This project was created by the 2006-2007 Metro English Department, Natalie Castelo and I. It served as a "mini-exhibition" for the end of the year. Initially, we conceived it as a much more collaborative and integrative project between the English and History curricula, however as the project unfolded it became solely part of the Language Arts domain. Ultimately, the Mythology Mastery project served its purpose in terms of student engagement and ownership of learning. However, in our opinion, it fell short in terms of our original vision of a truly integrated project spanning several disciplines and requiring deep critical analysis and application of knowledge.

The students showcased really innovative and interesting presentations and artifacts. We had sock puppet movies, flash animation cartoon strips, live dramatic interpretations, and incredible displays of artistry in the movie posters. Soundtracks were created with everything from hip-hop star Lil Wayne to alterna-teen senstation Panic! At the Disco presented. Generally speaking, if a group had put any effort into the project, the artifact was interesting.

The student-generated group contract and the peer assessment using the rubric served as powerful agents of accountability. I was surprised to find that most of the grades that students assigned to groups were completely aligned with my assessment.

The scaffolding of the modern connections and actual application of the understanding of the myths was clearly inadequate. I think that we needed to spend more time, and have more concretized benchmarks around that specific component. This weakness in the project design was partly due to the continued revisions to the assignment as it was unfolding. I think that because the original vision did involve working across disciplines, the complexity of what we were asking the students to do became difficult to enact once the time spent on the project was relegated to only one class.