Preface:
This project is a reflection on an elective semester of Mythology taught in a New York suburban high school in 2005-2006. Because of its scope, the main project of the course, a mythology game, cannot be explained within formal lesson parameters. An analysis of the game and of the blend of pedagogical techniques I call deep learning follows this preface. My explanation of the more traditional aspects of the class, including the supporting lessons and materials, can be found in the unit section following the analysis.

Purpose of the Project:
I spent 2003 to 2007 teaching and reflecting on the difficulties of high school students and educators. In my experience teachers often feel that they are trying to teach reading and writing to a generation that honestly believes books are dead and consequently the need to read is over. Some English teachers fear that we are witnessing the death of literature. (I am not in that camp.) Students cannot be blamed however; it is not only the culture but the neurology of the age - our post modern media saturated era. The revolutionary cultural shift to electronic information and endless entertainment has altered much of the educational landscape. Some theorize that this ocean of electronic stimulation affects the neural connections of our information age brains. Perhaps one reason why the detail and inwardness of reading and literature doesn't register with students is that television trains its viewers to receive the world without analysis or question. Viewers are trained to stay on the surface - to see the body but not the soul.

While this analysis is not a diatribe against media culture, far from it, the problem is mentioned here because it is an inescapable observation that teachers across the country make everyday. The deep learning approach of this project is presented as a step towards a solution. Deep learning is a teaching technique that can be utilized across a wide variety of disciplines, to counteract the terrible disengagement manifested by students who seem bored, but might actually be overwhelmed by information they cannot understand or digest. The following analysis describes ways to engage student hands, hearts and minds as they create a world of their own learning.

Admittedly, there can be no more magical subject to use as the basis for creating a world than mythology, since mythology is, essentially, about creating the world. The advantage of working with the subject certainly facilitated my goal of creating a culture of learning, a counterbalance to the post-modern age. Today's culture, where information floods over students faster than they can absorb it or find ways to connect it to other information, is far different than a culture where small groups of seekers discover information, bring it back to each other, share and compare, process and connect it to a growing, exciting, meaningful creation. Unfortunately it is rare to encounter entire groups of students so excited by learning that they are mutually teaching and learning from each other. Most often students at the high school level who find wonder, curiosity and satisfaction in learning experience it from within, on their own. Creating situations where groups of students can participate in an externalized experience of deep learning is one way to convey its joy. What if learning is never pleasurable? What if learning is different from knowledge? What if you lead a horse to water but it doesn't know how to drink?

The imagination inherent in mythology and the fun of a game might seem like an unbeatable combination, but projects not deeply connected to purpose fail to educate. A creative force breathed life and connectivity into the mythology game, yet it was also tightly controlled and designed from top to bottom according to a variety of proven educational theories and strategies. The hermetic, metaphoric aspect of creating a self-contained world galvanized the creativity of every individual involved. At the same time, educational theories of constructivist learning, cooperative learning, multiple intelligence theory, Bloom's taxonomy, MacKenzie's questioning techniques and a variety of integrated strategies were so naturally rooted in the heart of the project that creating and learning became one and the same. Nothing felt contrived or forced. Could it be that "game," as a metaphor, unified the teaching strategies?

George Lakoff's concept of experiential gestalts "which are ways of organizing experiences into structured wholes" could explain how students - who are part of a generation whose obsession with gaming, particularly electronic gaming (the perfect nexus of training some intrinsic part of their being for engagement in the cyber-age), spawns industries, movies and magazines while drawing legions of engineers, artists and designers in to assuage it - instantly became intently engaged by the GAME gestalt of our project (even though ours was not electronic) and managed to sustain their commitment to creating the game for months, working harder and learning more complexly than they thought possible. Thus the idea that the metaphor of "GAME" as in Learning is a GAME or World Creation is a GAME or Teaching is a GAME helped "structure [the students'] experience in terms of [a] multidimensional gestalt[] [that made their] experience coherent" (81).

The Class
The first question I asked myself as I prepared to teach a high school elective in Mythology was "How does mythology work?" Five months later, at the completion of the semester, I began to ask myself "How did that class work?" For it was magic, and it was magic for every student regardless of their initial interest, learning style or ability. The fifteen enrolled students represented grades 10-12 as well as every range of ability in the school; there was an even distribution between students with I.E.P.s, mainstream, Honors and AP level students.

