Metaphors We Teach By

How Metaphors Shape What We Do in Classrooms

Badley, Van Brummelen

• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781621893530
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Metaphors We Teach By helps teachers reflect on how the metaphors they use to think about education shape what happens in their classrooms and in their schools. Teaching and learning will differ in classrooms whose teachers think of students as plants to be nurtured from those who consider them as clay to be molded. Students will be assessed differently if teachers think of assessment as a blessing and as justice instead of as measurement. This volume examines dozens of such metaphors related to teaching and teachers, learning and learners, curriculum, assessment, gender, and matters of spirituality and faith. The book challenges teachers to embrace metaphors that fit their worldview and will improve teaching and learning in their classrooms.

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Metaphors: Unavoidable, Influential, and Enriching

Ken Badley and Harro Van Brummelen

Imagine this ordinary noon-hour scene in a high school staff room. Two teachers are discussing a student whom they both teach this semester. Kevin, who teaches biology, says, “I don’t know what is going on but Amanda has certainly struggled in my class the last two months. She can’t seem to grasp some of the basic concepts that she will need to get through upcoming units in the course.” Joan, who teaches social studies, responds, “I am actually surprised by what you’ve said. In my class, she’s the top student and is always digging below the surface to find deeper meaning.” Kevin, visibly taken aback, replies, “That’s a shock; I’d gotten the impression that Amanda was close to dropping out of school.”

Across the lunchroom, two other teachers discuss students in general. Megan claims that the school’s proper job is to accompany children on their journey. “Each of them is headed somewhere,” she states, “Our job is to watch in wonder, and to nudge and channel them where we think it appropriate to do so.” Brian asks, “But can’t accompany also mean to play a piano while the student sings or plays a musical instrument?” “Yes, it does mean that, but that’s not what I’m thinking of when I use the word; I mean more like walking beside, keeping company.” “But that’s a cop out, it seems to me,” Brian replies, “Society wants schools to equip children to function in a competitive global economy, and that requires structured, direct instruction.”

No teachers may ever have spoken these exact words. However, conversations like these happen every day in school staff rooms. Teachers continually say sentences filled with metaphors. The conversations contain a gold mine of educational metaphors. When a teacher speaks about a student struggling in class, we wonder if that means a military struggle, an athletic struggle, a political struggle or a spiritual struggle? Likely the teacher is referring to a cognitive struggle, where the student makes a great but unsuccessful effort to understand. Do we consider the language of cognitive struggle to be simply descriptive or do we recognize it as a metaphor, perhaps so common and therefore deeply buried that we never noticed it before as such?

Notice some other key terms in those initial conversations. What about grasp? Do we recognize the origins of grasp in the physical world, as something one might do with one’s hands. Do we recognize the metaphor when we talk about someone’s getting through a unit? What about top student? We have used top and bottom for so long that we no longer notice either the metaphoric character of these terms or their power. In fact, we may find ourselves resisting the claim that top and bottom are metaphoric at all. After all, how would we compare scholastic, athletic, musical, economic and other kinds of performance except with such language? We will return to these metaphors of place and orientation later.

Dropping out, another unnoticeable phrase in contemporary educational language, first appeared in 1896 (Dorn & Johanningmeier, 1999). Students undoubtedly dropped out of school before 1896 and educators undoubtedly had language to describe their doing so. We want to point to the metaphoric status of that phrase, something many may never have thought of before our noting it just now. In fact, most of the metaphors which we have peppered through the first fictional conversation above have become part of our ordinary educational lexicon. Educators do not typically think of these words and phrases as figurative language. Rather, we view them as plain language. In doing so, we lend credence to what we will call the strong view of metaphor—that metaphors are not just ornaments added on to literal language to help make explanations clear (the weak view of metaphor), but rather are powerful shapers of the very ways we think. Just consider how some of the other metaphors in the opening paragraphs shape our thinking: basic concepts, units in the course, digging below the surface, deeper meaning, and impression.

Notice the metaphors in the second conversation, which we purposely shaped around strongly contrasting views of the nature of the child and the task of the school. For Megan, the child’s life and learning constitute a journey. Schools should watch and walk with them, helping when necessary. But Brian believes schools need to socialize children and prepare them to function productively in a nation’s economic life. Our immediate concern here is not your view or our view of these understandings of the child and the school. Rather, we want to note how powerfully these metaphors work in educational language. Accompanying children and equipping children represent dramatically opposed educational metaphors, one quite humanistic and the other pragmatic and strongly oriented toward economic productivity. Clearly, these metaphors are not simply adornments meant to aid plain language in the job of making some educational concepts clear. Rather, these metaphors catch the essence or energy of two markedly different visions for children and schools. So, we ask, how important are metaphors in education? We take the position that metaphors are unavoidable, influential, and enriching. This book shows both how important they are and how they are important. Throughout, we will examine the metaphors that educators use to talk and think about a number of specific dimensions of education such as teaching and learning, assessment and spirituality.

Why ask about and consider the impact of metaphors? Teachers, principals and parents—in fact everyone, including students—think about students and schools using metaphoric language. But could we not get along just fine without metaphors? Could we not understand such important educational topics as teaching, learning, students, curriculum and assessment in non-figurative language? For decades philosophers and educational thinkers have debated the importance of metaphors in education (such as Black, 1944; Greene, 1971; Scheffler, 1971). One major writer on metaphor questioned whether metaphors are actually necessary and not just nice (Ortony, 1975, 1993). Despite the views of some that educators could manage just fine without metaphors (Miller, 1976), the authors of the chapters that follow believe that educational metaphors are not just nice, but that they powerfully affect teaching and learning, and, therefore, the lives of children and adolescents. Therefore educators need to evaluate how educational metaphors affect our praxis, and then choose carefully those metaphors within which we will locate our praxis.

