“The hero…is the man or woman who has been able to battle past his personal and local historical limitations. His solemn task and deed…is to return…to us, transfigured, and teach the lesson he has learned of life renewed.” – Joseph Campbell
This quote from Joseph Campbell appears before the preface in Charting A Hero’s Journey and encapsulates the central metaphor of the book: the student’s experience in the field as a heroic journey. Using Campbell’s well-known The Hero with a Thousand Faces as her blueprint, Linda Chisholm organizes the chapters of her book around the stages of the archetypal hero’s journey. This is an innovative and compelling strategy for organizing the reading selections. What student or instructor wouldn’t be drawn to viewing the sometimes mundane process of overcoming daily obstacles as “Battling the Beasts”? The very fact that Chisholm sees student service as exemplifying Campbell’s monomyth of the hero demonstrates her essential optimism about the value of student service both here and abroad. Chisholm is a pioneer in cross-cultural service-learning programs for both high school and college students. The infrastructure for these programs initially was provided by the educational institutions set up by the Anglican Church in countries that were formerly part of the British Empire. As the director of the Association of Episcopal Colleges, Chisholm founded, in 1993, a similar network on an international basis: colleges and universities taking advantage of computer/modern telecommunications to facilitate interactions among the students and faculty in Asia, Africa, Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the USA.