As a language arts department, we decided to focus the literature of our first marking period on heroes in world mythologies rather than last year's focus on Greek mythology stories. On the surface, this seems like a no-brainer. There should be many stories to choose from and students should be able to compare various cultures' idea of heroism. In actuality, it turns out to be hard to find hero stories written in English that aren't both Eurocentric and masculine.
We really had difficulties in finding texts that described heroines. [On a side note, looking up heroine on the Internet can sometimes bring up sites that you might not want to see.] Even focusing on Mulan, getting a text that is readable and relatable to students was quite a challenge. The problem was compounded by the fact that few of the stories dealing with Mulan (aside from the original Ballad of Mulan) are translated in English.
In the end, we chose the following: Odysseus (He was our starting point since we already had material from last year and a large number of later stories allude to his tale), Mulan, Aladdin (although he's really not that heroic in the original story), Raven from Tlingit oral tradition, Robin Hood (paired with Raven as the stories of the two had similarities and were both relatively short), and Sundiata (the founder of Ancient Mali, the first "Lion King").
Honestly, just looking through the various texts was enlightening. I'm pretty excited about the coming term.
We really had difficulties in finding texts that described heroines. [On a side note, looking up heroine on the Internet can sometimes bring up sites that you might not want to see.] Even focusing on Mulan, getting a text that is readable and relatable to students was quite a challenge. The problem was compounded by the fact that few of the stories dealing with Mulan (aside from the original Ballad of Mulan) are translated in English.
In the end, we chose the following: Odysseus (He was our starting point since we already had material from last year and a large number of later stories allude to his tale), Mulan, Aladdin (although he's really not that heroic in the original story), Raven from Tlingit oral tradition, Robin Hood (paired with Raven as the stories of the two had similarities and were both relatively short), and Sundiata (the founder of Ancient Mali, the first "Lion King").
Honestly, just looking through the various texts was enlightening. I'm pretty excited about the coming term.
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