten, on learning to read, which is a huge question that people often have learning to read the Waldorf Way. She's helping out with an astronomy workshop for the whole family. And I'm so excited that Quimby is coming. Your husband Quimby, he's the one that one of the ones. Yes. So great. And then, of course, gardening and food production, which is something that Barbara has such a strong passion for. Doing gardening with children. And I'll be doing language, arts, and history for the earlier grades, grades one through four, grades five through eight. I'll be doing Book Hearth with Allison, where we build a whole block around one book. That's so much fun to do. And then homeschooling high school because we've been getting so many questions about that. And that's

How Taproot workshops have evolved

Jean Miller, Host 18:59

one of the ways I think I'd love to hear your reflections on this, Barbara, too. One of the ways I think Taproot has evolved over the years, through the years, is that we've come to, we've moved away from doing each grade in its own individual silo to really looking at the family unit because so many of us have multiple ages, right? So how can we combine some blocks? How can we homeschool multiple ages at the same time without separately preparing for each individual grade? I think that's so important for the home setting.

SPEAKER_01 19:39

It definitely it's just so hard. Well, it's impossible to memorize if you have five children, you're gonna memorize five stories and you're gonna have five lessons, and what's the little one gonna be doing while you're teaching your sixth grader? Yes. You know, you just can't do you just can't do it that way. But you can do a really successful program by combining a lot of things and exposing your younger ones to things maybe a little early, and having your older ones put up with the little ones to do something else for them, yeah, that makes them less selfish about what they're doing. And all in all, it makes for uh not just the learning, but it's the empathy and the living in a family and having good relationships with people, and being the oldest who has to set an example, and being the youngest who has to try to keep up and still feel good about himself. You know, all of these things are really important learnings that kids don't get in a school where they're just isolated with their peers. Yeah. So it really makes a difference.

Jean Miller, Host 20:54

So true. I so often find myself saying, like, consider your family to be your community, right? Rudolf Steiner talked so much about, you know, how his inspiration was to invite the teachers to create a community, right, in their classroom. And so as a family, we're a community. That's our community. And I remember you, Barbara, inspired me so much early on when you would make reference to the one room schoolhouse. And that helped me so much to visualize my own homeschool as just a rich learning environment. Yep. That's a beautiful thing.

Jean asks Barbara what she's most looking forward to at this summer's teacher training

Jean Miller, Host 21:39

So, what are you looking forward to most this year for Taproot 2022?

SPEAKER_01 21:45

Well, for me, some of these people are ones who came to that first year 16 years ago, and they had preschoolers that are going to college now. And I really like to keep up with these children and see. what they're doing and how they're doing it and all that. So that's that's one of my big things. And of course I always look forward to the people who are coming to kindergarten for the first time with just starting out. It's a real joy to see them wanting to do this and being willing to give their daily lives to their children and not give their children to some institution to get caught.

Jean Miller, Host 22:29

Yeah and and Barbara I experience over and over again just so much love for you for the people who are returning like you have had such an impact on so many families and that is beautiful.

SPEAKER_01 22:44

It's a very good feeling definitely.

Jean Miller, Host 22:47

Yeah and then when the new families come too I think you have a gift of helping people feel much more at ease. So when those parents who who have kindergarten age children come to your workshops, you know, I think they leave having a much different picture of what kindergarten at home might look like than perhaps they came with and it's a much more relaxing and engaging and fun experience after they have taken your workshops. So thank you. It's so much fun to be doing this together. And so you know after we moved Taproot from Barbara's farm I started doing the organizing which Barbara had done for years herself. And I have so enjoyed keeping this going. It is an amazing experience.

SPEAKER_01 23:43

Well you you have the computer expertise and the technology to keep up with it and I I can't anymore. Yeah good job with these podcasts and your your weekly newsletter and and all of those things are really helpful to people.

Jean Miller, Host 24:03

Well thank you and it's so great to partner with you on the on the Taproot teacher training I just love that we get to continue that together.

Why Barbara recommends the Taproot Teacher Training

Jean Miller, Host 24:13

And okay last question then and we will be wrapping this up so why would you recommend parents come to Taproot?

SPEAKER_01 24:24

Well mainly I think to feel more comfortable about the whole process of homeschooling the other thing is mothers and mothers in law and aunts and uncles who give you a hard time about what you're doing when you're homeschooling well why don't you just send them to school and they're not reading yet what's the matter and I think that's one of the things that people go away from this weekend realizing that are people people are sending their children off to college with no high school and no school record of any kind or grades of any kind and they're going to really good schools. So it it gives people the confidence to do it and the confidence to be able to explain to other people what they're doing and why. And I've seen so many people who had to start homeschooling during the pandemic because the schools were on again off again and the teachers weren't there and the computer didn't especially around here computers just don't work in such a rural area a lot and a lot of people around here can't afford that. And so they opted to homeschool and some of them are really happy with it really happy with it and their children are happier and they're just why didn't I do this sooner yes so you know that's the kind of thing that people come away with from this conference.

Jean Miller, Host 26:00

I love that and and you know like we mentioned before I think there is a certain not only confidence but a a sense of who we are as the leader the homeschool parent in this whole family constellation and and it is amazing you I love that you brought that up that probably at least a third maybe even half of the presenters have now graduated children right and who have gone on to college and other postsecondary learning experiences and and that brings a real richness there's so much experience in this team of presenters and such a variety too also I will just underscore that feeling of that you're not alone right there are all so many people all over the world bringing this these wonderful experiential hands-on engaging approaches to their children at home and it's a wonderful camaraderie that sense of camaraderie is huge and it's a whole lot of fun we definitely know how to have fun so a few tips here you can find out more about taproot by going to artofomeschooling.com slash taproot that's the general page and it will then give you a link so if you want to go find out more information about Taproot 2022 in particular you can do that I have a feeling that we're gonna fill up quickly this year. And if you want to hear more from Barbara you can go to her website and she has some wonderful really hands-on practical books that she sells there that she's written over at Waldorfwithoutwaltz.com and Barbara and I had a wonderful conversation I called it my a conversation with my mentor Barbara Dewey back in episode two of this Art of Homeschooling podcast so you can go have a listen to that and all of those links are in the show notes for this episode which can be found at artofhomeschooling dot com slash episode eighty one. So Barbara yeah I know thank you Barbara so much for joining me for this conversation and I can't wait to see you at Taproot 2022 and help you s yeah help you set up the little kindergarten room and do some uh sky some stargazing and sing some wonderful songs in a big circle yes what fun what fun all right thanks so much for joining me for this episode bye for now that's all for today my friend but here's what I want you to remember rather than perfection let's focus on connection thanks so much for listening and I'll see you on the next episode of the Art of Homeschooling podcast