Teaching Metaphors
What object represents you as a teacher? What is your metaphor?
Metaphor: a non-literal comparison between two unlike things.
Metaphors are powerful things for teachers. They are the very building blocks of thought and allow us to see what isn’t there, to connect on a higher level to hidden realities. Cynthia Ozick in her timeless essay, “Metaphor and Memory” talks of metaphor as
“inhabiting language in its most concrete. As the shocking extension of the unknown into our most intimate, most feeling, most private selves, metaphor is the enemy of abstraction. “
Think of how powerful this famous metaphor of Shakespeare allows us to understand what life and the world we live in, is.
“All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players.”
Metaphors can help teachers see who they are and where they are going, they are a driving force in our professional development. In my own teaching, I’ve borrowed an idea from Finney Cherian, asking pre-service teachers to bring in an object that they believe represents themselves as a teacher.
In turn, each teacher explains how the object represents themselves as a teacher. I’ve had students bring in baseball gloves, Q-tips, medals and even toilet paper! What’s crucial is that this becomes a metaphor around which they can clearly see themselves as a teacher. It helps them begin their life as a teacher on solid ground. I once had a teacher bring in a picture of his 1971 Lincoln Continental. When asked the connection to his teaching beliefs he said,
“Just like me - built for comfort not speed.”
The object I choose often is a chalkboard brush.
It represents what I feel is the ephemeral, ever changing nature of teaching. Also, that we can begin each day with a clean slate, ever hopeful. We don’t accumulate but are in the act, we teach in the here and now. Too, everything is trial and error, by mistakes we learn. Nothing is permanent, written in stone - but subject to examination, testing and reform, refinement. Learning as a process of trial and error.
What is your teaching metaphor?
As I mentioned, metaphors are the building blocks of thought, as argued by George Lakoff. He outlines how our thought and conceptual systems would break down without the concrete stickiness of metaphor. They link the real and the ideal. They are what makes us human, so human. His “Metaphors we live by” is a great read.
Metaphors have been the basis of all great inventions and breakthroughs in knowledge. With the proper metaphor, things become clear and what was hidden, revealed. Think of Einstein imagining a man running through a telegraph wire and keeping up with the message. Think of Farnsworth plowing a field back and forth and imagining how an image could be scanned as a series of lines for transmission, the basis of today’s electronic broadcasting and TV.
Think back further of Archimedes and his Eureka! in the bathtub as the water rose (and arriving at a way to measure the mass of an intricate object). Think of Faraday and his vision of lines of force which led to the invention of the electric motor. Lastly (but we could go on forever concerning great advances and thought) Kekule who gave us the greatest discovery of organic chemistry ( that organic compounds are not open structures but chains or “rings”) after seeing a snake bite its tail.
Metaphors allow us to link “like to like”, to make x=y, to give a name of one thing to another. It is magical and like some kind of thought full homeopathic cure, we can build from two “likes”, a healthy, new, greater idea.
I think linguistics, education, learning how we learn language, needs a metaphor. A metaphor that will allow us teachers to understand how language takes birth and grows in a person. Chomsky comes closest with his use of “growth” and that language isn’t built, added on like we would lego tiles but it is organic and grows like a plant. We need more metaphors in language and about learning – metaphors to help us understand what we do and guide us teachers.
Michael McCarthy uses the geographical metaphor of “confluence” to suggest how two speakers engage in conversation and negotiate meaning (confluency). It’s a wonderful metaphor and way to understand this complex process, by analogy to two rivers meeting and mingling.
We might also ask how we could use metaphors in our own teaching, how they might allow students to conceptualize language and understand that which is foreign. Metaphors are the means by which we organize information and we might ask how a knowledge of semiotics and metonymy might inform teachers and help learners in their study of English. Imagine a course of English study where language was not just thematic but properly metaphorical?
I’d like to have more metaphors about teaching, about learning, about language acquisition …… do you have any to share? And too, what is your metaphor as a teacher?
