Category: Hero Thoughts Miscellany

Skip Press, Screenwriting/Literary Coach and Mentor
Website: http://www.skippress.com

Skip Press has coached and been mentor to thousands of wannabe and professional screenwriters, and he utilizes the Hero’s Journey in his work. He has also written several screenplays as well as authored best-selling books on screewriting and writing generally, including How to Write What You Want and Sell What You Write.

I’ve known Skip over the years, and he was an early advocate of our StoryCraft Software program and supporter of John Jarvis’s Jarvis Method, which incorporates the Hero’s Journey and is the basis for StoryCraft.

Skip offers the following services:

Contact Skip using the following email address: skip at skippress dot com

This category features our greatest hero tools: the mentors, guides, authors, teachers of our life, including life coaches, career and business coaches, therapists, psychologists, philosophers, literary & screenwriting coaches, and others who use hero’s journey principles.

If you are a coach, you are invited to add your biographical information to this category (and in the Books/Events category if you are an author of hero-related books/publications) as well as to contribute to our Hero Wisdom section. (Use the Contact form to start the process.)

Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute
Game of Heroes: Exploring Myth through Interactive (Non) Fiction
by William C. Wagoner
http://teachersinstitute.yale.edu/curriculum/units/2013/1/13.01.11.x.html#b

In this middle school unit on mythology, Joseph Campbell’s Monomyth cycle will be the tool to analyze the hero’s journey of both fictional and non fictional figures. Students will compare and contrast the biographical account of a real life hero with the mythical quest of a demigod; Theseus and Hercules can be studied side by side with Gandhi and Martin Luther King. Students will ultimately fuse their understandings of the metaphorical journey to view their own selves as heroes through their experiences of challenge and reward in the past and the potential opportunities and treasures of the future. Students will understand that the vast plethora of modern day superheroes, video game avatars, and movie stars, all form and inform our personal mythologies, or way of viewing and imagining the world, and that all of them follow the same general pattern. Almost any hero (from any medium and from any culture) can be studied with this unit, depending on student interests and teacher preference.

        The final project of the unit will be the creation of a text based computer adventure game, or “interactive (non)fiction.” Students will use what they have learned about the Hero’s Journey and the obstacles, settings, adventures, monsters, and rewards along the way to create their own playable hero’s journey using a simple yet powerful tool called the Inform engine.

        As an interactive story-game, students will design a space where players can make experience the lives of their favorite heroes, whether fictional or historical, as they create and explore their world, make important choices along the way, and strive to complete their quest. A deeper level of immersion and identifying with the hero’s journey can occur through reflecting on the choices one can make in the game. And hopefully this unit will convey an identification of the student as a hero figure in his or her own life, with the power to conquer fear and the unknown through personal choices and the aid of others.

From the My Hero Teachers Room (https://www.myhero.com/teachersroom/lessonplans)

The MyHero.org website presents lesson plans on numerous subjects relating to learning about heroes and heroism, including:

Heroes:

https://www.myhero.com/teachersroom/Show/42
Exploring Heroes, Unit I: What is a Hero?
By: by Allyx Schiavone and Ann M. Hoffelder
K-4
5-8
9-12+
English / Language Arts
Social Studies
ESL / EFL

https://www.myhero.com/teachersroom/Show/43
Exploring Heroes, Unit II : Who are Heroes?
By: by Allyx Schiavone and Ann M. Hoffelder
K-4
5-8
9-12+
English / Language Arts

https://www.myhero.com/teachersroom/Show/44
Exploring Heroes, Unit III : Heroic Actions
By: by Allyx Schiavone and Ann M. Hoffelder
K-4
5-8
9-12+
English / Language Arts
Social Studies

https://www.myhero.com/teachersroom/Show/22
Heroes vs. Celebrities
By: Kimberly Kenna and Mauro Sheridan
5-8
9-12+
Arts – Media
English / Language Arts
Social Studies

https://www.myhero.com/teachersroom/Show/19
Using the MY HERO Book in the Classroom
By: Sara Armstrong, Ph.D., The MY HERO Project
K-4
5-8
9-12+
Arts – Media
English / Language Arts
ESL / EFL

https://www.myhero.com/teachersroom/Show/9
How Should We Choose Our Heroes?
By: Charles Harper, The MY HERO Project (Laguna Beach, CA)
K-4
5-8
9-12+
Arts – Media
Social Studies

https://www.myhero.com/teachersroom/Show/11
Using MY HERO to Promote Peacemaking
By: Andrew Greene, iEARN Sierra Leone (Freetown, WA/WESTERN)
5-8
9-12+
Arts – Media
English / Language Arts
Social Studies

https://www.myhero.com/teachersroom/Show/16
Comparing and Contrasting Heroes
By: Jerrilyn Jacobs, Taft High School (Woodland Hills, CA)
K-4
5-8
9-12+
Arts – Media
English / Language Arts
Social Studies

https://www.myhero.com/teachersroom/Show/45
Our Heroes Ourselves
By: Billie Jo Grant
K-4
5-8
Arts – Theatre
Arts – Media
Arts – Visual
English / Language Arts
Social Studies