In addition to readings, papers and traditional assessments the class was able to focus on an alternative assessment, the creation of a mythology game. As it developed over the months, student fascination with the mythology game spread its magic through the school, even influencing students who weren't in the class. One year later many students from the class have communicated with me (I moved to another state), telling me that the class was the most powerful learning experience of their lives. Several wrote about the class in their college application essays. Some even went so far as to say that they never expect to have such an experience again; they don't believe it possible. I feel as transformed as my students; as a teacher my life has changed forever.

I puzzled over the learning mechanism we created. I became convinced that the depth of learning that occurred was not only remarkable; it was repeatable. I believe, although I will frame this discussion as it relates to the teaching of Greek mythology, that the following deep learning teaching technique could allow students to explore many complex subjects such as the Civil War, the Middle Ages, the Age of Exploration, Feminist & Suffrage Movements, the Civil Rights Movement, or the Middle East; important literary works such as MacBeth, A Tale of Two Cities, The Scarlet Letter; or even entire literary eras such as the Transcendentalist, Victorian, Romantic or Elizabethan eras.

Look further down on this lens for more of this essay

Each Aspect of The Deep Learning Classroom Deserves Its Own Lens

1) Emotional -- See www.squidoo.com/Emotionally_Safe_Classrooms

2) Sensory -- See www.squidoo.com/Making_Knowledge_Real

3) Connectivity -- See www.squidoo.com/Bring_History_To_Life

4) Social -- See www.squidoo.com/Students_Teaching_Each_Other

Core Aspects of the Mythology Game:

Question Cards: Students generated questions (over 500 during semester) as they read and researched myths, plays and hero stories. During game play questions are answered when players / teams roll dice and land on question squares (a certain color). According to the game rules questions are to be answered as thoroughly as possible, showing not only understanding of the story but also the significance of the myth. Interestingly, whenever there was downtime during class, students would take the cards out and quiz each other even before the game was complete enough to play. Later on, prior to the end-of-term match against the teachers, students went into serious study mode and spent lunch periods and study halls huddled over the 20-page "cheat sheet" of all questions and answers (any student caught sharing the cheat sheet with a teacher risked a trip to Hades). I never saw students study so feverishly and it started to make the teachers who were to play the game against them nervous. To illustrate the drama, one day, about a week before the tournament, the leader of the teacher team came to me, very upset, asking for the same "cheat sheet" that the students had. I eventually gave her one, but without the answers.

Identification Cards: Pathway squares on the board alternate between being question card squares or identification card squares. Identification cards are photo quality prints, about baseball card size, of mythology based artwork students located during internet-based research (over 300 during the semester). The player who draws an identification card must not only identify the myth, but also describe the action depicted in the artwork and explain how it relates to the myth and the myth's significance. Additionally some identification cards have special instructions - these cards can be used as punishments, curses for other teams, or get-out-of-trouble cards, provided that the question on it is answered correctly. Some cards will send you automatically to Hades, etc. The fascinating popularity of the identification cards (played with frequently) was due to student surprise at how much information was stored in each picture - and how quickly they could recall it. Students delighted in finding examples of art about the same myth but from many different art periods - from ancient pottery shards, through Renaissance, Neo Classic, Romantic, Abstract, Futuristic and all the way up to Disney and Anime styles. Discussions about Identification Cards were full of teachable moments and mini-lessons about Allusion, Metaphor, different art styles and art history.

Board of Realms: a 12' x 3' board game made out of three equal sized pieces. One piece mapped the Underworld, one Ancient Greece, and the third Mt. Olympus. The maps are discussed in great detail later in the paper.

Pathways, Strategy and Rules: As with every other part of the game, the way the pathways were laid out was 100% student created. The only requirement was that the rules and strategy had to incorporate many concepts of the ancient Greek worldview such as hubris, fate, everlasting fame, furies, quests and more. This requirement led to super-charged higher-level thinking, even in the way the pathways were laid out; the resulting game is complex, hilarious, frustrating, thrilling and very high-energy. It also reinforces, in a palpable and unforgettable way, the coherence of the Greek worldview.

Educational Significance of Game Elements

Question Cards Question cards evolved from nightly homework assignments of reading several myths and writing several questions about each myth. In the beginning, student questions were predictably weak, e.g. "Who was Dionysius?" and after initial discouragement I found support in my desire to teach proper questioning by discovering the work of Jamie McKenzie, Ed.D. Question Cards are the fundamental building blocks representing and reinforcing student knowledge. Without the cards the game would not exist, not merely because games need question cards, but because the process of knowing and comprehending the myths, the first levels of Bloom's cognitive taxonomy, supports the higher level affective and cognitive functions of valuing, analyzing, applying and synthesizing knowledge of the myths. All the higher layers of thinking depend on the basic acquisition and organization of knowledge - just as all the vital creative synthesis and sophisticated processing that made the game fascinating depended utterly on students' basic understanding of the myths.

