On the many metaphors of learning … and their associated educational frames

Abstract

Current landscapes of curriculum discourse and educational practice are examined by focusing on co-evolutions of metaphors for knowledge, learning and teaching across four prominent ‘frames’—namely, Standardized Education, Authentic Education, Democratic Citizenship Education and Systemic Sustainability Education. It is argued that these frames become compelling and resilient (or repulsive and nonsensical)—not because of what they explicitly assert, but because of the coherence of their implicit webs of vocabulary, metaphor, image and ideological association. While some of these frames/webs may be embraced as complementary, more often they are treated as conflicting or incoherent—in part, it would seem, because of tensions among their mainly implicit substrates of figurative association.

Keywords:

• Educational theory
• educational practice
• pedagogical orientations
• educational frames
• metaphor and thought
• educational movements

Notes

1. Google.com offers traces of the usages of many words, which can be accessed by searching a term along with the word definition (e.g. ‘polyhistor definition’). The box that appears above the search results can be expanded, by clicking the arrow at its base, to show additional information that includes a graph of its historical usage, based on texts in the Google database.

2. The association of the word artifice with cunning and deception is relatively new, and likely associated with the rise of science. The term was derived in the early 1500s from the Latin ars ‘art’ + facere ‘to make, do’—and the meanings associated with device and trickery date back to the 1650s.

3. On this point, in my experience, the suggestion that there is an implicit geometry of formal schooling is often met with strong expressions of doubt. The most common protest is that lines and rectangles are simply the most ubiquitous, economical and efficient of geometric forms—and therefore to be expected when constructing schools and planning curriculum. For us, two important issues are presented in this manner of response. Firstly, it demonstrates a profound lack of awareness of how existence might be interpreted through and organized by other geometries (see e.g. Eglash, 1999). Secondly, it foregrounds the ‘fish can’t see the water’ phenomenon. That which is most familiar and most pervasive can be the most invisible.

4. The ‘normal’ of ‘normal school’—or, more precisely, ‘école normale’—was originally a reference to the sort of model pedagogue that the first institutions for teacher preparation sought to produce (Edwards, 1991). As reflected in Table 1, this notion was tightly fitted to both the linguistic and the visual metaphors of Standardized Education, being derived from the Late Latin normalis, meaning both ‘conforming with rules’ and ‘standing at a right angle.’