kindergarten, the world
by sue ford

“I can’t keep my power next to Kelly!” a live wired little girl said to me in total earnestness. I was about to share a music program with a kindergarten class.

“All right community… choose a place to sit in a circle… choose a mudra…. Now take three breaths… one… two…three…”

Five year olds doing ancient yoga hand positions called mudras to calm and center themselves! “Keeping my power”? No this was not public school. This was Mary Virginia Bunker’s kindergarten/first grade class at Rainbow Mountain School in Asheville, North Carolina.

I first met Mary Virginia Bunker fifteen years ago, looking for a kindergarten class for my first-born daughter. I was enchanted with her style, her storytelling, her sense of community, and her passion for the five year old. She had established a unique curriculum for her experiential classroom based on myth.

“According to Joseph Campbell and Carl Jung, one of the most important gifts we can give a child between five and seven is myth and fairytale. The kindergarten/first grade period of development is a period in which children are moving from the pre-literate culture of preschool to the literate culture of the elementary program. The bridge period in childhood development often parallels the human evolution of culture.
Pre-literate culture was made up of music, sensorial appreciation, emerging community relationships and celebration of the natural world, dance, myth, story, imaginary exploration and experimentation. Myths and fairytales gave them the opportunity to viscerally and vicariously experience their own emotions and sensation in the visible and invisible world.”

The practical applications of this philosophy are evident in Mary Virginia’s classroom. The learning centers and thematic units are about exploration of mythical themes. The children lift the blocks of Stonehenge, build a cave, create a dolphin dance and capture a buffalo. Mary Virginia is a gifted storyteller and shares the power and magic of folktales, fairy tales and world myths daily in her class. She introduces her listeners to Robin Hood, King Arthur and his knights, Krishna and Radha, the Greek Pantheon, Moses, Isis, Sacred Stories, Creation Myths and much more.

The listeners disappear into an almost trance-like mystical timeless experience of being in another place in another time with another set of experiences. While some teachers may prioritize the mechanical skill of phonemes and sentence structure, Mary Virginia prioritizes the very deepest reasons that humans read, make stories and create.

Storytelling and teaching come naturally to Mary Virginia as she spent a great deal of time with her Edwardian grandmother, Mary Piersol Bunker, also a storyteller and a first grade teacher. In 1913, she was a very unusual and fascinating woman for her time, having acquired the equivalent of a master’s degree, then going on to live and teach in Indonesia for years along with her husband, a teacher and lover of astronomy. They traveled the world to pursue their many interests including Mary’s interest in mythology and world religions before returning to the states to raise a family. As a very young child, Mary Virginia would visit her grandmother’s magical place with gorgeous gardens and many beautiful cultural books. She would pour over the pictures in coffee table books and ask her grandmother about them. Her grandmother would launch into many intimate stories about the photographs using graceful archaic and poetic language. All of the palaces, temples and holy places became part of the fabric of Mary Virginia’s everyday life. She grew up thinking that her grandmother was a close personal friend of the fairies and that perhaps she was in a college sorority with Demeter, Isis, Kwan Yin and many other mythological beings. It never ceased to amaze her that not every other child had a grandmother who told folktales, myths and fairy tales from around the world. Dressed in saris and sarongs, doing Japanese flower arranging and watching Javanese puppets dance provided a unique underpinning to Mary Virginia’s teaching style she was to develop as an adult.

Mary Virginia studied education at Loyola College. At that time, the concept of literature-based classrooms at the early childhood level was becoming a national movement. Mary Virginia worked with children in Hazard County, Kentucky and on several Indian reservations where she saw first hand how the children were raised with stories, folklore and mythology to transmit the wisdom of community teachings and socialization. She came to Asheville and found the already established Rainbow Mountain School and brought her work of the mythology-based classroom to the Rainbow Mountain Community. She now tells stories to kindergarteners through eighth graders, in every classroom.

For about ten years, Mary Virginia has helped to facilitate the “Mysteries Council” and the “Gender Mysteries” curriculum for the middle school program (Omega Program) at the school. Jack Zimmerman originally developed the Mysteries Council concept, in 1985 in Santa Monica, California. John Johnson, one of Rainbow Mountain’s founders brought the idea to Mary Virginia. The idea has been expanded to create a developmentally appropriate program for the middle school aged youth with the Gender Mysteries curriculum. It is an attempt to bridge childhood to adulthood addressing the many unspoken questions that arise in adolescence. It incorporates myth, wisdom teachings, sacred stories, music, movement and drama. It recognizes that there are gender specific mysteries that need to be explored separately (with the Gender Mysteries) and certain diverse issues that can be explored as a community (with the Mysteries Council). Many of the topics overlap within each gender but are explored separately and include: beauty and the media, codes of honor, leadership, personal sense of selves as emotional and physical beings, what it is to be a woman or a man, male or female community and bonding, spirituality, music and dance from various sacred traditions. In the Mysteries Council, middle schoolers explore topics such as peace and peacekeeping, the hero’s journey, community, gender relationships and how they’ve developed over the course of history.

Mary Virginia’s work is deeply interconnected with the work of her Rainbow Mountain Community. She provides only one piece of a developmental puzzle that moves from preschool through Grade 8.

Mary Virginia has worked extensively with Joseph Campbell’s concept of the hero and the hero’s journey. Drawing from that more mythically developed definition of a hero and a hero’s “power” in the community. She has incorporated that work into the daily life and discipline of five and six year olds. Now with over 20 years of experience, Mary Virginia observes that the five/six year old is intrinsically awed and entranced by power. She recognizes the need for a structure to make wise community choices not based on entitlement but on realizing the ramifications of each individual’s choices.

The children learn to “use their power” wisely for the good of the whole community as well as for the good of him/her self. In my opinion, dear reader, and I’m sure you would agree, this one concept in action could solve many problems of our community AND the world.

Sue Ford is a mother of three daughters ages 13, 16 and 20, all of whom attended Mary Virginia’s kindergarten class at Rainbow Mountain. Sue is a musician, singer-songwriter and assistant director of Womansong. She currently teaches music at Rainbow Mountain Children’s School and marimba band at Evergreen Community Charter School.
[ SueF444@aol.com; 645-5001 ]