Interview by Lisa Babinet, PhD, WSP Faculty
Reprinted with permission from School Renewal, Spring, 2025
As a child, Lea Fredrickson attended an outdoor preschool. There, a community of parents, inspired by their experience, began to envision a unique educational path for their children. This vision culminated in the founding of Waldorf School of Santa Barbara where Lea was part of the first graduating eighth-grade class. Her mother served as the founding administrator, with many classmates’ parents playing integral roles in creating and shaping the school community.
“I loved everything about my Waldorf education,” Lea shares. “The stories, creative play, being in nature, acting in plays, and learning math creatively—all these experiences shaped my childhood. The passion and joy my teachers brought to the classroom inspired me, and in the community, I formed lifelong friendships.”
After graduating eighth grade, Lea attended a local independent high school, then earned an undergraduate degree in physics from the University of California, Santa Barbara, which included a year studying abroad in Spain. After completing her undergraduate degree, Lea went on to complete a Ph.D. in physics from UCLA. She gained teaching experience as a substitute teacher and graduate teaching assistant, but it was a serendipitous discovery that redirected her path to Waldorf education.
“While searching for a postdoctoral position, I found that Waldorf School of the Peninsula (WSP), just blocks away from my home, was seeking a high school physics teacher,” she recalls. “It felt like a calling, and thirteen years later, I’m still here, finding immense joy in teaching.”
Nurturing STEM at Waldorf School of the Peninsula
At WSP, Lea has taken on various roles teaching physics, calculus, Spanish, dance, and even co-creating an interdisciplinary senior science elective. A highlight of her teaching career is founding the school’s robotics team, which competes in FIRST Robotics. Now in its twelfth season, the team has even hosted a competition on campus.
“Many students have said that robotics was a highlight of their high school experience,” she says. “It fosters collaboration, creativity, and problem-solving in a hands-on, engaging way.”
Lea recently transitioned to a leadership role as high school pedagogical administrator, supporting her colleagues while facilitating the redevelopment of the computer science curriculum.
Readiness in a Tech-Forward Future
Reflecting on her Waldorf education, Lea credits it with instilling a love of discovery and a multidisciplinary perspective. “My Waldorf experience taught me to find understanding through discovery rather than being handed answers. It’s a principle I carry into my teaching.”
To parents concerned about their children’s readiness for the tech world, she offers reassurance: “Waldorf education prepares students with flexibility of thinking, resilience, and confidence to navigate an uncertain future. It’s less about specific tools and more about fostering adaptability and critical thinking.”
Embracing AI with Awareness
As AI continues to evolve, Lea is both excited and cautious. “Generative AI is accelerating human creativity in unprecedented ways, but it also carries the potential for misuse. Waldorf students are uniquely positioned to engage with this technology critically, understanding its capabilities and limitations.”
At WSP, Lea and her colleagues are ensuring that the next generation of students meets the future with curiosity, humanity, and a solid foundation in STEM. As she looks forward, her dedication to blending Waldorf principles with cutting-edge innovation offers a model for education in the 21st century.
The daughter of parents who fled the South and Jim Crow, Isabel Wilkerson sought real stories from real people. She was the first black woman to be a Pulitzer Prize winner, and the first African American to win for individual reporting, at that. Wilkerson dedicated fifteen years to the making of this six-hundred-page book, interviewing over 1200 individuals documenting the widespread phenomenon that was the Great Migration.
“Such may be the sheer force of determination of any emigrant leaving one repressive place for something he or she hopes will be better. But for many of the migrants from the South, the stakes were especially high – there was no place left to go, no other refuge or other suns to search for, in their own country if they failed. Things had to work out, whatever it took, and that determination showed up in the statistics.” (Wilkerson 530.)
These stories that Isabel Wilkerson brings to paper capture the desperation of the times. There was a blind faith that so many people simply had to put in their plans of leaving the south because they had no other choice. The times were cold, and there was word of sunshine in the north.
Isabel Wilkerson translates real life experiences gracefully on the page, blending these three stories with information and context of the times with care. She shows us experiences from people who would have otherwise blended into history as simply a small part of the great phenomenon that swept America. She brings these similar yet very different experiences to light for us, following three of millions who had gone in search of warmth.
I recommend reading this book because the switching of focus on different main characters saves from a droning on and on about one person. You’re allowed to take a break from someone’s story and read something new without having to put down the book. It adds depth to the whole of the reading and learning experience, as sometimes the material can get to be a lot. This book gives the reader a view through the eyes of three people who had to find their ways in the dark, trusting that they would reach a light to bring the warmth of other suns.
Read more student perspectives in the Waldorf Chronicles, a newsletter run by WSP high school students.
