Activity Eleven: The Hero’s Journey Storytelling and advocacy) 10

Activity 11

The Hero’s Journey

Aims:

• To explore the impact of stories as a tool for understanding and advocacy. • To encourage young people to relate the idea of being a ‘hero’, to recognise that they have the ability to be a hero if they choose to.

Age: 10+

Time: Depends on how you run this workshop

Materials: Copies of the stories.

Goals:

There are two stories (pages 42-45). Both are about young people of the same age but in different realities. Each story represents a journey and both stories ultimately converge into one story.

In the Irish context, storytelling is embedded in our culture and is a fundamental part of our national heritage as it is in many countries and cultures across the world. Storytelling can be a tool, it presents us with opportunities to learn, to think, to reflect, to escape, to empathise, to understand, etc. The power of storytelling cannot be measured and at times our humanity depends on storytelling to signpost us to a better tomorrow.

Good Storytelling can influence people to change:

The way we feel - The way we think - The way we behave

As a facilitator, think about how to structure this workshop in terms of setting the scene for a storytelling event and also considering the workshop elements that follow the stories. The purpose of having two stories is to give space to the fact that alongside the stories of refugee children, there are our own stories and within our own stories are possibilities to become heroes and to contribute to the world we want while living our own lives within our own context. Being a hero in the struggle for a better world is not always about going away to find a place where the worst things are happening. Sometimes it’s about staying in your own place and discovering what impact you can have there. Step 1: Read the stories of Sirhan and Jess. You have options about how you present the stories. They can be done parallel, reading part one of Sirhan and then part one of Jess, etc. Alternatively, you can read the whole story of Sirhan and then the whole story of Jess. Of course depending on the group, you may invite some participants to read or present the stories. Some advance preparation for this would be required. To give some added learning to the workshop, you could do an input about storytelling and the basic mechanics of how to create a story.

Step 2: After the stories have been shared, create smaller groups and invite them to create their own ending for the story.