Bridges to learning: Metaphors of teaching, learning and language

Abstract

Teachers' and students' metaphors of teaching, learning and language; Metaphors may also have a useful function in teaching, by helping to raise learners' awareness of key concepts, models and issues. Similarly, raising teachers' awareness of their own metaphors may help them to reflect on their own experience and to develop professionality. (150) In contrast, the rest of the data involves elicted meatphors obtained by asking subjects to complete a sentence stem: 'Teaching is ...'; 'Language is ...'; or 'A good teacher is ...'. (151) How 'real' are metaphors: are they onlyverbal devices, or do they have cognitive and social validity for students and teachers? (152) The most convincing evidence would be to show clear relationships between teachers' metaphors (or those of students) and students' learning outcomes, or to relate particular sets of metaphors to different types of classroom behaviour and different approaches to learning. However, at present, these are distant goals. (152) ... - the metaphors are a bridge towards internalisation of concepts and towards changes in the practice of teaching. (153) A number of researchers in teacher education have demonstrated that metaphors represent cognitive and affective distillations of teachers' fundamental beliefs about teaching. (154) The elication and discussion of student teachers' own metaphors of their classroom practice, and subsequent reflection on how their metaphors and practice develop, have a direct pedagogic function to promote awareness of professional practice and of selfimage, in a process of continuing professional development. (155) The teachers often have no explanation for the learning (no theories of learning are cited in any of the narratives), or, as seems possible, the metaphor is the explanation or, alt least, a striving to explain. (158) Considering that these kinds of narratives are often exchanged amont teachers in school staffrooms, the metaphors seem to have the status of being key elements of a folk theory of learning. (160) Using a metaphor enables teachers to verbalise what is unknown or difficult to describe in other terms. (160) In education, the use of metaphor has been receiving attention for some time (Taylor, 1984). In courses for the professional development of teachers, especially in pre-service courses, it is now common to attempt to get teachers to identify their own metaphors for teaching, the classroom, learnin, etc. as part of a reflective process of helpint them to reconceptualise the processes of teaching and learning through self-critique and through appeciation of multiple perspectives. The development of alternative metaphors related to evaluating actual practices is part of this. (173)