The Hero’s Journey: Educational Transformation (http://www.ascd.org/publications/books/199002/chapters/Educational-Transformation-and-the-Hero’s-Journey.aspx), by John L. Brown and Cerylle A. Moffett, looks at the Hero’s Journey as a model for transforming issues in the field of education.
From Chapter 1.:
“Today, we all face incredibly difficult, demanding times in the field of education. The forces of change and complexity pervade virtually every part of our professional lives. Like every mythic hero, we are inextricably drawn into the labyrinth; like every archetypal voyager, we must find our way out of darkness and back to a more powerful and sustaining light. Our universe, like that of heroes and heroines of legend and myth, is riddled with irony, paradox, and either/or thinking:
• the contradictions of conservative and liberal viewpoints operating simultaneously while vying for supremacy in public education today;
• the controversy about pedagogical models such as whole language and phonics;
• the political demand for uniform educational standards coming at a time when pluralism, diversity, and regional autonomy have never been more powerful;
….
In our collective heroic journey in education, facing chaos and complexity involves supreme truth telling. It requires that we recognize, without flinching, the dragons at our gates and the serpents in our gardens. If a Minotaur exists at the center of the labyrinth, we must confront it—and acknowledge it is a part of us. The realities of education—from the information explosion to the demands of a transient, increasingly diverse society to the ultimate need to put to rest old mental models of how schools and learning should function—require that we confront head-on our own heros journey and abandon the condition described by the Irish poet W. B. Yeats in his poem “The Second Coming”: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”… The heroic journey in education parallels the multifaceted journey of all mythic heroes: In the face of complacency, chaos, complexity, and an unpredictable future, heroes search for equilibrium, homeostasis, order, and peace—existential conditions that we can achieve if we are willing to undertake the quest. What is our quest as educational heroes? Essentially, our quest is to become more self-aware and efficacious as individuals at the interpersonal, organizational, and systemic levels.”
Check out other powerful hero resources at TheHeroPlace, including Hero Wisdom (such as that of script-writing coach Skip Press) and Hero Organizations (such as the Gallery of Heroes) as well as other Hero Tools (such as StoryCraft Hero-Story Writing Software). Also, search or submit to hero databases (such as hero-story databases) from around the Internet in the Your Heroes section of TheHeroPlace.
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