I am delighted to announce that, beginning in Fall 2018, I will be moving to the Religious Studies department at MSU! I will maintain 40% of my appointment to English, but the remaining 60% will be in Religious Studies!

The faculty in the religious studies department are committed to each other and their program. They have a close relationship with their undergraduate students and care deeply about their achievement. I hope that the courses and expertise I bring will add to these worthy efforts.

Beginning in Fall 2018, I will be teaching REL 205: Myth, Self and Religion. My focus will be on stories about creation, transformation and destruction: the ways we can interpret these stories as myths, religious texts or psychological ones. At the end of the semester, students will be able to answer the following essential questions:

• Why do the themes of Creation, Transformation and Destruction occur so frequently in popular and esoteric culture–both ancient and contemporary?
• How does one recognize whether a text is being used for mythic, personal/psychological or religious purposes?
• How can we interpret the same text as myth, personal or religious?
• How is the study of creation, transformation, and destruction stories relevant to the lives of 21st century students?

Here’s a copy of my working (i.e., rough draft) syllabus: Valles REL 205 Syllabus FA18. As I make changes, I will try to remember to update the version here.

I’d love to hear from anyone with ideas about how to make it stronger!  To comment, you can either email me at vallesm@msu.edu or tweet me @margotvalles1.

Inspiration

The Seasons and The Sun-God myth
Extra Information about the Sun-God Myth in the Arthurian Tradition:

No-one knows precisely how old the Sun-God myth is but it is present throughout all of recorded history, albeit, in a variety of manifestations. In its essence, it is the story of the changing seasons and the yearly cycle from abundance in the summer through the darkening days of autumn, into the barren land of winter and into the renewal of life in spring. Unlike a scientific explanation, however, this cycle is explained through a story. The students’ character’s adventures this semester were yet another version of the Sun-God myth.

In many Arthurian texts, especially those in the bel inconnu tradition, a young knight manages to defeat an unknown knight who wears red armor. Often, the language used to describe the Red Knight’s appearance compares him explicitly with the sun, sometimes however, the parallels are implicit. When the young knight takes on the red armor belonging to the defeated unknown knight, he takes with it the responsibility of restoring fertility and abundance to the kingdom. Just like the sun who must bring summer from winter, the young knight must restore the Earth.

Extra Information/Inspiration about the Seasons and narrative structure:

The description of the seasons below is from Northrop Frye’s The Archetype of Literature. Northrop Frye. The Kenyon Review, Vol. 13, No. 1 (Winter, 1951), pp. 92-110.

The dawn, spring and birth phase. Myths of the birth of the hero, of revival and resurrection, of creation and (because the four phases area cycle) of the defeat of the powers of darkness, winter and death. Subordinate characters: the father and the mother. The archetype of romance and of most dithyrambic and rhapsodic poetry.

The zenith, summer, and marriage or triumph phase. Myths of apotheosis, of the sacred marriage, and of entering into Paradise. Subordinate characters: the companion and the bride. The archetype of comedy, pastoral and idyll.

The sunset, autumn and death phase. Myths of fall, of the dying god, of violent death and sacrifice and of the isolation of the hero. Subordinate characters: the traitor and the siren. The archetype of tragedy and elegy.

The darkness, winter and dissolution phase. Myths of the triumph of these powers; myths of floods and the return of chaos, of the defeat of the hero, and Gotterdammerung myths. Subordinate characters: the ogre and the witch. The archetype of satire (see, for instance, the conclusion of The Dunciad).

Joseph Campbell’s Monomyth

A diagrammatic representation of the Hero’s Journey from Joseph Campbell’s book, The Hero with A Thousand Faces. This image is available through wikimedia commons.
Campbell’s monomyth informs this project at multiple levels.

On the one hand, the characters that the students develop follow a trajectory across the course material that is modeled on the Hero’s Journey. On the other hand, I also used the hero’s journey as a model for Backwards-Designing the course, based on the work of Angela Gunder, Cathy Russell and Jessica Knott (https://sites.google.com/view/narrativeonline/the-framework).  They based their model on the Backwards Design work of Wiggins and McTighe, cited at the bottom of their page. The authors of the site write:

Monomyth in Online Course Design

With our student defined as epic hero, what would the hero’s journey look like in an online course? The Hero’s Journey (or the monomyth), a pattern of narrative defined by writer and mythologist Joseph Campbell in his 1949 work “The Hero with a Thousand Faces,” describes the progression of an identified hero through a series of stages. Campbell’s description of the Hero’s Journey, which has heavily influenced such filmmakers as George Lucas, Steven Spielberg and Francis Ford Coppola, combines the series of stages into three major units or acts – the hero’s departure into the adventure, the initiation into a series of trials, and the return to the ordinary world with new knowledge or treasure to be shared with his peers.

Beyond its ubiquitous application in literature and cinema, the monomyth structure has the power to serve as a framework for creating points of engagement in many other modalities – in digital stories, games, and even online course curriculum. The direct use of the monomyth or narrative structure in online course design is still emerging, but the salient components of the monomyth and their parallels to widely-accepted models and practices for effective online course designs are compelling. In recent year, educators have placed a greater emphasis on establishing the role of the learner within the online classroom, shifting the level of autonomy and direction that they have over the entire process (Palloff & Pratt, 2013). The concept of establishing learners as “epic heroes” in an online course correlates with this role shift, with educators moving students into the role of creators of knowledge.

Using the monomyth as the framework for redefining the responsibility of learners means that individual students are tasked with completing a concrete call to action whereby they set the path and pace in meeting an established outcome. The compilation of definitions and discussions included on this site contextualize the concept of the monomyth and its stages within effective learning design practices, both current and emerging, and answer the challenge of how educators might begin to align learner-centered practices to a framework supported by relevant research.

You can see from my course map, that I wanted both the students’ characters and the students themselves to see themselves as heroes on this epic journey. Almost all of the graded assignments ask students to make connections between the travails and adventures of their characters, popular culture and their own lives.

To read more about Campbell’s monomyth and the narrative in online course design, go to http://bit.ly/monomythonline