You know, it really warms my heart when my students get into a class assignment.  I’ve just spent the past hour “chatting” with many of my students on our Hero’s Journey website, and it’s been great.  And reading their posts on the 60 Day Sojourn has made me feel as if I am connecting with them in some way beyond just teaching them how to construct a variety of sentence structures or how to analyze a work of literature.  This project is connecting to them as individuals on a journey.

We are the heroes of our own life stories; how those stories ultimately play out will be based on our reactions to life’s challenges and the decisions we make.   Using references to mythology, literature, television, and film, we illustrate how the Hero’s Journey permeates not only our culture, but all cultures across time and geographic location. From there, we will explore how the pattern is part of the human condition and how it can be used as a tool to examine our own lives.

After referencing the connections to the stories of humanity (myths, etc), they will listen to  guided visualizations that will allow them to examine their own journeys through life. From there they will respond to introspection questions that make the project personal for them.

I sincerely hope that all my students will be open to sharing their journeys with the rest of us.   In examining ancient and recent literature as well as exploring our own life patterns, it will help us to see that we are all connected through our stories. We all have goals, trials to face, dragons to slay, and our Ultimate Boon awaits us for a job well done!

The culmination of the long term project will be to write their own heroic tales and have them read by, not only others in the class, but by other members of our site.  The work of Joseph Campbell is my passion, and I hope to see it live on through the work of my own students.   Each year, we publish an anthology of the top-voted stories (the students do the voting, not me)… and I look forward to what they will come up with this year!!

I’d like to invite anyone who happens to wander across this page to check out my students’ work!  (Just don’t spam my page, please… that really detracts from what the students are doing and I don’t appreciate that).  You can find us at http://herosjourney.ning.com

These are our previous anthologies that the students have produced.   They are published authors, complete with an ISBN number, whose stories are available to the world online through Amazon, Lulu, and Barnes and Noble!  I am very proud of their work!  And I am already so looking forward to what this year’s students will write!  Based on their replies so far, we are in for a treat!