ELA teachers! Raise your hand if you’ve ever had your classes read to you The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn or even just considered it. Now, raise your hand if you’ve ever used Twain’s masterpiece to teach the stages and archetypes of the hero’s journey. Haven’t you even thought about it? Well, you’re in good company. And you’re in luck too, because here are some tips on how to teach both the Hero’s Journey and Huck Finn.

Huck’s development follows the stages of the hero’s journey described by Joseph Campbell. Huck’s journey is one of inner growth and discovery. He moves from the view that slavery was ordained by God, a fundamental belief in his small Missouri town, to the realization that enslaving another is wrong and unfair. It develops from a child to a mature individual who thinks for himself. That’s Huckleberry Finn’s hero’s journey. To get there, Twain takes him through adventures and trials that Campbell later identified as stages of the Monomyth.

Many teachers show “The Adventures of Huck Finn,” the 1993 film in which Elijah Wood plays the young adventurer, as an entertaining way to end a unit of the novel. Watching and talking about the movie can bring the lessons and ideas of the story into clear focus. However, teachers can extend the curriculum beyond a basic “observe and compare” lesson by introducing the concept of the hero’s journey.

Before showing the film, describe one version of the stages and archetypes of the hero’s journey. This will prepare students to identify those aspects in the story. Then have students review the hero’s journey that summarizes its stages and archetypes in a format that allows them to take notes. Show the film with several three to five minute breaks so students can write down their notes.

Once the movie is complete, you can perform a number of activities and tasks. Students can write responses to prompts in sentences or paragraphs. They can work in class, alone or in a team, or they can formalize the answers at home. The prompts can also serve as a basis for class discussion or as a test.

Alternatively, teachers can reinforce homework into a longer project that requires independent research and a formal essay on a topic suggested by the teacher. Another possible project is for students to present their findings to the class with posters, diagrams, PowerPoint presentations, or even clips from the film to support their conclusions.

The end result of Huck Finn’s Hero’s Journey is a restatement of the basic theme of the book. The book details Huck’s experiences that they must have to learn the lesson; many of them are identifiable as the stages of the Monomyth. Teaching the hero’s journey with The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn it is an effective way to explore the thematic lessons of this novel and, at the same time, to explore one of the basic mythical and literary paradigms of Western culture.