We’re Off to See the Wizard

The Ordinary World
This is what happened. I was happy with my own little I-Search project. I’d been doing it for years, and even though I never really solidify anything I teach, I was getting it down pretty good. In the past, my students had come up with really interesting questions, pursued the answers, and told good stories about their searches along the way. No two pieces were every the same, and students had learned to recognize the process of research, rather than just having their eye on the product.

Answering the Call
I could have stayed there, but my team teacher of English wasn’t satisfied. She wanted to turn the I-Search into a combined English and Social Studies writing project. She wanted to help them write creative non-fiction stories, whatever that was.

Refusal of the Call
Right. I just couldn’t get my head around it. Historical fiction, creative non-fiction, whatever. And she wanted me to do all the grunt work with them, the research. We tried to find some examples of what she was talking about.

Crossing the First Threshold
Then came the staff developer, who just happened to have taught with me 20 years ago, with something up his sleeve. The Hero’s Journey. Every good story, he said, follows the pattern of the Hero’s Journey. The story begins with an ordinary world (Kansas, let’s say) The Hero is somehow out of place, but it’s comfortable. (Dorothy – she lives with Auntie Em and Uncle Henry – but where are her parents?) The Call is Answered (She runs away with Toto), but then she chickens out (the peddler tells her to go back home). When the tornado strikes, there’s no going back. She ain’t in Kansas any more, folks (Crossing the First Threshold).

There’s more. Enemies, Allies, Trials, Mentors, Ordeals, Returning Home, Resurrection.

So that’s how we (my old friend the staff developer, my clever English cohort, and I) are presenting this writing project to the students. As in the Hero’s story, as in life, as in a combined writing project, they are on a journey, and can now identify the markings of trials and tribulations, dark caves and moments of confusion in their own research, because this is their journey.

Imagine a bunch of 7th graders whistling “We off to see the Wizard” on their way to do research in the library.