A History of Inspiration through Metaphors of Learning

The Height of Teaching

Robert Nelson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• eBook ISBN: 9781000608298
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

In this book, Robert Nelson reminds us that one of the most important elements of teaching and learning is to inspire and to be inspired. Given that inspiration itself has evolved through metaphor, the inquiry distinguishes inspirational learning by its peculiarly metaphoric character.

We acknowledge that students respond to passion and enthusiasm, that they seek stimulation, purpose, motivation and inspiration. But because these triggers operate through mysterious language and arrive at their modern usage through metaphor, we have no means of penetrating their structure or gaining access to their powers. We mishandle educational practice through a focus on technical process and machinery rather than the imaginary animating vision that propagates inspired study through metaphor. This book corrects the imbalance and argues that metaphors are intrinsic to all our educational ambitions. It reveals the wide metaphorical backdrop of learning and teaching that works on an unconscious level and is only revealed through analysing the language that describes what matters most.

Inviting readers to explore learning in a non-traditional way, this book will be of interest to researchers and students in education seeking to understand better the nature of inspiration.

Part 1 Motivational metaphors

1 Passion How the pleasure of learning is measured with agony

DOI: 10.4324/9781003275435-3

We live in an age of passion. There is apparently an epidemic of passion, as politicians, companies, employees, doctors, engineers and lawyers are all keen to tell us how passionate they are about what they do. The outbreak of passion has naturally reached teaching.¹ The search term in Google for ‘passion for teaching’ yields about 103 million results; ‘passionate teacher’ yields about 78 million results and ‘passionate educator’ about 18 million. These are staggering figures that acknowledge the person, the teacher, rather than just the abstract institution of teaching. In one sense, these results are satisfying and suit my purpose of identifying effective qualities of education with subjective and metaphorical narratives in teaching practice. But there is a catch. With this great public promiscuity of passion, passion itself has become strategic.

Now that we all talk so readily about how passionate we are, passion may seem like devalued currency. Passion is vaunted with hyperbole, as the sine qua non of service industries that declare how passionate they are about delivering your parcel or servicing your hot water. But perhaps this vulgarization of passion has not trashed its meaning; perhaps it has built a genuine culture of passion, a culture of expecting an emotional engagement with whatever we do, perhaps all the more admirable when the job seems otherwise routine or unambitious. To inject passion into such a dull mission is commendable. Even if the declarations of passion risk hysteria, we have come to expect that anyone interested in serving us will want the distinction of being passionate in their charge.

So perhaps it is not just a cheap marketing ploy. Psychologically, we need to be persuaded that we attack our job positively rather than experience it as drudgery. As an expression of our engagement with something that we like to do, it now seems obvious that we would want to be passionate. All the teachers who inspired me were in some sense passionate. Meanwhile, all the teachers who bored me or confused me or filled me with anxiety over instructions or working in groups or how I might be assessed all have one quality in common: they all lacked passion for teaching. There seemed to be something cold and soulless in their pedagogy. That is why I felt anxious because there was no reassuring overriding narrative of the teacher’s affection for the subject matter and joy in transmitting it or involving others in her or his imagination.

Passion, though a good fit with students, is a maverick partner with pedagogical theory and the administrative structures of a school or university. In education, the lust for your favourite thing always retains a shade of Milton’s ‘wanton passions in the sacred Porch’,² where nothing so romantic belongs. We do not enjoy the prospect of anything disruptive or uncontrollable and perhaps unconsciously guard against ‘the whirlwind of passion’.³ Passion, as in love, errs to the impulsive, the obsessive, the irresponsibly fanatical. It is not naturally concerned with balance, with design, with planning, even though it can be served by elements of each and organizes its agency through them. Passion is not a servant like diligence but expresses a self-motivation that obeys its own laws. It does not easily defer to authority or reflect a will beyond itself, even though we trust that there is a benign alignment between a scholar’s passion and the objectives of a learning institution. At root, however, passion is autonomous and anarchic. Passions overtake reason and make their own universe, each with its own rules. As the baroque poet Boileau observed, every passion speaks its own language.⁴ With this self-referentiality, passion is also unreliable, fickle, and treacherous. Passion can disappear, dry up or turn; it flags, becomes exhausted or switches radically to another topic, with which it engages in manic surges. By the same irrational impulse through which people fall in love, people fall out of love: they become bored, disappointed by the same exaggerated measure of their former love and long to get out of the commitment. From an institutional point of view, where one secures the managerial dependability of all elements of education, one would have to ask: who let this unruly stuff in the door?