I recently got a job working at a restaurant and after a couple of weeks the abstract concept of food waste became concrete in my mind. It was no longer just the idea of food being lost, I was starting to see real food wasted. And much of the food being thrown out was still perfectly edible! It could probably be reasonably inferred from the contents of any restaurant’s dumpsters that humans have an excess of available food. But we see in the world as well as in the United States that that is not actually true.
Imagine you have a pound of food in front of you. For a visual, that’s about the weight of a bowl of pasta. That is how much food is wasted every single day per person. This means that every day, for every person in the world, a whole bowl of pasta is lost. That is equivalent to over seven billion bowls of pasta wasted every day. One pound of food per person per day.
In the United States, a whole thirty to forty percent of available food goes to waste, and the reasons it goes to waste vary a lot, ranging from farming practices to cooking practices. During every step food takes to reach our mouths, food is wasted.
The first concern comes with the fact that we are, in fact, wasting thirty to forty percent of our food, and in turn, putting too much effort and labor into something that will never see the light of day (or the inside of a stomach). We are losing so much money paying for workers whose work ends up being wasted. This, and the food insecurity we see all around us today, are reasons food waste is an important topic.
One reason that waste is so commonplace is how we unnecessarily nitpick what food reaches stores. Companies will reject food that doesn’t look the way a customer might imagine, because it’s been shown that people are more likely to buy visually aesthetic food than “misshapen” food. This problem is in the process of being overcome, with companies like Imperfect Foods selling “misshapen” produce (like that in the picture above) so that it doesn’t go to waste.
A large contributing factor to food waste is over purchasing. This is a problem both in average households and, to a much more dramatic degree, in restaurants. What we as average citizens can do is to keep over purchasing to a minimum. Buying too much food ultimately leads to that food being thrown out for spoiling or for lack of need. If we all limit what we buy to what we need, food waste would be reduced on a small scale. The restaurant industry, on the other hand, has a larger impact on the creation of food waste. Restaurants need to buy extra food, as is understandable, because of the nature of the industry, but there must be better ways of dealing with leftovers than to simply throw them away at the end of the day. Restaurants could, at the end of the day, take the edible food that was destined for the trash and instead offer food to people in need.
This is not a completely hopeless fight. We may have no control over the restaurant industry or the packing and processing of food, but we do have control over what we buy and what we throw away. The things we can do to reduce the amount of food waste is to buy the amount of food we need and to only throw out food that is inedible. There’s no reason so much food should be going to waste, especially considering the large number of households that are food insecure.
Experiential Interdisciplinary Week (better known as EI Week) is a week-long engaged learning process in which high school students at WSP “learn by doing”. The planning of EI Week starts in winter when high school faculty and students submit proposals for workshops based on the theme that WSP adopts to explore as a whole school community. This academic year, the school established “togetherness” as the appropriate theme when our school community transitioned back to campus for in-person learning. EI Week learning activities can include, but are not limited to, a hands-on learning approach, day and overnight trips, field explorations, guest speakers, community service, art, music, performances, and so forth.
The workshop in which I participated was titled “Exploring Bay Area Diversity ” and the main intention was to bring more awareness that would give students a platform to discuss the quality of equity and actual representation of Bay Area communities by looking through the intersectional lens on social issues.
A group of eleven students and two faculty advisors had several planning sessions and discussions to form what we envisioned the week would be like for us to bring the proposal into a reality. In these meetings, our group members began to brainstorm, discuss and disagree, collaborate and combine ideas, lead and follow each other until we arrived at the basic framework of what our group would be doing together for a week. Basically, the piece that stood out for most of us was the challenge to visualize or verbalize intersectionality.
Eventually, we shifted our focus to include all types of diversity while promoting and celebrating inclusive environments that strive to make everyone living in the Bay Area feel like we belong here. Our group was clear that we wanted to incorporate community service, explore historical aspects of migration into the Bay Area, deepen our understanding of racial equity and systemic issues, eat good food, celebrate art, music and culture of various communities, and spend time capturing our experiences through photography, journaling, poetry, story-telling, painting, drawing, learning, creating, and questioning.
The biggest take away from this experience is that our group learned that there are pockets of segregation across different counties. There are also the invisible communities who have very little access to healthy food, proper shelter, education, health care, childcare, employment issues, and equal wages, as well as immigrant rights. Our exploration clearly brings out how segregated the entire Bay Area is. That segregation impacts economic outcomes: a racial segregation that leads to economic segregation. The housing crisis in the Bay Area impacts all of us in its own way as well. The most humbling moment of this entire experience was when we met with Erika Huggins for an entire afternoon while she led our group through the streets of West Oakland and shared her biography and history of the Black Panther Party. With deep wisdom and courage, she conveyed that we should try to talk about these things in a broad framework of humanity. How do we treat our fellow human beings?
