Welcome to Harris Communications
Educational Home
of the Hero's Journey
E-Mail: [email protected]
Phone: 707-252-7898
FAX: 707-252-7898
Exploring life's great adventure since 1997
Workshops, Seminars
and In-Service Presentations

Because the hero's journey pattern is so adaptable, it can form the foundation for many kinds of workshops. The Basic Workshop presents the foundations for understanding and using the journey pattern in the classroom or in life. Other workshops are built on how the journey process expresses itself in different disciplines and subjects. 

Awaken the hero in your students and energize your teachers with a Hero's Journey workshop.

Basic Workshop: Introduction to the Hero's Journey

  • Exploration of the three-stage transformative process: at the heart of the journey;

  • Rituals and Rites of Passage: how rituals are traditional vehicles for growth and transformation, how rituals help us transform meaning; how rituals deepen the dialogue between the individual and the culture.

  • Discussion of traditional hero's journey models, including Otto Rank, Lord Raglan, Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell (includes charts and diagrams for classroom use).

  • Introduction to the basic, eight-stage hero's journey process we developed to use with literature, film and life.

  • Exploration of the Call Refused and how avoiding or refusing our journeys an lead to stagnation and defensiveness, using Groundhog Day as an example;

  • Discussion and presentation: teaching the hero's journey pattern using film. (We usually use Spiderman II, Finding Nemo, or The Lion King, but we can use virtually any film you would like.)

  • The hero's journey as a learning schema: discussion and examples on how to activate students' schemas, create advance organizers, develop and use graphic organizers for character analyse, create effective tests, essays, discussions and projects around the journey schema.

Within this framework we can substitute and modify material to fit your school's specific curriculum and needs.

Your Presenter: Reg Harris

Reg Harris has presented dozens of workshops and seminars, ranging from in-service workshops for individual schools to sessions at state conventions for the California Association of Teachers of English and the Oregon Council of Teachers of English. (See his full bio here.)

Reg has a master's in existential and humanistic psychology. His work focused on the psychology of the journey process, culminating in a new, psychologically based model of the journey. His thesis, The Eternal Circle: A Hermeneutic Model of the Hero's Journey, covered the transformational experience, gestalt theory, adolescent psychology and educational psychology, and existential themes in the journey.

While his workshops have focused on teaching and the classroom, the hero's journey theme has valuable applications for any organization that encourages personal growth, teamwork and cooperation. 

Reg has several workshops available, beginning with the basic "Awakening the Hero in Your Students: An Introduction to the Hero's Journey." Remember, any workshop can be customized to your individual curriculum and needs. Contact Reg Harris at [email protected] to discuss your specific workshop needs.

Workshops:

  • Awakening the Hero in Your Students: An Introduction to the Hero's Journey;

  • The Journey in Modern Film: Strategies for teaching and developing the hero's journey theme in film. Incorporates heroes, antiheroes and tragic heroes on the screen (can use virtually any film);

  • The Hero's Journey in Mythology (using both Greek and non-Greek mythologies, with a look at the Trickster and polarity in myth and the hero's journey);

  • Custom workshop: Can focus on using literature and film from your current curriculum to teach the hero's journey and the process of transformation. Can also be a combination of any of the themes below.

Themes that can be covered within workshops:

  • The basic pattern of the hero's journey;

  • The Tragic Hero and the Call Refused (Willy Loman, Claudius, McBeth, Hamlet, etc.);

  • The Mandala: A Map to the Personal Journey (creating a personal mandala, power of symbols and metaphors, using mandalas for character analysis and interpretation);

  • The Wisdom of Polarity: Explores the polar aspects of the journey, including Hegel's dialectic (thesis-antithesis-synthesis), the Yin-Yan, and polar characters in literature, film and myth (i.e., Hamlet and Laertes, Apollo and Dionysus, Spiderman and Doc Ock)

  • The Adolescent Journey (using developmental psychology to understand the adolescent experience and how literature/film can be mentors on that journey; adolescent journeys in literature, such as Telemachus in The Odyssey);

  • The Existential journey (using films such as Harold and Maude and The Legend of Bagger Vance, and novels such as Walkabout, Of Mice and Men, To Kill a Mockingbird and The Old Man and the Sea);

  • Hermeneutics and the Hero's Journey: Hermeneutic theory, the hermeneutic loop, and the hermeneutic dialogue between ourselves and our world;

  • The Personal Journey in a Postmodern World: What becomes of the personal journey in a world where cultural myths have disappeared (novels The Things They Carried and Fahrenheit 451 and films The Matrix and Spiderman II).

On June 11, 2007, Reg was a keynote speaker at the 30th Anniversary Tribute to Star Wars at Modesto Junior College. His presentation, "Use the Force, George," explored the influence of Joseph Campbell on George Lucas and the expression of the heroic journey pattern in Star Wars: A New Hope, the original 1977 film.