My Hero Mail

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The toolkit contains activities designed to reintroduce traditional ideals of heroism within an afterschool program. Some criteria of success for the toolkit include revealing and making the fundamental differences that exist between todays hero and the traditional hero more apparent to my audience and helping cultivate a stronger bond with their heroes of today.
The more modern our culture has become, the further it has moved away from the archetypal hero image. Traditional heroes are men and women who “deliberately and courageously overcome obstacles for the benefit of others without regard to personal consequence” (modelingfutureheroes.com). In today’s world, due to the high influence of media, the celebrity and the traditional hero are synonymous: many of those who are most famous and idolized are not necessarily those who have demonstrated moral courage or heroism (Loftus, 1995) and thus celebrities can become pseudo-heroes by taking the role of traditional heroes in the lives of media consumers. Our youth need inspirational heroes as role models in their lives to guide their behaviors, attitudes and values. However, today’s children are lightly exposed to the true definition of heroes. Words like bravery, fortitude, gallantry, and valor, which once stirred their emotions, do not carry the same weight for them. They perceive celebrities as heroes and keep from confronting the older; more demanding forms of this ideals. As our society weakens the term heroism, it fails to foster heroic imagination in children.
Do children today have heroes? Have the attributes of their heroes changed? Do these heroes come from their immediate social environment? These questions guided my research and were asked as part of a wider question of whether children today are replacing traditional models of heroes with celebrities. 

Heres a glimpse of my process: http://www.connect.ecuad.ca/~nprakash/nprakash_processbook.pdf

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