In truth, nobody ever let passion through the door because it was already dug into the edifice from its very foundations in study and research. With its intimate bond between all imaginative urgent thought in any intellectual investigation, passion ruled universities. Passion trumps all rules because nothing notable can be achieved without it, least of all education. The things that can be done without passion range from the mechanical to the cynical. But our faith in it is fragile and ghosted by suspicion.

The patchy reputation of intuitive charismatic teachers stems from a sense that their whims are protected by an air of passion. In the days before constructive alignment, student evaluations and learning outcomes and course reviews, many teachers broke all the orthodox protocols of today. They had no interest in syllabus design, if they had ever heard of it, and were derelict in observing the conventions that we now regard as minimum levels of academic duty, like timely feedback, relevance of presentation to the topic or relevance of the topic to the subject, constructive alignment and consistency of marking through rubrics and other mechanisms. It was easy to conceal any degree of neglect beneath an air of passion. For anyone suspicious of anyone else’s motives, passion might have seemed a smokescreen through which any dodgy educational manoeuvre can be transacted and still win approval from students. Passion, though used promiscuously in publicity, is also suspected as a narcissistic charismatic intoxication, a teaching narcotic that overcomes the student who is seduced in the buoyancy of it, as if euphorically transported by the performance of the teacher.

Even if passion can be considered as an important teacherly attribute, it is considered a natural gift which, by definition, cannot easily be cultivated. Passion is a spontaneous expression of deep interest that cannot be fudged or artificially generated. Universities therefore cannot instruct their staff to be passionate or advise their lecturers how to develop the passion that they already show in their research to make it more communicable in their teaching. We have no passion instruction manual. There are no passion protocols. They would be almost as absurd and patronizing as telling teachers that they have to enjoy their teaching.

In a world that is planned and managed, we are agonized over passion, because passion is unmanageable. We want it for student rapports and for marketing. It may also be good for learning because students enjoy it and remember the passion of their teachers as inspiring. So we want it in the classroom and feel boastful about it beyond the classroom in a competitive environment where anything positive might improve rankings or clinch the enrolment of bright students. Our problem is that we have no way of theorizing passion and therefore no way of cultivating it, even if we know how to recognize it according to student evaluations. Passion is there but not there, a perpetual item of endearment and swagger in teaching and research but intractably ghostly in the pedagogical bureaucratic structure.

One of the arch-ghosts in the educational machine, passion is love, initially love for the discipline but close by is a love for the student embrace of the material, the contact with students through the content, which is a human—rather than abstract—kind of love, even though impeccably intellectual. My passion for engineering would not become a passion for teaching engineering until I derive joy from my students picking it up. The passion is not just a love of a field but an urge to pass it on. I actually develop a fondness for my students as they take up the cues. I become invested in their delight. My images, my thoughts, my metaphors, enter their affections. I love it when they catch on. It is magical. Consequently, all the neurosis that attends upon love shows up in our understanding of passion. The love of teaching equates with a love of connecting with the individual, but quite likely the individual en masse because teaching is a relationship where love scales up. And that is also part of the magic: the normally exclusive ownership of love does not apply in teaching because the love is shared, marvellously democratized in the inclusive ambience of a passionate teacher.

Passion therefore has to do with the effectiveness of education because we as learners attribute to our most passionate teachers the enduring interest that we have retained in some field. We identify the effective teachers by their passion, not so much their exacting standards or the elegance or their syllabus design. All the other teachers, alas, I either have forgotten about or continue to hold in doubtful regard. Nor are these memories signs of a nostalgic past, where teachers got away with more blarney than care. Passion is all the more of a commodity now that much learning can be done remotely, by robot, bloodless and somewhat calculating by the algorithms of the LMS. Actually, I somewhat admire what can be done on the LMS, where passion may be installed through videos and witty quizzes, and the educational future is never going to be denuded of passion. But for inspiring students, no one will buy the robot. Students have to be able to see or feel a person, even if she or he is a voice behind the LMS. We buy the passion. We want a relationship with the passionate person. We want the passion for ourselves.

