Journey Story In Five Chapters

Preface: Crawling out from the mind-cave where I’ve been reading and responding to my students’ stories for the past two weeks, I devote this post to reflecting on the process that brought me to this celebratory moment. My eighth graders and I have just brought to a close an in depth study of the journey motif in literature, culminating in their writing ten page journey stories. The stories serve as a summative assessment of my students’ learning, which will represent them in their final portfolios. Additionally, they've turned out to be truly memorable and affecting pieces of literature from young writers.

Chapter 1: (Setting the Scene, Often With a Hint of Conflict)
The journey began with reading. My students--who came to me with very little reading experience in middle school, and even less enthusiasm for the endeavor—have been reading novels all year. Some I assign to the whole class or specific groups, and others the students select for themselves. By the spring, they realize that it is impossible to pass eighth grade English without really reading whole novels. They’ve seen me modify assignments for certain students based on their needs and allow extra time for those who slacked off initially; they’ve witnessed me enter the school carrying giant bags from Barnes and Noble full of books I know they will want to eat up, but they’ve never seen me bend on the basic requirement of reading.

Chapter 2: (Conflict—A Call to Action)
The final and longest book in our cycle of novels that all deal with the theme of adolescent coming of age is The Ear, the Eye, and the Arm by Nancy Farmer. It is a 300-page saga, taking place in Zimbabwe in the year 2194, in which the military general of Zimbabwe’s three children escape from their sheltered existence, where they are home-schooled and robots do everything for them; they are kidnapped four different times, before they finally, heroically, make it home. It is also the book that, superficially, is least familiar to my mostly Brooklyn-born West Indian-American students. In past years when I worked with mostly English language learners from Latin America, this book was a clear favorite. I am surprised when my new students fuss over the book and fight hard not to read it. While some begin to enjoy it as they progress through the book, others count it among their least favorite books ever! Nonetheless, the discussions are heated and quite interesting. I allow any and all criticism—just as long as a student can find evidence for it in the text. (8th graders are often better than I am at policing that!)

Chapter 3: (The Plot Thickens--Unfamiliar Territory)
In my previous work with ELL's, I found that the complicated saga of The Ear, the Eye and the Arm, could be more easily comprehended if the students understood and were able to anticipate its basic plot structure. I used two classic picture books I had studied in a Children’s Literature course at Bank Street taught by Madeleine Ray: Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak and Sylvester and the Magic Pebble by William Steig. Both books are journey stories with conflicts and plot structures that parallel those of The Ear, the Eye and the Arm. They are also complex works of art by master writers that bring about high-level discussions among students of any age. I have my students graph the intensity of the story of Where the Wild Things Are in order to teach exposition, conflict, rising action, climax and resolution/denouement. I have them diagram Sylvester’s journey in groups in order that they connect the movement of the journey with the intensity of the story. Everyone loves a good story, and these activities pull the more reluctant readers in.

Chapter 4: (Climax, Point of Highest Intensity)
After the picture book studies, and as students are almost finished reading the novel, I bring in some theory. I show a clip from Bill Moyers’ interview of the late Joseph Campbell about his theory of The Hero With a Thousand Faces. Campbell breaks down the “hero sequence of actions,” connecting this with both the journey motif and the universal coming of age story. I pause the DVD incessantly, so students can take notes on every word. My colleague jokes with me, “They are really on the edge of their seats watching this old white guy talk about stories!” Indeed they were. By the end of the interview clip, my students have reached an “Aha” moment that we have been working toward all year long in our studies of literature. They’ve finally moved beyond the simplistic notion that all stories can be broken down into a “problem” and a “solution,” which is taught widely at the elementary school level in New York City. They replace this with the concept of a character “leaving in one condition,” facing hardship, and returning with newfound experience and wisdom. The original conflict may never fully resolve itself, but the character is now better equipped to deal with it.

