The Hero’s Journey: A Guide to Literature and Life
Benefits to Teaching
the Hero’s Journey Pattern
- The Hero’s Journey forms a scaffold to aid comprehension and understanding. The journey’s framework gives students a generic structure to help them understand the story’s main elements (i.e., motivation, plot, conflict, and characterization). Then, by using the journey’s innate internal connections as a starting point, students will be better able to assimilate and process new information. The journey’s generic structure can also provide information to help students fill in gaps in the story to make inferences where the story itself fails to supply enough information.
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The Heroic Journey can serve as a bridge to help students use what they know to understand what they don’t know. They can use the journey schema to transfer information from a known situation to an unknown or unfamiliar situation (i.e., from stories they know to stories or experiences that are new). The journey can also serve as a framework to guide them in new situations, such as providing structure or ideas during a test or a common language for discussions. With the journey schema as a starting point, they can respond more fully, creatively and effectively. Most importantly, the journey schema becomes a tool to help students apply the themes and lessons they learn in literature to the challenges they face in their own lives.
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The Heroic Journey schema can boost memory by providing a framework to which students can attach details from the new story. It can also aid recall by serving as a source of cues to retrieve details stored in memory. The journey’s generic stages also allow students to “chunk” new information so that they remember it more easily by grouping details into a pre-existing framework.
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The Journey schema can boost your students’ performance on many of the processes related to studying literature.
It provides a framework for comparing or contrasting elements within a story or across different stories. Using their knowledge of the journey pattern, students can write more effectively about specific elements within a story or compare or contrast elements in different stories.
Benefits to Teaching the Hero’s Journey
The Hero’s Journey: A Guide to Literature and Life
Benefits to Teaching
the Hero’s Journey Pattern
The Heroic Journey can serve as a bridge to help students use what they know to understand what they don’t know. They can use the journey schema to transfer information from a known situation to an unknown or unfamiliar situation (i.e., from stories they know to stories or experiences that are new). The journey can also serve as a framework to guide them in new situations, such as providing structure or ideas during a test or a common language for discussions. With the journey schema as a starting point, they can respond more fully, creatively and effectively. Most importantly, the journey schema becomes a tool to help students apply the themes and lessons they learn in literature to the challenges they face in their own lives.
The Heroic Journey schema can boost memory by providing a framework to which students can attach details from the new story. It can also aid recall by serving as a source of cues to retrieve details stored in memory. The journey’s generic stages also allow students to “chunk” new information so that they remember it more easily by grouping details into a pre-existing framework.
The Journey schema can boost your students’ performance on many of the processes related to studying literature.
It provides a framework for comparing or contrasting elements within a story or across different stories. Using their knowledge of the journey pattern, students can write more effectively about specific elements within a story or compare or contrast elements in different stories.