Becoming a Teacher as a Hero's Journey: Using Metaphor in Preservice Teacher Education

Teacher Education Quarterly, Winter 2005 by Goldstein, Lisa S

Next the student proceeds to the threshold of her field placement classroom, where she encounters her cooperating teacher, a presence who guards the passage; each hero must negotiate her relationship with the threshold guardian in order to gain entrance to this new realm of experience. The threshold guardian plays a crucial role in the hero's journey: the student cannot begin her initiation until she has crossed the threshold.

Unlike the ever-helpful ally or the always-dangerous dragon, the threshold guardian is generally a complex character with motivations and behaviors that are often unclear and unstable. For preservice teachers the cooperating teacher can appear both as friend and foe, be supportive or intimidating, easy to approach or challenging, and often takes on all these personas (Borko & Mayfield, 1995; Graham, 1999).

Once she has crossed the threshold, the student begins her initiation period. In her placement classroom the student encounters unfamiliar forces of all kinds; she must find new allies, face a range of trials, and call on her inner resources and her untapped strengths in order to be successful. The close connections between student teaching and the hero's initiation period are explored in great depth in literature focused on student teaching as a rite of passage (Berman, 1994; Eddy, 1969; White, 1989).

For student teachers, there are many potential allies on this journey: other student teachers, the children in the placement classroom, the children's parents, the cooperating teacher or other teachers on the faculty, the principal, the fieldwork supervisor. However, these people also have the potential to be dragons, testing and challenging the preservice teacher. And, as is the case for all who embark on a hero ' s journey, often the fiercest dragons will be found within the student herself.

Facing dragons - external and internal - is the heart of the journey. Successfully battling the dragons and enduring the trials are the source of the transformation that is the reward of the hero's journey: in teacher education our hero begins as a college student and ends as a novice teacher, ready to go out into the world and share what she has learned.

I felt that using the hero's journey as a metaphor for their first internship semester would offer my students an alternative way of thinking about their experience, perhaps providing a more positive perspective. This study was designed to allow me to determine if using the mythic hero's journey as a metaphor could reposition the challenges of the fieldwork experience, thereby serving as a source of support and encouragement to these students during this difficult yet essential professional transformation.

Using Star Wars in Teacher Education

Although the hero's journey is a well-known mythic theme, I felt it necessary to discuss the hero's journey with my students in the context of a familiar story. I opted to use the Star Wars trilogy of films - Star Wars (Lucas, 1977); The Empire Strikes Back (Lucas, Brackett & Kasdan, 1980); and The Return oftheJedi (Lucas & Kasdan, 1983) - as a mediating force to help the students see and forge the connections between the mythic hero's journey cycle and their nascent teaching lives.