Why the Hero’s Journey Still Works—and How to Teach It Effectively in ELA
Is there anything that better unites the ancient world of mythical monsters and the modern world of independent women, superheroes, and high-tech supervillains than the hero’s journey?
We’re, of course, willing to hear arguments, but we’re pretty sure we can make a solid case for the hero’s journey. From the ancient Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh to the MCU’s Thunderbolts, the classic story of an unsuspecting and perhaps reluctant hero (or group of heroes) drawn into a special world to battle larger-than-life antagonists while learning a little something about themselves along the way somehow never grows old.
Tempting as it might be to think that a 4000-year-old story template is overused or formulaic and to bypass it as we build our ELA curriculum, the persistence of this singular story for millennia argues for the inclusion of the hero’s journey when we teach our students about literature.
The hero’s journey still resonates with modern readers, and it’s something that students of any grade or level can appreciate and learn from. Today, we’re providing practical strategies for teaching this classic in a way that’s fresh and engaging.
Why the Hero’s Journey Still Matters
While it may have existed since the beginning of civilization, the hero’s journey as a subject of academic study and discussion is rooted in the work of American literature professor Joseph Campbell. In his seminal work The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949), Campbell summarizes the hero’s journey like this:
Campbell breaks the journey into 12 stages (don’t worry—we’ll get to them), and they show up everywhere. Prevalence alone makes the hero’s journey worthy of covering: part of our job is to give students the cultural toolkit they need to appreciate a lifetime of literature, film, and pop culture. Teaching the hero’s journey framework is also a fantastic way to tackle the perennial ELA teacher’s challenge of livening up “boring” classics, making those older stories more relevant and exciting.
The hero’s journey is particularly relevant to adolescent readers, whose key social-emotional work is to formulate their own identity. Psychologist Erik Erikson places adolescents in the life stage of Identity vs. Role Confusion, where they’re trying to answer questions like, “Who am I? How do I fit in? Where am I going in life?” As our students wrestle with these questions of identity, challenge, growth, and belonging, they can relate to protagonists from a world of times and cultures trying to answer the same questions.
And, of course, teaching the hero’s journey easily aligns with our content standards, whether students are examining structure, archetypes, themes, or comparisons between interpretations of a text.
Making the Hero’s Journey Feel Relevant
The opportunities to apply the hero’s journey framework to a classic text abound: without thinking too hard about it, we can list The Odyssey, Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, The Hobbit, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and Heart of Darkness—all texts that appear frequently in ELA curriculum maps.
But regardless of the classic text you choose, your students’ appreciation for the hero’s journey will be stronger when you connect the framework to modern texts they already know. Whether it’s Katniss Everdeen taking down the Capitol of Panem, Luke Skywalker rescuing Leia from Darth Vader, Spider-Man learning how to use his web slingers, or Moana sailing into the unknown to find the Heart of Te Fiti, students have seen the hero’s journey before.
There are several ways you can do this at the beginning of your unit:
Ask students to work in small groups to apply the framework to a book, movie, show, or song they already know and share those examples with the class. You can fill your walls with examples of the hero’s journey framework, reminding students of the stages and the framework’s pervasiveness as you dive into your core text.
Start your unit with a contemporary cinematic example that you and your students can use as a common reference point throughout the unit. When we taught The Odyssey, we started with a review of the basics of Greek mythology and the 12 stages of the hero’s journey using Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief. We referred back to the film frequently throughout our reading of The Odyssey. The kids’ version of Thomas C. Foster’s How to Read Literature Like a Professor uses How the Grinch Stole Christmas as an example of a quest, a natural fit for a hero’s journey example.
If you’re looking for a more literary common reference point, you could start with a short story that utilizes the framework (Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown” is the story from our repertoire that leaps to mind, but we’re sure there are more out there).
Pair your classic hero’s journey unit with a modern text, either as a full class or as students’ independent reading (you could even have “Friday literature circles” throughout your hero’s journey unit). Lists of examples on the Internet abound, but we thought this one, this one, and this one had some good suggestions of texts we’ve enjoyed that would appeal to younger and older readers. Foster’s updated “high-school friendly” version of How to Read Literature Like a Professor also includes Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad, Sandra Cisneros’s A House on Mango Street, and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Remains of the Day as examples of quest stories.
How to Teach the Hero’s Journey Effectively
Introduce the Stages Clearly (But Briefly)
We recommend starting with Matthew Winkler’s excellent TEDEd video, “What makes a hero?” In under five minutes, the video introduces the hero’s journey framework and (perhaps most importantly) helps students to see how the storyline could apply to their own lives as they struggle to grow and overcome challenges.
Follow this up with a graphic organizer or anchor chart that helps students visualize the 12 stages of the hero’s journey.
- Call to Adventure — The hero receives a message, invite, or challenge that calls him to his adventure. He may or may not want to heed the call.
- Assistance — The hero is offered or is required to seek the help of another, probably older and wiser, individual.
- Departure — The hero leaves his normal, safe world and enters the world of adventure.
- Trials — The hero solves a riddle, slays a monster, or escapes from a trap.
- Approach — The hero faces his biggest ordeal or his worst fear.
- Crisis — The hero faces his darkest hour (he may even die only to be reborn).
- Treasure — The hero receives his treasure. It may be literal treasure, special recognition, power, etc.
- Result — The monster bows down to the hero, or the hero is chased from the special world.
- Return — The hero comes back to the ordinary world.
