Category: Teaching

From: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/302574250_The_power_of_self-reflection_-_Travelling_the_Hero’s_Journey
The Power of Self-Reflection: Traveling the Hero’s Journey
A paper delivered at the 40th International conference on Improving University Teaching, Ljubljana, Slovenia
by Julie Wilans, Central Queensland University

“A simple, self-reflective tool that has been used very effectively for well over a decade in a regional Australian pre-university preparatory program (STEPS ) is the use of the metaphor of the Hero’s Journey (Vogler, 2007).
        The Hero’s Journey is a self-reflective tool that can be utilised with students as a way to ‘normalise’ the range of emotions experienced during their formal learning journey. It provides a framework that can help students make sense of personal transformation.
        Because of its universality and timeless wisdom, mythic structure has been found to be an empowering tool for developing in adult learners the reality that change and difficulty can be a transformative force in their lives. In positioning the students as the hero/heroine of their own adventure, they are enlightened with the notion that they each hold the key to unlocking their own potential.The journey of the adult learner shares a number of parallels with the hero/heroine in storytelling. It involves a call to leave the ordinary world, to experience degrees of self-doubt and fear, to experience challenge and reward and to discover inner strength. At the outset of STEPS, and throughout the duration of the program, the Hero’s Journey stages are offered to the students as a means of making sense of personal challenge and change.”

Click here to access the entire paper at researchgate.net.

(For specific curricula, see Teaching Tools in our Hero Tools section.)

Check out other powerful hero resources at TheHeroPlace, including Hero Tools (such as StoryCraft Hero-Story Writing Software) and Hero Organizations (such as the Gallery of Heroes) as well as other Hero Wisdom (such as that of script-writing coach Skip Press). Also, search or submit to hero databases (such as hero-story databases) from around the Internet in the Your Heroes section of TheHeroPlace.

Help us maintain, improve, and expand this and other posts in TheHeroPlace.  Contact us today to add to our unique resource for “All Things Hero!”

From https://www.edutopia.org/blog/heros-journey-21st-century-betty-ray

In “A Hero’s Journey for the 21st Century,” Betty Ray discusses adapting the teaching of Hero’s Journey for the 21st century classroom.

Click here to access the full article by Betty Jo at EduTopia.

(For specific curricula, see Teaching Tools in the Hero Tools section.)

Check out other powerful hero resources at TheHeroPlace, including Hero Tools (such as StoryCraft Hero-Story Writing Software) and Hero Organizations (such as the Gallery of Heroes) as well as other Hero Wisdom (such as that of script-writing coach Skip Press). Also, search or submit to hero databases (such as hero-story databases) from around the Internet in the Your Heroes section of TheHeroPlace.

Help us maintain, improve, and expand this and other posts in TheHeroPlace.  Contact us today to add to our unique resource for “All Things Hero!”

From:
http://www.ascd.org/publications/books/199002/chapters/Educational-Transformation-and-the-Hero’s-Journey.aspx
The Hero’s Journey
by John L. Brown and Cerylle A. Moffett
The Hero’s Journey: Educational Transformation, by John Brown and Cheryl 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.”

Click here to read more from the book at ASCD.org.

(For specific curricula, see Teaching Tools in our Hero Tools section.)

Check out other powerful hero resources at TheHeroPlace, including Hero Tools (such as StoryCraft Hero-Story Writing Software) and Hero Organizations (such as the Gallery of Heroes) as well as other Hero Wisdom (such as that of script-writing coach Skip Press<). Also, search or submit to hero databases (such as hero-story databases) from around the Internet in the Your Heroes section of TheHeroPlace.

Help us maintain, improve, and expand this and other posts in TheHeroPlace.  Contact us today to add to our unique resource for “All Things Hero!”