Essential Questions Jamie McKenzie's Learning to Question to Wonder to Learn provides hundreds of examples of powerful questioning techniques. Modeling the mindset of a deep thinker by thinking out loud, teaching questioning through mini-lessons and regularly assigning "read this and write good questions" rather than "read this and answer the questions" as homework were ways I incorporated his theories into my teaching. Another important use of questions in my deep thinking model was that the class generated questions, discussed, answered, and let questions lead them to other questions. Questions became part of the game, and students spent time quizzing each other to prepare for the challenge against the teachers. Explicit teaching about questions included modeling Bloom's taxonomy to categorize questions and illustrate different aspects of learning.

The following system of questions illustrates the kind of questioning found in MacKenzie's book. They also present the humanistic questions that fuel my personal interest in mythology. Please read the following questions as a system of questions, one idea leading to another, thought following thought. Notice the function of simple words like "Why" and "How":

Mythology Fulfills A Mysterious Function For Mankind - How And Why?
Are myths merely systems of seemingly simple stories, not quite literature, religion, nor legend? Why do all cultures have mythologies, and why are they different? How are they the same? What is it about a mythology that makes one culture different from another?

What is our modern day mythology and how is it similar to ancient mythology - say Greek mythology? How is our culture similar to ancient Greek culture? What are the common features to all cultures? Is our culture particularly affected by Greek mythology and why not other mythologies? How does the economic / political power of a culture affect its mythology and vice versa? Is the political / economic influence of a culture on other cultures in ratio to the mythological influence of that culture on other cultures? Did worship of particular deities over others influence micro-cultures within ancient Greek society? How did that manifest? How did those micro-cultures affect the larger society? What is the equivalent of these micro-cultures in today's world?

What purpose does mythology serve for humanity?

How does Mythology WORK?

Since mythology is universal - is it a part of our brain? Our genetics? Is there an evolutionary, anthropological necessity for mythology?

Can we interpret mythology using familiar literary tools and lenses? Or is mythology more effectively studied in a humanistic, contextual format?

What about the psychology of mythology? How do God-concepts affect individuals? Does admiration of an ideal lead to improvement of the individual? The gods of Greek mythology can be seen as personifications of natural forces or hyperbolic entities exhibiting narrowly focused, idealized human abilities (our modern super heroes with super powers). Why do people create Gods? Why heroes? Why are some Gods more powerful than others? Why did the Greek gods misbehave and interfere with each other? How does the God family system of Greek mythology reflect human family psychology? How do Greek god concepts compare with the modern psychological concepts of archetypes?

Is one purpose of mythology to help dispel fear of the unknown? How does that work? Why is fear a powerful shaper of mankind? Did the rise of science also help dispel fear of the unknown? What is the effect of science on our concepts of sacredness? Is the dominance of science in modern life connected to religious conflicts of our times? Where do we locate the sacred? How has this changed since the ancients mapped out their world?

Look further down on this lens for more of this essay

Board of Realms
The Maps - The Ground Beneath Our Feet
Maps became the center of my deep learning method because of their unique properties: "[a] map is a paradox in that physically it is mere marks on sheets of paper, yet visually it brings to mind a multidimensional world, containing objects and even emotions not perceived directly on the piece of paper" (Muehrecke 323). Students devoted enormous creative energy to creating an artifact, a board game built in three separate segments (each segment measures 4 feet by 3 feet). Their engagement in a collaborative mapping process resulted in a richly elaborated, shared metaphor evocative of the geography of the ancient world, the underworld, and of the Gods' home in Mount Olympus. Each aspect of the Greek worldview was researched, negotiated, modified and mapped. As mythological texts were explored, additional layers of mythic geography were encoded, through group negotiation, upon the board game. Methodical coloring, blending, texturing, edging, shadowing and shading involved hours of enjoyable creative time during which the students discussed the stories they were embedding within the iconography of the maps. As the maps took on color the myths themselves gained complexity and depth in students' imaginations.

