The Myth of the Student Hero and the “Dreaded Lit Review”

Conclusion

Students and teachers alike enter the classroom with understandings of the existing power relations, which represent opposing ideologies that typically guide class content and conduct. This is the college knowledge game. Likewise, both students and teachers carry mythic images and archetypes that guide their experiences in the classroom and their reflections on those academic experiences (e.g., comics about writing the literature review).

The previous analysis of students' comics about the process of writing a literature review seems to resonate with Campbell's stages of the hero's mythic journey. Likewise, the presence of students' archetypes within their comics (e.g., blood, the sea, gods, monsters, superheroes, tricksters, shadows, and mandalas) seem to affirm the idea that universal images of the "collective unconscious" are in play and at work (cf. Burke, 1966; Jung, 1971).

At the very least, students' comics offer up ideologies that question, critique, and support the ideologies that students encounter. Most profoundly, the comics acknowledge the contextual processes that surround the "encouragement of learning" by acknowledging that the learning is itself contextualized by the "education of the whole person," with that education being related to the individual student's growth; thus, students comics also reflected expressions of anxiety, boredom, fear, growth, and accomplishment. Finally, the comics also reflect personal statements regarding the "service of faith and the promotion of justice" (see Loyola Marymount University Mission Statement). For students' comics arguably demonstrate some sort of faith about the "human" and the "divine" while creating personal narratives about justice (see Campbell). Naturally, within the comics, the ideological positions, like the mythic narratives, are very particular to the context of my class. As we say in the academic game, "more research is needed."

Students' abilities to critique the work they do as students is very limited, and "Student Teaching Evaluations" have become increasingly suspect. Opportunities for more creative reflections—in the form of comics—may be of value.

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