The Hero’s Journey in Education

Originally published January 2, 2017 on Medium

Over Christmas Break, I immersed myself in different stories, different worlds. I entered a world of violence and power in Westeros as I read A Feast for Crows. I went back to J.K. Rowling’s world of magic as I watched Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them. I watched season four of Lost and transported myself to some mysterious island in the Pacific Ocean.

We are surrounded by stories, all day, all the time. Even people who don’t consider themselves readers are constantly immersed in storytelling. Our Facebook feeds present non-stop stories, as do quick Snapchat videos. Turn on the TV- stories. Read a newspaper- stories. Listen to the radio, to podcasts, to an album- more and more stories. Stories are embedded in our DNA.

What stories do we tell about education? When we go to the classroom, what is the dominant narrative? I feel many teachers do have noble visions of their career and can articulate their values in resumes and interviews and applications. But often in the midst of the daily grind of teaching, we often get bogged down in the minutiae of teaching: the lesson plans, the grading, the classroom management, the meetings, and so on.

For the first time this year, I went into the school year seeking an overarching theme in my 9th grade English class. I wanted a theme that could resonate throughout the school year. Inspired by Joseph Campbell, I chose the theme of “The Hero’s Journey.”

How about viewing the role of teaching and learning through an epic lens, a heroic lens? For the role of the teacher is all about transformation. Based off my understanding, the hero’s journey can be boiled down to the following stages:

(1) Call to Adventure

(2) Leaving the Ordinary World and Crossing a Threshold into a New World

(3)An Adventure that Features Obstacles, Lessons, Mentors, Allies, New Skills, and Antagonists

(4) A Return to the Original World with New Skills: Transformation

I challenged my students to view themselves on this hero’s journey. They have received a call to adventure to a new school, a new world. They left behind the world they knew. They have gone on an adventure where they will face many challenges, meet new friends, and learn new skills. They will go on to college and careers and hopefully will return to their communities transformed.

This was the model and goal for many of the students I taught at my previous school, Red Cloud High School on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. Here was a place of amazing cultural richness: sweat lodge ceremonies, pow-wow dances, strong Lakota values, and so forth. At the same time, it was a place of suffering and poverty. Many students sought to leave the reservation after high school. I helped many students with college application and scholarship essays, and most students wrote about how they wanted to return to their home community after college in order to transform it in positive ways. The Hero’s Journey.

During this school year, with my new chosen theme, I asked students to consider a time when they were heroic in some way. They wrote a narrative essay that provided me some window into their lives. I wanted students to reflect on their own “superpowers” and skills. I also asked students to create a project that integrated both visual art and storytelling as they presented a person that has been heroic in their own life. I was inspired by High Tech High’s project on heroes to undertake this project. I also showed different short videos that introduced this idea of the hero’s journey. I started with this one.

When students come into the classroom, I sometimes will play some epic-sounding music score from a film or TV show. To me, it gives the idea we are doing some big here in the classroom, something epic. I want to shake off the doldrums of monotony and boredom and change our perspective on education. Here’s my favorite entrance music:

Going along with the theme of the hero’s journey, I wanted to gamify the classroom this year. In the last two years at my current school, I feel I have had success. Students work hard on the challenges I throw at them every week: essays, class novels, Achieve3000 articles, IXL grammar skills, Membean vocabulary training. But I wanted more of a feeling of excitement and joy in the classroom.

So this year, I created my first experiment of a year-long classroom game: The Hero’s Journey. It is a mixture of video game XP, Harry Potter-style points awarding, and martial arts. Students can progress to five different belts as in the martial arts. Each belt symbolizes a different superpower that students can use. I hope to write more about this at another time. I like to view the classroom as a dojo, a spiritual place to refine skills and seek continuous improvement, kaizen. Or as a type of environment like Plato’s Academy, a place to explore ideas and seek wisdom.

For in the hero’s journey, the protagonist seeks some sort of wisdom and self-knowledge. For students, I hope they are on a journey of discovery, a way to explore and pursue their passions. As Joseph Campbell once said, “Follow your bliss.” We are reading Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist in my 9th grade English class in a unit on passions that I have entitled “Set the World on Fire” after the saying from St. Ignatius. In The Alchemist, Coelho recounts a parable about seeing the wonders of the world but at the same time not dropping the oil from the spoon that you are carrying. We discuss what this means: living passionately but also not forgetting about one’s responsibilities. Joy and discipline.

This school year I wanted t0 re-frame my course and my overall mindset, and hopefully my students’ as well. Hopefully, the hero’s journey can bring more excitement into the classroom. In Teaching to Transgress, bell hooks writes, “To enter classroom settings…with the will to share the desire to encourage excitement, was to transgress” (7).

To transgress is to cross over, to transform…to take what we have known and infuse it with more spirit, vitality, and joy.