- New Life — The quest has changed the hero. He has outgrown his old life.
- Resolution — The tangled plotlines get straightened out.
- Status Quo — The hero’s life returns to “normal.” Things are the same but different because the hero has changed.
As students are learning, you might find it useful to break the 12 steps into approachable chunks (we recommend 1–3, 4–8, 9–12) or to provide scaffolding for them. We provided scaffolding in a variety of ways: sometimes we gave students multiple-choice questions so they were selecting events (or stages) from options rather than memory; sometimes we gave them hints or parameters to guide them to the “correct” event; sometimes we told students what the event was and had them explain how it fit a partiuclar stage of the hero’s journey.
Analyze with Purpose
It’s important, even if only briefly, to move beyond merely identifying the stages of the hero’s journey to discussing its effects.
If you’re looking at two texts, have your students compare a classic hero’s journey (e.g., Odysseus) to a more modern hero’s journey (e.g., Percy Jackson). What do the differences reveal about the different times and cultures? What do they suggest about the authors’ purposes?
Ask questions that require critical thinking about the use of a common structure: Where does the pattern break from the traditional hero’s journey structure? Why might the author have structured the story in that way? What does that reveal about the character or culture?
Questions like these not only encourage students to think critically in your class, but they also provide students with lenses they can use to examine media and cultural stories in the future.
Make It Interactive
Work in groups or as a class to create a map of a known story’s hero’s journey or as a final project for your unit. Sometimes seeing the journey brings it to life in a way that words cannot; it’s also a great way for students to see how physical journeys and events in a story tend to reflect emotional or psychological events in the characters.
Another way to bring the hero’s journey to life for your students is to allow students to act out key moments or create a storyboard for the journey (perhaps conveying each of the stages in one frame).
Incorporate Writing
As English teachers, we want to incorporate writing whenever we can, and writing is an easy addition to a unit on the hero’s journey.
One option is to assign students to compare a hero (or the hero’s journey) across genres, mediums, cultures, or time periods. Suppose you’ve incorporated multiple texts into your unit. In that case, this is a natural endpoint: students can write an analytical essay comparing and contrasting two different presentations of the archetype and conclude by discussing the effect or “so what” of those differences.
In our standard-level Odyssey unit, we assigned students to compare Odysseus to the qualities of a Homeric hero and a modern hero to examine how the definition of a hero has changed over time. While not identical, this activity could easily be adapted to fit the hero’s journey (or is a great option if you want to cover the hero’s journey but simplify the final writing task).
Another option is to assign students to write an expository essay explaining how a particular text follows the hero’s journey framework, which is what we assigned our honors students to do after reading The Odyssey. This allowed us to assess their understanding of the archetype, as for each stage, they had to select an event from the story and explain how it fit the description of the stage. This could also be broken down into single paragraph assignments throughout the unit: instead of writing a full essay, students could explain each stage as they get to it.
If you’re looking for a more creative option, you could also have your students write their own short story or memoir in the hero’s journey format, taking care to include all (or predetermined) stages.
Common Pitfalls in Teaching the Hero’s Journey and How to Avoid Them
As impactful as teaching the hero’s journey can be, there are a few common pitfalls that teachers (and students) can fall into.
Pitfall #1: Treating the structure as rigid and universal
It can be incredibly challenging to map a story (particularly a novel) exactly into Campbell’s 12 stages. Not only is there usually some room for interpretation, but authors try to maintain a balance between familiarity and novelty, so they don’t always follow old structures exactly. This is especially true if you’re looking at modern examples, as contemporary authors often employ archetypes by experimenting with them rather than straightforwardly using them.
If you try to teach the structure as rigid and universal, you’ll be frustrated, and so will your students. Instead, encourage your students to look for nuance and exceptions, and allow for multiple (reasonable) interpretations.
Pitfall #2: Only using outdated examples
It’s a mistake to let our students think that the hero’s journey archetype is merely a tool for teaching old texts like Beowulf or The Odyssey. Doing so limits our ability to make both the archetype and the older texts meaningful and relevant for modern students, and we’ll have richer discussions when we let our students bring in current texts to see how the archetype changes over time.
Pitfall #3: Overloading students with all 12 stages
Twelve stages of anything is a lot to learn, and while it’s certainly worth teaching and introducing them, it’s also worth helping our students to focus on the most impactful steps. If they grasp that a hero leaves the normal world, faces a challenge in the special world, and learns something about himself along the way, they’ve grasped the key concept even if they mix up the “Return,” “New Life,” and “Resolution” stages.
Whether you give your students room to make small errors, provide scaffolding that helps them land on a successful application, or eliminate stages so they can focus on what’s most important, keeping them from getting overwhelmed in technicalities is key to a successful hero’s journey unit.
The hero’s journey has endured for thousands of years because it reflects the human experience. Learning through challenges and struggles is something we can all relate to, and not only is the hero’s journey a story that appeals to students of all ages, but it’s a story that makes stuffy old texts much more relatable and exciting, building bridges between far-off times and cultures. If you bring energy and creativity to the unit, students will respond.
If you’re interested in introducing your students to the hero’s journey but are looking for a place to start, we’ve got you covered with our Introduction to Greek Mythology mini-unit, which includes a visual graphic of the hero’s journey format and resources to help your students apply the framework to Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief. You can also purchase the mini-unit bundled with our larger The Odyssey unit, in which students apply the hero’s journey archetype to Homer’s classic while exploring what the archetype reveals about ancient Greek culture.