Metaphors as Ornamental Language

Most of us likely first studied metaphors sometime in upper elementary school. We probably memorized definitions of simile and metaphor, some of us struggling to remember which one involved the words like or as. In their attempts to teach us about metaphor, our teachers may have quoted “My Love is Like a Red, Red Rose” from Robert Burns or the famous question in Shakespeare’s Sonnet #18, “Shall I compare thee to a Summer’s day?” Most of us likely emerged from secondary school with a generalized definition of metaphor roughly like that offered by Aristotle in his Poetics over twenty-three centuries ago: metaphor is the expression of one thing in terms of another (Aristotle, 1997). Aristotle’s definition has much to commend it, most obviously that it is borne out by our experience. We all understand some difficult concepts—such as valence in chemistry, supply and demand in economics, the ego in psychology—better because someone used a metaphor to aid our understanding.

Years later, when a member of the Ski Patrol informs us that avalanching snow is like wet cement, we may show new respect for the posted boundaries on a mountain. Or when the Safety Branch of the Department of Transport tells us that texting while driving is like drunk driving, we may rethink our claim that we can both text and drive. Such everyday examples illustrate that, in some sense, both Aristotle and our English teachers understood something true about metaphor.

Metaphors may induce caution at ski resorts or on the road, but they may prove dangerous in other circumstances. A number of researchers have suggested in recent decades that metaphors operate at a much more fundamental level in cognition than we usually recognize. When we fail to notice their powerful role in thinking, we may go off in a dubious direction or make big mistakes. Rather than us using our metaphors positively at such times, they use us in unhelpful ways. Recall the conversations at the beginning of this chapter. What if teachers really should accompany children on a journey but schools see it as their primary mandate to prepare them for participation in a global economy? Or reverse the question. What if educators really should prepare children for economic participation but schools understand their primary mandate as accompanying students on their personal quest for learning? It is important which metaphors educators choose. Metaphors help shape the practices that educators follow. An educator working with a metaphor that does not reflect a school’s mission and vision may well aim at goals that conflict with that school or its supporting community. Their students may well learn material and ask questions that are wide of the mark. We do not claim that a consideration of metaphors will answer all what schools are about. But, conversely, without thinking about the use of educational metaphors, we cannot fully understand what is happening in schools. So in this book we focus on this important question: How do the metaphors that we employ in education either deflect us from our proper work or move us closer to work that is proper, worthwhile and lasting? Related to this is the question of how the metaphors we use reflect our basic beliefs about schooling.

Metaphors as More Than Ornament

To explore whether metaphors actually function as more than linguistic ornaments, starting in the staff room as we did makes sense. We say this because it is in the staff rooms, among other places, that we will hear conversations among teachers. As we saw at the start of this introductory chapter, those conversations invariably include metaphors and, as such, reveal a great deal about how teachers think about their students and their work. Establishing whether metaphors function as something other than ornaments may require that we do some work outside the staff room, as well, perhaps in the linguistics, psychology or philosophy sections of the library. We say this because metaphors have become the subject of much academic dispute, with some claiming that metaphors function only as ornaments for anyone wanting to explain or express a difficult concept or idea, and others claiming that human cognition itself depends on metaphor. That is, the question of whether metaphors are necessary and not just nice just won’t go away.

The contemporary debate about whether metaphors are “necessary and not just nice” began in earnest in 1980 with the publication of Metaphors We Live By, written by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, the first of several books they have written about metaphors, cognition and society (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980). In this 1980 book, their most famous, they note that “most people think they can get along perfectly well without metaphor” (p. 3), a view which fits what we have been calling the ornamental view or the metaphors are just nice view. They point out that one reason people draw this conclusion may lie in the widespread perception that metaphor is basically a matter of language, not a matter of thought. In other words, if metaphors are ornamental, an individual speaker or writer has the choice of dressing up an explanation with figurative language or not. They continue,

The concepts that govern our thought are not just matters of the intellect. They also govern our everyday functioning, down to the most mundane details. Our concepts structure what we perceive, how we get around the world, and how we relate to other people. Our conceptual system thus plays a central role in defining our everyday realities. If we are right in suggesting that our conceptual system is largely metaphorical, then the way we think, what we experience, and what we do every day is very much a matter of metaphor. (p. 3)

Lest any of their readers still wonder if Lakoff and Johnson have truly cast their lot with the strong view of metaphor, they end their opening chapter this way: “. . . metaphor is not just a matter of language, that is, of mere words. We shall argue that, on the contrary, human thought processes are largely metaphorical. This is what we mean when we say that the human conceptual system is metaphorically structured and defined” (p. 6). The passages we have quoted here make Lakoff and Johnson’s view quite clear: metaphors are necessary.

They follow their opening assertions with a hundred pages of illustrations of how metaphorically we think and speak about the simplest, everyday matters. In Chapter 4 of Metaphors We Live By, for example, they give an extended treatment to orientation words such as up and down. In the fictional interchanges between teachers with which we began this chapter, one of our teachers voiced surprise that a student was experiencing difficulty in biology because she was at the top of the social studies class. We included th...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Chapter 1: Metaphors: Unavoidable, Influential, and Enriching
• Chapter 2: Metaphors for Learners
• Chapter 3: Metaphors for Teachers
• Chapter 4: Metaphors for Teaching and Learning
• Chapter 5: Curriculum as a Journey Toward Wisdom
• Chapter 6: Student Assessment: Hitting the Mark or Lighting the Candle?
• Chapter 7: Princesses and Superheroes: Metaphors that Work Against Wholeness
• Chapter 8: Metaphors for Spirituality in Public Educational Settings
• Chapter 9: Metaphors and Models of Faith-Learning Integration