Map as Reality, Grounding: One obvious function of mapping is to acquaint students with the actual geography of Greece and the Mediterranean. The central board of the game had to be one of the most negotiated spaces, first and foremost because it exists in plain site on maps, globes and satellite images. However according to the rules of the project, the game board needed to show all of the crucial cities, waterways, points of worship, battles and heroic exploits we would study. It needed to be at once a geographic and a mythic ancient Greece; and the ancients had no satellites to verify their cartographies. Sent on guided quests with the requirement that they come up with one comprehensive map, students discovered that the ancient maps were wildly different from each other, and much time was spent in comparing them and wondering about their differences. After understanding that maps represent the ideas of the maker, students were able to approach their mapping with more confidence. A wonderful result of this was that there was no "copying from the source," there couldn't be. Students were liberated from the worry that their work had to be "a certain way" - instead they took ownership of their creation - attained their own reality.

Map as History: During these initial searches and sketches, teachable moments arose naturally for input on the historic, economic, agricultural, political and military realities of the era. Students studied topographic maps while hearing about the lack of arable land, or sketched contours of the craggy coastline while hearing of the sacrifice of Iphegenia for sailing wind, or replaying the scenes of triremes sailing to Ilios from the movie Troy. Countless opportunities for mini myth lessons arose during this time as well, such as when students were considering the placement of Athens and the fortunate shape of its harbor on the game board. This became the moment for teaching / hearing / seeing / learning about the agricultural advantages of olives, the economics of olive oil and its trade, as well as all the tales of Athena's gift to Athens (for example: http://www.mythweb.com/gods/Athena.html), seeing the temple to Athena (see an animation from the Institute for the Visualization of History http://www.vizin.org/projects/master.htm#acropolis/html /acropolis.htm), finding museum photos of painted pottery artifacts once containing olive oil, and simultaneously hearing about Athena's birth, her favors, her wisdom and her worship.

Map as Fiction, Setting: As the maps became more elaborate, more encoded with detail and story it became easier and faster to teach the class new stories, even as the stories we covered became more complicated. As an example - we were moving towards the end of the semester and about to study the Iliad. To introduce the epic I helped the students imagine the nature of the conflict in context of what they had already processed / created / learned. As the students gathered around the by now almost fully fleshed out maps I reminded the students of the story of "The Judgment of Paris" (we even had, by then, several art identification cards of various artist's interpretation of that story). I then proceeded to give the general structure of the story, tracing out with my finger where each main Achaean came from, their name and their story, how they were connected and drawn in to the war. I traced the paths of the ships to Ilios, and described the rudiments of the plot. Every moment of the story I told was easily seen on the map, within twenty minutes the story came alive because the map was already so alive in the students' minds. I traced journeys, explained motivations and even demonstrated (using the Mt. Olympus board) how intimately the gods were involved. For some reason that moment stands out particularly in my mind; the students faces illuminated with understanding and happiness. Any apprehension students might naturally feel when approaching such an illustrious, dense and difficult literature was eliminated by their already tangible connection with the world of the story. This simple use of the map as fiction provided structured scaffolding and conceptual support for understanding the epic.

Map as Connection: Another profoundly important function of the maps was that the ground the students created contained all the myths, all the heroes, and all the adventures. The maps contained the Gods and Goddesses, their temples and sacred places, Neptune's sea with Nereus' fifty Neriads, the mountains with their maenads, the river of fire, the river of forgetfulness, the marshes of the dead and Charon and his boat, the mountain of Olympus, the island of the Minotaur, the city where Medea flew away in her fiery dragon borne chariot after slaying her children. There the serpent guarded the Golden Fleece, and Theseus' father hid his sword and sandals beneath the heavy rock. There Pygmalion fell in love with Galatea and Aphrodite was born of the foam of the sea. The maps, the game board, the recreation of the ancient world, the Underworld and Mt. Olympus, served to link the myths to each other in a way impossible when reading them aloud. For text and language is linear; stories occur one word at a time, separated by time and space (Muehrecke 318). By housing all these stories on a map / game board they vividly populate a world, a world teaming with life, story lush with plot and conflict, rich in people, events, consequences, irony and adventure. The stories overlap and interweave, the context, the unity of the system, represents the actual nature of mythology far better than telling each story one at a time and hoping for the reader to make the connections that are actually the source of the power of mythology. For mythology is not just stories, it is systems of stories, it is the subtext of our reality, it is the texture of life. Mythology is the way our brain frames life, perhaps. We don't really know the ultimate reason for mythology. But we do know that mythology is far more than stories; it is a web, a net, a system that endures across time, culture, language and memory. The students' game board synchronized the stories by providing unity, context and connection.

Please go to my next lens: Deep Learning II to read the next segments of this essay (on Pedagogic Techniques of Deep Learning)