Harnessing Waldorf Story Methods to Move From Perceived Helplessness to Hero’s Journey: Challenges and Opportunities

• In Event: Harnessing Waldorf to Construct Educational Possibilities: Challenges and Opportunities

Abstract

Purpose
This study probes the tensions between Equitable Learning Environments (ELEs) and scale (Coburn et al., April 2023). It concentrates on the dilemma that learning scientists “are good at creating hothouse conditions in which our innovations can grow…but not as good at creating innovations that can be sustained on their own” (Penuel, 2019, 660 as cited in Coburn, 2023). Given the tension between the typical ELE short life-span and urgent need for “constructing educational opportunities” (AERA, 2023a), this study examines Waldorf education as uniquely instructive case. It gives special attention to four risks to ELE scale: seeing contexts as static (Erickson, 2014); neglecting diversity of learning (Lee & Luykx, 2005; Philip, Bang & Jackson, 2018); leaving out community voices; and scaling up bias (Moje, 2022; Penuel, 2019, Philip et al, 2018).

The ELEs principles (Bang et al, 2021) were written into the founding Waldorf school’s 1919 charter. It challenged barriers of class – the factory worker’s and factory owner's child learned side-by-side; gender – Europe's first co-ed school; and education – no tracking (Oberman 2008a). It was not short-lived. With its 2019 centennial, it marked being the oldest progressive reform. It also marks a moment rich with lessons on ELE scale risk and opportunity, so offering a case where the question of Coburn et al, “how to extend promising social changes...in ways that …attend to their learning ecologies” (Coburn et al., 2023, slide 12) is well posed.

To advance our understanding, we turn to two crisis moments in Waldorf education’s history: one the closing assembly of the Stuttgart Waldorf School 1938 under the Nazi Regime; the other, a crisis brought by internal and national racial reckoning in the wake of the George Floyd’s murder, at the public Waldorf school, George Washington Carver School, in Sacramento, CA 2020-2021. We focus on the role of hero’s journey story in each.

Theoretical Framework
The theoretical frame draws from institutional theory and social psychology. We join the work of Coburn and colleagues (see Curnow & Jurow, 2021) on networks with institutional theory of Scott (2008) and the social psychological perspective on “heroic imagination” of Franco & Zimbardo (2006).

Methods
The study joins a mixed-method approach (Creswell & Plano Clark, 2017) with case study (Yin, 2003).

Data Sources
Data sources include assembly transcripts, meeting minutes, educator interviews and curriculum materials.

Findings
Preliminary findings detail how the nurturing of the participants’ heroic imaginations offered key lessons in allowing this ELE institution to scale over time, weathering crisis as long as the stories were consonant with local normative and cultural-cognitive structures. Absent that alignment, the struggle for the right story offered a key stage on which the struggle for this ELE’s further scaling played out.

Scholarly Significance of the Study
This study reveals the need for further research blending the social psychology concept of heroic imagination, analysis of who and how to build hero's journey stories in local context with intuitional and movement theory to better understand opportunities and challenges of scaling ELEs for theory and practice.
  

Authors

• Allegra Alessandri Pfeifer, California Department of Education

• Ida Oberman, Alanus University of Arts and Social Sciences