Johan Green. NORENSE funding: 35000 SEK for an article for RoSE.

Narrative education has a central position within the Waldorf Pedagogy, and during my almost thirty years as an active teacher I have always been fascinated by this method. Today I work with teacher training at the Waldorf University college in Bromma, Stockholm. When I, in this position, have been trying to describe my experiences within the field of narrative education I have been missing words and concepts to cover these experiences. The knowledge of narrative education, as it is practiced within waldorf pedagogy, is to a large extent implicit. It became an impulse to me to let narrative education become the core object of my master studies at RSUC, which I finished in June 2018. In my work four motives became central:

• The Rooms of Narrative Education
• The Pictures of Narrative Education
• The Meetings in Narrative Education
• The Risks and Responsibility of Narrative Education

With this article my aim is to highlight aspect out of these four motives, but also to deepen and widen these motives.

Research questions:

How can teachers and pupils’ experiences and thoughts of and about narrative education be described, interpreted and understood?

In what ways can this description, interpretation and understanding contribute to the practice of narrative education?

Sources, methods and theoretical perspectives:

As empirical background for my study I wanted to investigate in what way narrative education is experienced and understood from within, by those who take part in and live with this way of teaching and thus choose the qualitative interview as method for gathering empirical material. In order to be able to gather an as rich empirical data as possible, from informants that has a thorough experience of narrative education as it is practiced within the waldorf schools, I turned to four class teachers with long experience from waldorf pedagogy and four students in grade twelve who had been attending waldorf schools for the main part of their school years.

Steiners pedagogical works where important as a theoretical background, but above them did, among others, the following authors and publications prove to be of a great importance to the different themes in my work: Johanna Kuyvenhoven gave through her book In the Presence of Each Other (2013) a theoretical background to the understanding of the theme “the Rooms of Narrative Education”, Kieran Egan gave with the book an imaginative approach to teaching (2005) an understanding of the theme “the Pictures of Narrative Education”, Anna-Carin Bredmars article Emotionell lyhördhet i lärarens arbete (2015) to the theme “the Meetings in Narrative Education, and Sharon Todds book Att lära av den Andre (2008) was important for my understanding of the theme “the Risks and Responsibility of Narrative Education”.

In the article I intend to write my ambition is to widen my theoretical perspective with the help of, for instance, the perspectives of Hayden Whites as expressed in the article The Value of Narrativity (1990) and the perspectives of Bo Dahlin & Joakim Larsson as expressed in the article The teacher: the Other as the Self (2016).

The article was published in RoSE in 2020: Narrative Teaching. Multidimensional aspects of narration. RoSE 2020, 11(2).