Chapter 5: (Resolution/Denouement--Character Returns Home)
I assign the journey story. I have students create a bare bones outline with me, based on what we’ve learned from the novel, the picture books, and Joseph Campbell. I type up the outline and provide it for each student, along with a folder and loose-leaf paper. Each student is charged with using the outline to create an original fictional journey story with five chapters, each one approximately two pages. Students have already practiced writing fictional scenes that balance description of setting, dialogue and action in a past unit (connected to a different novel study), so we only review the rules for punctuating dialogue and add a lesson on interior monologue. Students write fervently, creating main characters with compelling conflicts…the stories that emerge are well crafted and exciting to read. They are structurally sound, and with a few exceptions [main character drops dead or everyone suddenly moves to Pennsylvania and lives happily ever after], the endings are not forced. They demonstrate understanding of that most important piece of the journey story—the main character matures, not miraculously, but through experience.

Afterward: I realize that the sweat and tears involved in pushing my students to read, both inside and outside of their comfort zones, was worth it. They have transformed into real writers. They can create suspense, irony, and vivid characters; many of them naturally use symbolism, balance dialogue with interior monologue, and description with action. Have I explicitly taught all of these things? No. They have learned many of them through the experience of reading fiction, responding honestly, and investigating how both successful and unsuccessful stories are made.

In addition to the pride I feel for my students’ success with writing, reading their stories helps me to know them better. I thought I knew my students well before, but now [taking some symbolic license here] I know who they imagine themselves to be, where they want to go, and some of the challenges they must overcome along the way. And they have taken the significant step of imagining the journey and allowing it to play out on paper.

[First image taken from http://www.nlpu.com/Hero's%20Journey3.jpg. Second image taken by me.]

Comments

[Jack Zangerle]

Hello,

I have become a big fan of your blog. My name is Jack Zangerle, I am the 8th grade ELA teacher at Dover Plains Middle School about 100 miles north of NYC. I spent my first four teaching years in the Bronx at a Catholic school and have been in Dover for the past seven years.

For the past few years, I have tried to cover some of the work of Joseph Campbell, that you mentioned in your post, during my mythology unit. Normally, I reserve this lesson for my "Accelerated" class (honors class). I love seeing how students realize that there is a universality in the story telling of humanity. It is a magic moment when students begin to see the monomyth in the literature they have known their entire lives (I loved your use of "Where the Wild Things Are") It is especially powerful when kids begin to personalize what Campbell is saying and begin to see themselves as a hero in the mythology of their own lives.

I was interested in asking how you felt that average students dealt with the abstractions inherent in this approach to literature. How did you present the actual monomyth Campbell outlines? His actual text is probably a bit heady for most 8th grade readers.

Any insights would be appreciated. You are doing a great job with your blog. Keep it up. I look forward to your posts. I am in the process of starting my own teaching blog. Thanks for the inspiration.

Jack
jack.zangerle@doverschools.org

[Ariel Sacks]

Jack, Its great to to see read your comment here. This is an interesting question about using Joseph Campbell. I've always had mixed classes in terms of skill level, so I don;t have anything to compare with, but I have found a way to present Campbell that I think all my students can access. Basically, after reading and discussing the picture books and doing a series of group activities that help students analyze the journey structure of each story (charting the journey on chart paper, and also graphing the intensity of the story on chart paper), students are familiar with a lot of what Campbell talks about. I show just the first few minutes of his interview with Bill Moyers in The Hero With a Thousand Faces section of the DVD "The Power of Myth." He breaks down the different types of heroes and heroic deeds and explains the hero's sequence of actions and cycle of the journey. I have students take notes, pausing the dvd after just about every sentence. Sometimes I actually repeat the key phrase I want them to write down. Students seem to like it and afterwards we have interesting discussions. I've done this with transitional ELL's who are still struggling with English--they did great with it, which I attribute to the fact that they had enough relevant experience with the content which helped them make sense of what Campbell says. The pausing also helps. When we finished the stories, the novel, and the video, I had the class create a diagram of the usual sequence of a journey story, based on what we'd observed in the stories. The chart we create pretty well matches Campbell's, though they'd never seen it. Hope that helps!

Let me know if you start your blog, and also if you find any new ways to use Campbell with students. Come back and comment again!
Ariel