On a cloudy morning at the Seattle Waldorf School, second-grade teacher Laura Cox draped a shawl over her shoulders and lit a candle. Standing in front of a darkened classroom, she recited:
“Quiet your voices, be still every tongue,
And fix on me deeply your eyes.
For out of my heart a story will come,
Ancient, lovely, and wise.”
With no book or script to guide her, she recounted the birth of Prince Siddartha. Her students sat rapt as she told of his birth in a garden in India, then how, as a child, he rescued an injured swan.
A foundation
In the Waldorf tradition, storytelling is foundational for almost everything from math and science to classroom management.
In middle and upper grades, a chemistry lesson might begin via a biography of the French chemist Antoine Lavoisier to provide context, and quadratic equations might be taught alongside an introduction to Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi, the Persian polymath considered the father of modern algebra.
Waldorf educators intentionally select folktales, fairy tales, legends, and biographies from all over the world.
READ AND LISTEN: The Lion and the Mouse
“It acknowledges the wisdom of other places and peoples when we can draw globally on those who have influenced us,” says Cox.
While Waldorf schools do incorporate illustrations, objects, and text in storytelling, at first, most stories are shared orally – or, in Waldorf terms, they “tell stories by heart.”
“We want that human-to-human engagement,” says Seattle Waldorf’s Grade School Director Dru Smith-Crain. Without pictures or videos to guide them, students use their imaginations by creating images in their minds.
“This promotes flexibility of thinking, it helps to build memory, and it fosters in us a stronger sense of curiosity and wonder about things,” says Smith-Crain.
What research says
From a research perspective, Dr. Trina Spencer, a University of Kansas professor, has shown that for elementary students, skills in oral academic language are directly related to literacy, aka reading and writing. Students’ listening comprehension significantly predicts their reading comprehension, and skills in speaking in turn foster writing performance.
At Eastside Christian School, Sundee Frazier teaches middle school English and creative writing and finds a link between her faith tradition and teaching.
“Jesus taught using mostly stories: it’s effective pedagogy!” says Sundee. “Stories stick with us much longer than facts or statistics because they’re imbued with emotion.”
Traditionally, her 7th graders write personal narratives as one of their major projects. This year, however, Frazier says, “I’m going to ask them to step it up a notch. They’ll take that written piece and then we’re going to transform it into an oral piece that they’ll present to their classmates.”
Why the change? An opportunity for connection, student-to-student.
“I think so many of the world’s problems could be solved if we had more connection to one another as human beings who have similar struggles, similar fears, similar challenges,” says Frazier.
She hopes that when students hear each others’ stories, they’ll realize how much they share.
“We love to tell stories, we love to hear stories,” says Frazier, who is also a novelist. “That’s how our values are shaped; that’s how we transmit cultural values, standards, and norms.”
Transmitting culture
Since 2015, storytelling to transmit cultural values has been allowed in public schools in Washington State. That’s the year Senate Bill 5433 codified teaching Native American history, culture, and government in public schools.
In Auburn School District’s student body, more than 70 tribes are represented. Because of Auburn’s location on historical Muckleshoot land, stories and teaching from that tribe are highly valued as part of the district’s curriculum.
Although in-person storytelling is celebrated at larger school- or district-wide events, Robin Pratt, the district’s Native American Education Coordinator, encourages teachers and students to access storytelling resources digitally. The Muckleshoot tribe has worked with multimedia specialists to produce a wide array of videos, including stories about canoe journeys and salmon.
Learning to serve a lifetime
Pratt embraces the videos as authentic examples of Muckleshoot storytelling.
“They’re telling their story and these are the authorized pieces that you can use,” says Pratt. “They created it. And that’s how they want it represented.”
Back in Cox’s classroom, Waldorf students revisited the birth of Siddartha again and again over several days. While doing so helps grow academic skills like narrative cognition, story sequence, and writing, Cox says she also employs the legend for loftier goals.
The story might open a discussion on being kind and loving, for example, or support a debate on ethics and morality when considering Siddartha’s response to witnessing others suffer.
“We’ll learn how to be human,” she says. “How to be a member of a community. How to take up the challenges in the world that face us.”
Read more from our storytelling project:
Learning txʷəlšucid and telling the stories
Living, breathing, working for my culture
A family of Moths: Recreating The Moth StorySLAM at home
‘Out of my heart a story will come: Storytelling in schools’
Why do we tell stories around the fire?
