What We’re Protecting
At Antioch, meaningful collaboration begins with listening.
That principle is helping shape Camphill Academy Afrika, a three-year training program for educators working in inclusive Waldorf classrooms throughout East Africa. The initiative grew from a conversation between Antioch Teaching Faculty Carla Beebe Comey and Tanzanian educator Janet Manoni about a vital question: How could Waldorf education become more responsive to African communities, cultures, and ways of knowing?
The answer could not, and should not, come from one institution or one country.
Educators and organizations from Tanzania, Rwanda, Botswana, the United States, and Switzerland came together to identify shared needs and build a program grounded in inclusion, cultural reciprocity, community, and locally rooted knowledge. The first pilot residency brought 31 participants and 13 faculty members together in Tanzania in 2025. A second residency followed in Rwanda in January 2026.
Participants combine instruction with community-building and direct experience. They visit organizations serving children with disabilities, learn from local educators, exchange ideas across cultures, and develop practices they can carry into their own classrooms.
Just as important is the initiative’s long-term direction: the program is being built so that African educators can ultimately lead and sustain it.
This work reflects an essential Antioch belief. Education should not be imposed on communities. It should be created with them. Knowledge moves in more than one direction, and lasting change requires people to share authority as well as ideas.
Antioch’s autonomy gives faculty the room to form relationships, respond to emerging needs, and build unconventional partnerships rooted in trust rather than institutional hierarchy. That freedom allows projects to develop from the community outward, not from the institution downward.
This is how we keep Antioch, Antioch: by protecting an educational model that listens first, builds together, and measures success by what communities are empowered to carry forward.