West Falls school weaves together arts and academics

We were 10 minutes out of East Aurora driving her Prius south with Juliet Bice, long-time handworks teacher and advocate in various Waldorf education programs regionally. I was taking a tour of the Waldorf school in West Falls, in what was once a public elementary school building.

Learning to finger-knit

First we viewed the Fall Fest diorama: a large, glass-fronted display of arranged tree branches, animal models and tiny human figures crafted with great sensitivity and care from felted wool. Each figure is worked up by the same basic process: Wool fabric is soaked in hot water with soap and agitated until the fibers are reduced to a kind of mulch that is left to dry flat. When dry, its fibers are knit together in a loose, flexible bond that is still quite malleable and easily pulled apart.

Particularly excellent craftsmanship is evident in a large white owl, a wolf’s head, and a life-sized chimpunk—each handsewn and modeled so that the wool has a believable body mass. These animal and human figures are constructed around a wire or stone armature and basted together with a special fish-hooked needle.

Bice gave me a personal tour of each classroom’s “realm,” identified by colors corresponding to levels of consciousness as children move through their years. Each grade is given a different but completely integrated schema.

The commonly held stereotype of Waldorf—“rose-colored arcania,” “woodsier than thou,” “irrelevant fuzzy-navel gazing” education for “privileged Eurocentric lefties”—is often brought up in discussions of alternative education programs. But what lies beneath the ordinary desktops are orderly notebooks, carefully pointed wooden colored pencils, pages of waxed colored illustrations, maps, and marginal sketches—all encouraged to enhance the learning experience. This is not “accessorizing” education and is in fact the core of the Waldorf method: the protection of childhood through allowing children, with guidance, to experience life on their terms through play.

Adherents to the Waldorf curriculum believe children should be protected from premature intellectualism, the strictly utilitarian outlook on civilization’s essential human values. Waldorf’s child-centered focus reflects a world picture—a philosophy/methodology known as anthroposophy. Waldorf education integrates the artistic with the academic, reflecting the oneness of the world in an imaginative pictorial manner rather than in rote intellectual concepts.

In a classroom, Bice sat at a long wooden table with a box of felted wool in different shades of brown. Her practiced hands pulled apart the soft, fiberous masses. She kneaded a tuft of wool into a ball then smoothed open a slot in the material, gradually molding it into the shape of a small tortilla. She took a three-inch needle with barbs facing the wooden handle, like a fish hook. With the needle she made a series of rapid punctures in the wool. The barbs pierced the material on the push stroke, and the fabric strands reversed themselves on the pull stroke, interlocking individual fibers and bonding the two sides of the wool. She inserted a small stone in the cavity formed by the fold and continued to pierce the wool until the stone was held fast and the material began to take on the appearance of a small body mass—to whit, a mouse.

Bice quickly added tufts of wool for ears and a wisp of wool rolled into a tail, all the while continuing to pierce the wool in the jabbing/adhering motion that fused the parts into a whole mouse. She then modeled two hind legs and two forelegs with the same push-pull strokes. At this point a cat would have found the object of considerable interest. Further wisps of black wool were rolled into a ball and situated on either side of the head, forming eyes and a nose.

At the heart of the modern fairytale which is Waldorf education is “the divine”—not in an overtly religious way but certainly in a spiritual sense. The first Waldorf school was opened to serve the children of factory workers in Stuttgart, Germany. Waldorf evolved through the teaching and guidance of Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925). The developmental picture of the child in a Waldorf program is broken into seven-year cycles. After the change of teeth, the next seven years are devoted to establishing a reverence for beauty. In the first grade all children learn to knit. The skill is introduced by way of the story of a little gnome who lives under a mountain. He listens to the lovely song of a mother mockingbird. “It actually makes much more sense than that,” Bice said. “Certainly the children get it.” The characters in the story are employed to represent different configurations of yarn, enabling the child to see and remember each step in the process of knitting as it is brought to life with feeling and imagination.

Bice gave as another example a simple song that helps children to learn the steps needed to braid a length of yarn, a technique known as finger-knitting: “little fish big pond, big fish little pond.” Beginning with a slip knot, the yarn is pulled through the resultant loop (fish) and then back through itself (pond), each loop pulled through the last. This process is known as “casting on loops.”

“Beauty makes the teaching job easier,” said Jackie Wingfelder, another long-time teacher at Waldorf. “Young children have a natural inclination to beautiful things. It enables a child to grow out from the center of her being in a human scale to nature.”

Waldorf, she continued, moves the child from “beauty” to “truth”—the child’s eyes are directed outward and open to the world. “I think this accounts for the older children not being jaded or cynical. In our school we even have fewer nutritional issues and fewer children with glasses.”

“We had a bus driver once, you know, they drop off the kids and drive off,” Wingfelder said. “But this one turned off his bus and followed the children into the building. I asked him, ‘May I help you, sir?’ You know, being concerned. He said he never had a school where the kids couldn’t wait to get off the bus and into the school and he wanted to see for himself what they couldn’t wait to get to school for.”