Othering certainly is a mechanism by which we are trying to segregate people: ‘us’ versus ‘them.’ So, it’s important that our generation look at this moment through the lens of ‘othering and belonging,’ and see that if we have a more integrated community, we are actually lifting up everybody. We are lifting up the entire society. We are all living together.
Other EI Week workshops looked at Food Systems, went on various Outdoor Adventures, and explored sustainable fashion.
Dylan Lee is a regular contributor to the Waldorf Chronicles, a newsletter run by WSP high school students.
WSP hosted a FIRST® Tech Robotics Qualifying Tournament on the Mountain View campus earlier this month. The STEM group that convenes the event is named First—but the event was a first in other ways, too: until now, WSP had never hosted a public tournament before. (Shout out to WSP senior and Walbots captain Lysander Schmidt and faculty team-sponsor Dr. Lea Fredrickson for spearheading!)
By 8:15 AM on a chilly Saturday morning, competitors from 16 local middle schools had arrived. As the hosting robotics team, WSP’s own Walbots joined nearly 80 other WSP volunteers to serve as judges, referees, scorekeepers, videographers, commentators, and runners, to name just a few of the many volunteer roles. High school senior Zoe Wheatonfox helped kick off the competition with a gorgeous rendition of the national anthem.
Here are three things I, and many other participants, didn’t expect to see at a robotics tournament:
1. Chickens on the loose We’re guessing it was the first time many of the 320 participants had seen a chicken at a robotics tournament. “Pepper” and “Turbo” were roaming the garden as students wearing safety goggles would stop on their way to and from the competition hall (aka the Eurythmy room) to exclaim, “Is that a chicken?!”
Yes. At WSP, chickens roam alongside Silicon Valley’s next generation of engineers. No big deal.
Students took breaks not only to sit in the garden and hold the chickens but also jump on tree stumps, play tetherball or ping pong, and enjoy the rope swings hanging from a nearby tree.
“It was wonderful to see the students from the other teams getting so much genuine joy from our campus,” said WSP parent (and lead scorekeeper) Brent Ingler. “Witnessing their excitement over things that we, as a school, may otherwise take for granted was heartwarming.”
2. “A well-oiled robot” That’s how a visiting robotics team mentor who’s attended these tournaments for years described this event. Or as a student participant said, “The whole event had a fun, chill, vibe and was so much fun.”
Thank the incredible flow within the WSP team for that.
“Every problem that came up, we actually resolved very efficiently, and that’s what made it overall a successful event,” said Lysander. “In our community, there are a lot of people with ingenuity and initiative. We had so many volunteers who could do whatever was needed.”
To allow spectators to cheer on their teams, despite COVID restrictions on numbers of attendees, all 9 hours of the event were live-streamed by a crew of WSP students led by Pierre Laurent, WSP’s School Administrator. (Catch a few highlights of their footage here.)
Go team!
3. Real-time innovation Competitors spent the day troubleshooting, tweaking, and adjusting their robots. The team “pits” looked like chaotic workshops, with students darting in and out.
WSP parent and event judge Neil Overmon, who designs systems for Level 4 self-driving trucks, was inspired. “I was genuinely impressed with the student competitors,” he said. “They were working with concepts that I don’t always see even at the professional level. I was inspired to brush up on a few topics when I went home that night!”
Watching the teams work was also a master class in problem solving and collaboration.
“What you think is going to happen and what actually happens a lot of times is not the same,” said WSP 11th grader and Walbots team member Stephen Lee. “That’s applicable not just in a robotics club but also in real life.”
He also saw the value of standing by your vision. “If you want to present ideas to people who don’t think it’s going to work, you just do it.”
Interested in joining or supporting the Walbots Robotics Club at WSP?
“The club is open to anyone who is interested,” says Lysander. “At its core, it’s just a group of people doing some things. If you want to animate something, that’s robotics. If you want to work on finances, you can do that in robotics. If you want to make a website, draw some art, or even design clothing, it’s all part of what we do.
It’s also truly student-driven. As WSP parent and longtime Walbots supporter Christopher Schmidt explains, “we’re quite different from a lot of FIRST Tech Challenge schools. We draw the line. Neither Dr. Fredrickson nor I ever tell the students what the decisions are going to be in building the robot. Also, at our school, we have the right balance of time commitment. At our school, the people in the robotics club are also the people who are doing theater and track. It doesn’t need to take over your whole life. And that makes it even more fun.”
The club is always looking for sponsorship and support. Reach out to high school faculty sponsor Dr. Fredrickson or Team Captain Lysander Schmidt for more information.
