Filmmaker Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of “The Odyssey,” which is riding a huge mid-summer box office wave, is shining a spotlight on the retelling of an epic that high school English and social studies teachers have taught for decades.
After teaching the text to freshmen for years, Bernie Heidkamp, an English teacher at Oak Park and River Forest High School in the Chicago suburbs, said he eschewed the tale for a few years given the “White male hero” aspect. But he has since returned to the Homeric epic in graphic novel format — specifically, Gareth Hinds’ retelling published by Candlewick Press.
“‘The Odyssey’ is a far-off story dealing with events we would never experience, but the way it forces the mind to expand and accept that as reality, and connect with people, is the same as other storytelling,” he said.
The story of “The Odyssey” was centuries old when it was first written down, and it has been translated into English in multiple ways, said Joe Schmidt, president of the National Council for the Social Studies and executive director of K-12 Education at Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia.
“It was that oral tradition pulled forward,” Schmidt said.
The story can be complicated to teach partly because of its oral origins, Heidkamp said. “It has multiple frames of narration. It goes back and forth in time,” he said.
But mythology always has fascinated students, as shown by how many are drawn to the Percy Jackson series’ retellings of Greek mythology or to the tabletop roleplaying game Dungeons & Dragons, he said. “There’s this call that mythology has on growing readers or growing thinkers.”
When the Odyssey’s focus on humans and human struggles is highlighted, the epic “stretches the imagination of a growing mind. You are stepping outside your own world to experience other worlds,” he said. “It produces empathy and the ability to relate to others that you wouldn’t normally have to relate to.”
In a social studies class, myths like “The Odyssey” use the teller’s version of their history to help understand the world in which those stories were created, Schmidt said.
“This layering is one thing I would want students to understand,” he said. “What does it mean to translate? What does it mean to adapt? And what does it mean to tell somebody’s history through their own telling of that history?”
Looking at the way these stories are periodically reinterpreted across mediums also raises the questions of what’s still common between them, Schmidt said. “Storytelling is trying to hold onto those very cultural universal truths of what we have.”
Mythical stories present the dangers of the natural world and the fears they provoke, along with the heroes who persevere through them, Schmidt said.
“What are the traits we’re identifying when we’re talking about a hero?” he said. “How are we defining the villains? We are defining how we view ourselves, and how we want others to remember us, which leads to entirely different conversations with the kids. … How do they see their own cultures defined?”
When he teaches "The Odyssey," Heidkamp talks to students about its oral history and asks what is lost when written text is valued above all.
"The oral tradition is something collective, something powerful you experience together," he said. "Trying to do that in a classroom and making this a communal experience is more in tune with how ‘The Odyssey’ was originally conceived by Homer.”
