I created the Lesson Plan on the Greek hero in the fall of 2016 as part of the Instructional Design course through the University of Arkansas’s program in Educational Technology. The purpose of the lesson plan was to have students engage in the material in new and constructive ways that would lead through the levels of Bloom’s Mastery from knowledge acquisition to interpretation to application.

The overall lesson relied on Bloom’s Mastery levels and a constructivist approach to education in order to develop building blocks to have students successfully master knowledge of Greek heroes and Joseph Campbell’s theory on the Hero’s journey. Before creating these building blocks, I first determined the users of the lesson—students in an introductory mythology course at a college—and the learning outcomes of the lesson. Because many of the students have limited technology at home, I deisgned a lesson that required technology only in the classroom. Additionally, while best practices encourage group work, the students primarily live off campus and so group work was confined to the classroom. In this lesson, I determined that the main heroes the students would be responsible for were Theseus, Perseus, and Jason. I selected a primary source reading and then created a worksheet to guide their reading, encouraging them to identify the main components of the narrative and the similarities of the heroes involved. Next, students watch a Youtube video in class about Joseph Campbell’s theory of the Hero’s journey. After viewing numerous videos, I selected this one as the right level of engagement and levity for an introductory college audience. After viewing this video in class, students work in groups to determine how the stories of the Greek heroes align with Campbell’s theory. For homework, students were supposed to reflect on their own experiences and knowledge of heroes from other cultures, including movies, books, and comic books. In class the next day, we discuss these reflections and then emphasize the role of culture in making each hero specific and relevant to his or her audience. Finally, students are asked to design their own hero narratives that both follow Campbell’s journey, but also address the specific concerns and values of the student’s culture. In doing this, students are encouraged to discuss the diversity of their experiences.

The process of creating this lesson plan allowed me to put into practice theories on education and learning, in particular constructivist theory in which student learn through building blocks of knowledge. Additionally, I had the chance to think through a curriculum that I had taught before, but now to redesign this lesson with purpose. This was the most beneficial part of the lesson design—I had taught this lesson before and had always intended students to have the same basic learning outcomes (the details of the Greek hero narratives and the patterns of Campbell’s theory). But I had not thought through a lesson in which this information was not just given to the students, but discussed, interpreted, and applied not only to the ancient material but to the personal experiences of the students. While I am not able to apply this same amount of rigor and energy into every lesson, I have adopted the overall approach as a way of structuring my course and have used the same process for my bigger, more complicated lessons, such as a recent one on Roman graffiti and a future one on the Roman army.