Using Mythology to Ground Social and Emotional Learning

For most of human history, story has been a central tool in the social and emotional learning (SEL) of young people. As mythologist Joseph Campbell pointed out, the myths of ancient societies taught young people how to become fully engaged members of their community and gave them guidance for persevering through the inevitable psychological crises of life.

Today, faced with a desperate need for more social and emotional learning tools to help young people navigate an increasingly complicated world, educators should once again consider the value that story has in conveying social and emotional wisdom. Specifically, the Greek myths—Theseus and the Minotaur, Orpheus and Eurydice, and many more—are uniquely positioned to help us foster social-emotional learning.

Why the Greek Myths?

The Greek myths, for all their strangeness, have two distinct advantages as vehicles for SEL: (a) their continued hold on our cultural imagination means that they turn up in all sorts of places outside the classroom, such as TV shows and advertising; and (b) their social and emotional richness, which allows them to be scaled for students throughout the secondary school years.

What follows are just a few classroom activities that use the Greek myths for SEL. Ideally, students entering middle school could be exposed to a number of the most iconic Greek myths in their humanities classes as their touchpoints for these activities—Orpheus and Eurydice, Daedalus and Icarus, the Calydonian boar hunt, Adonis, Narcissus and Echo, and so on—but for simplicity’s sake, I’ll draw all my examples for how to use the myths in your classroom from the story of Theseus and the Minotaur.

A quick summary of the myth: Theseus is the young son of King Aegeus of Athens. For some years, Athens has been under the control of the tyrannical King Minos of Crete. Minos demands that every nine years, Athens sends him young men and women as tributes who will be fed to the Minotaur, a monstrous half-human, half-bull creature—the secret child of Minos’s wife and a bull—that lives in a labyrinth underneath the royal palace in Crete. Theseus bravely volunteers as one of the Athenian tributes in the hopes that he can find a way to defeat the Minotaur and end this savage tradition.

Arriving in Crete, Theseus finds that Minos’s daughter Ariadne wants to help Theseus in his quest, and she provides him a string he can use to navigate his way back out of the labyrinth after he has defeated the monster. Theseus defeats the Minotaur in combat, finds his wary back out of the maze with the string Ariadne gave him, and sails back to Athens triumphant.

3 Activities to Integrate Myths into SEL

1. Mythological Minute Check-In. Check-ins help students practice self-awareness, so a Mythological Minute activity has students check in about their current emotional state by identifying a mythological figure associated with the same feelings. The overwhelmed high school student might check in by saying, “I’m Theseus stepping into the labyrinth,” while a student who feels more centered might say, “I’m Ariadne, ready to help support my classmates on their journey.”

Teachers can help students develop even more acute self-awareness by asking follow-up questions like “Why did you pick Theseus instead of, say, the Minotaur, who stomps around the labyrinth in a constant rage that shakes all of Crete?” The result is students with a better understanding of their own tendencies, a better vocabulary for expressing their feelings, and an abiding sense that their feelings are valid, considering that they can find people in the myths from thousands of years ago who felt the same way our students feel today.

2. My Academic Hero’s Journey. Decades of research have validated the power of goal-setting in academic contexts, so imagine having students map out their academic goals using Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey. While Campbell’s model of the Hero’s Journey can be quite complex, in essence it really consists of three phases: Separation, Initiation, and Return. In the Separation phase of the journey, our hero is often a big fish in a small pond, resting on their laurels, often with a nagging sense that there is a greater challenge or responsibility calling to them.

In the Initiation phase, our hero is put through numerous trials but often finds new helpers and companions along the way, slowly and sometimes painfully realizing their true potential. Finally, in the Return phase, our hero returns to the start of the journey, now possessing a new talent or gift that can enrich the world.

So this activity, beginning with teaching students about Campbell’s Hero’s Journey, can be used to help our students see their own academic journey as one marked by (a) stepping outside their comfort zone; (b) facing trials that make them stronger, often with help and support from new sources; and finally (c) taking their newfound gifts—new skills, new mindsets—and using them to reinvigorate their surroundings.

The often boring process of setting personal goals now becomes a process of personal myth-making. At the start of a school year, teachers can ask students to consider how, academically, they are like Theseus—relucant to take on the next big challenge staring them in the face.

Next, teachers can help them imagine the trials that will likely come from trying to meet this challenge. Finally, teachers can even have students envision what it will be like when they have achieved their goal and how they might share their experience with others.

3. Myths and the Wheel of Emotions. Myths very rarely tell us how characters feel, so they offer students a way to practice examining finer emotions and recognize that we often feel multiple ways simultaneously. As Theseus descends into the labyrinth to battle the Minotaur, students might respond that he feels scared.

With a tool like the Wheel of Emotions, the teacher can ask about how a mythic hero feels at a particular moment in a myth, asking students to draw upon other parts of the story—Theseus volunteered for this task, his home of Athens has been tyrannically controlled by King Minos, the Minotaur’s father, etc.—to help students recognize that while Theseus may feel scared, he may also feel anger, and even some pride.

And by consistently utilizing the Wheel of Emotions, teachers can help students put a finer point on the emotions they see in these mythic figures—Theseus is surely afraid as he steps into the labyrinth, but is that fear anxiousness about what he will have to do or insecurity about his ability to return from this quest?