Stepping into the mainstream: exploring Steiner streams in publicly funded schools in Australia, 1990–2011.

This paper traces the introduction of Steiner programmes in publicly funded school settings in Victoria, Australia, through a recent history covering approximately 1990–2011. Three programmes are examined through interviews with Steiner educators focusing on some of the challenges of working with these alternative educational ideas in these settings. While the first two of these programmes proved successful, the third was discontinued amid some controversy in 2011. The educational change these programmes presented is framed in terms of their contribution to epistemological diversity within the public-education domain in Australia, as reflected in the educational values associated with these programmes, and the educational sensibilities through which these were mediated in terms of the Steiner educators interviewed. Biographical Sociology is drawn on to foreground the felt experience of the Steiner educators involved, and to highlight some of the ideological and philosophical tensions that were at play, and how they were managed. These tensions, it is argued, were at times exacerbated through the co-location of these programmes within existing mainstream schools in Australia, in contrast to the more common stand-alone, publicly funded Steiner schools established internationally. In exploring the spilling over of these tensions into polemical public debate in relation to the third programme, the move of Steiner education into publicly funded school settings internationally is taken into account, and questions of the successful mitigation of these tensions more generally examined, placing these local experiences into a wider context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]