Welcome Students....To The Fairy Tales, Folktales, Myths and Dreams Workshop. Fairy Tales is a place for you to go back into childhood stories and dreams. A place where fantasy and reality seem to merge into an overflowing dream state.

In this workshop you will discover and re-visit various components of your life that make you unique and wonderful. I am not here to teach you these things, but to guide you towards the discovery. Discovering who you are is an on-going process that combines those life experiences; past, present, and future. According to John Locke, "personal identity (the self) depends on consciousness, not on substance, nor on the soul". We are the same person, to the extent, that we are conscious of our past and future thoughts and actions in the same way as we are conscious of our present thoughts and actions.

Humans are viewed as goal oriented agents who actively seek information. They come to formal education (and training) with a range of prior knowledge, skills, beliefs, and concepts, that significantly influence what they notice about the environment and how they organize and interpret it. This in turn, affects their abilities to remember, reason, solve problems and acquire knowledge. (Bransford, Brown & Cockling 1999, p10)

This workshop is designed as a stress-free environment, free from paperwork, reports, research projects, and negative attitudes. This will be a time for you to return to a place that you found joy and comfort. Being a grownup is highly overrated, so enjoy the class.

THE POWER OF WORDS

WHAT ARE YOUR WORDS SAYING..........

Hansel and Gretel

"Hansel and Gretel" asks us to believe that two children abandoned by their parents, in the forest, will find a house made of Gingerbread. But these and other tales live on because they are dramatic metaphors of real life. "Hansel and Gretel", for instance, represents the two greatest fears of children - that they will be abandoned and that they will be imprisoned. Many adults, if they think back, will remember one of both of these fears, though usually in a less extreme version. We occasionally felt neglected, disregarded, unsupported - unloved. Or we felt overprotected, overindulged, intruded upon - loved, but in a very possessive, almost scary way.

"Hansel and Gretel" was essentially about a brave and clever girl who saves her brother from danger. For another, it was about a brave and clever boy who figures out how to find his and his sister's way home by marking their path through the woods. Some may view the tale as a warning against a greed for sweets.

Fairy Tales

Fairy Tales are the myths we live by, evoking the imagination and teaching us the lessons of the heart. At first glance, most famous fairy tales seem so implausible and irrelevant to contemporary life that their survival is hard to understand. The story of "Rapunzel" involves a heroine with hair at least twenty feet long. To many readers, the most memorable feature of "Rapunzel" is the incantation "Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair," with its accompanying image of a beautiful young girl standing in the window of a tower with her magically long golden hair hanging down outside.

Long think hair has always been thought beautiful and erotically alluring; artists and writers have celebrated it as the sign of a lush, intensified womanliness. In nineteenth-century America, it was a source of pride if you could actually sit on your hair, and to lose it was a disaster. When Jo in Little Women sells her thick chestnut mane it is treated by her family as a kind of minor tragedy. Similarly, in "Rapunzel" and its variants, the witch often begins her revenge by violently chopping off the heroine's long hair.

But though long, thick hair was often referred to as "woman's glory," it was also her burden. Washing it, drying it, combing out the tangles, brushing it plaiting it, pinning it up, and taking it down took a lot of effort.

The Moral (to some)

In the Grimms' tale of "Rapunzel", the prince is a fairly ineffective figure. After he climbs Rapunzel's hair into the tower and is confronted by the witch, he jumps from the window in despair and is blinded by thorns. Both he and his beloved then wander about alone in misery for several years, but at last they are reunited and when Rapunzel's tears fall on his eyes, his sight is restored. In many modern versions the hero is a stronger character. These stories usually omit his blinding, or treat it metaphorically: he gets a concussion when he falls from the tower, and cannot remember Rapunzel and his love for her; or his glasses are broken and he can't see her; or he believes that she has abandoned him rather than been banished to the wilderness by the witch. In the end,, however, the lovers are reunited, one way or another. Men may appear to desert or forget you, but not forever is the moral.