In a way, we have a right to passion in the people who serve our educational needs. We are only joining everyone else. Employers look for passion. The electorate expects to see passion; it is built into the rhetoric of anyone who sells anything. Otherwise, we have no faith in a politician. He or she is cynical, in it for private profit, advantage or influence or status or power. We are correctly mistrustful of such professional mercenaries because they can never be relied upon to respect our interests. They lack the stabilizing tug of priorities that a passion assumes. As individuals, we trust passion, even though we can have an adversary who is also passionate about bringing us down. Perhaps by the ‘no true Scotsman’ principle, we rationalize their negative passion as not true passion. They have a kind of false passion. With a reflex to isolate the innocence of passion from something that we do not like, we think of it as a pretence of passion; it strikes us as fake or lacking integrity.

Passion in an institutional setting is love that is marketable, transferable, directed to your participation. It is the opposite of indifference but also the opposite of calculation. You have passion to declare that you are motivated from the heart, sincere, without an ulterior energy; you feel with integrity, animated by internal zeal, not just a job, a preoccupation inherent in the vocation when practised by the devotee. Passion is the personal motivation that carries the narrative, like people who are filled with music and take a kind of enchantment with them wherever they go. It tallies with commitment or conviction and fire in the belly. But, of course, passions are not immune from contestation, no matter how perfectly they embody sincerity.

The paradoxes and agonies in the concept arise from the beginning of our language. The roots of passion concern suffering in Latin (patire, to suffer). In Greek, the origins of passion are also negative, as a person who has undergone something (παθητός) is essentially one who has suffered. As in the Latin tradition, it is somehow redeemed with prepositions and reaches toward positive feelings, as in passionate attachment (προσπάθεια) or verbally to feel passionate love for (προσπαθέω) someone or something. This conversion is answered in reverse by other conceptions which begin in a positive or sanguine energy, like being high-spirited (θυμικός), which ends as passion in the sense of wrath (θύμωμα).

The interchangeability of passion as something good as well as horrible could almost be explained in terms of logic, as if passion is always predicated on something else which can be either good or bad, hence conferring good or bad connotations depending on the instance. Thus, it is good to have a passion for art or music or science, but it is dreadful to have a passion for arson or fraud and irksome to have passion for pornography that demeans women. Passion, that is, could be considered an entirely relative concept, meaningless in itself unless describing the thing that one is passionate for. The verb ‘to like’ fits into that category as you can like something good but someone else can like something disgusting. The disconnect throws no essential ambiguity on the concept of ‘liking’ because liking is essentially relative. In the same way, a ‘road’ is neutral in mood because it can be a road to paradise or a road to doom, a smooth road or a bumpy road. Passion, however, is not in that neutral category. Passion is a disturbance of a rational order which is simultaneously enchanting and dangerous. It is glorious, but it has a peculiar kind of existential suffering installed within it.

The twin genius of passion as something both sought for and torrid is clinched in the Biblical tradition of the passion of Christ.⁵ This core motif of the Christian narrative takes Jesus from the role of teacher to victim: his activities as a priest end with his torture and crucifixion, flogged, brutalized with a crown of thorns and nailed to a cross where he is further poked at, derided and left to die. This extreme suffering, however, has a triumphant ending because, as holy victim, Christ is a complete sacrifice with the power of redemption for all who believe in him. It is the reason that this ghastly death is celebrated, not just in artistic representations but each week in churches through the rehearsal of the Eucharist, where the congregation takes part in the sacrifice of Christ through holy communion. Christ’s passion is thus regarded as the defeat of death and consequently the salvation of anyone who believes in him. The nastiest wretchedness is mystically tran...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• This book at a glance
• Synopses of the chapters
• Acknowledgement
• Introduction: inspiration as the height of learning
• Part 1 Motivational metaphors
• Part 2 Material metaphors
• Part 3 Aspirational metaphors
• Conclusion: how we will never recognize inspiring cognition without metaphor
• Bibliography of secondary sources
• Index