Reflecting on metaphors and the possibilities of ‘language change’ in teaching and teacher education

ABSTRACT

The paper suggests that ‘language change’ might hold an important key to aspects of educational reform and to the betterment of teacher education. The language we identify as contributing the most to the ineffectiveness of educational reform is the educational language impregnated by psychologised metaphors, which dominate educational discourses – a language that utilises constructs (e.g. self, mind, cognition), as if those were ‘things’ located within an individual. We argue that psychologised language creates and uses metaphors for students and teachers that constitute obstacles to learning/knowing. Psychologised metaphors produce learning/teaching ‘technologies’ that bring about subsequent practices that work against the declared school goals, while pathologizing individual minds and holding them responsible for departing from assumed universal patterns of normality. The paper suggests some alternative paths by proposing a different metaphor (learning as performance) and discussing its implications for teaching and teacher education.

KEYWORDS:

• Psychologized metaphors
• teachers’ beliefs
• learning as performance
• language change
• teacher education

‘O! this learning, what a thing it is’. —W. Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew, Act 1 Scene 2

Introduction

The present paper’s point of departure may sound ambitious, as it suggests that language change might hold an important key to some aspects of educational reform in general and to the betterment of teacher education in particular, yet in reality, it is modest. All we suggest is that without paying attention to language and the resulting metaphors that prevail in teaching and teacher education, not much can be attained. The language we identify as contributing the most to the ineffectiveness of educational reform in present neoliberal western democracies is educational language impregnated by psychologised metaphors which dominate educational discourses (Bekerman and Zembylas 2018). We argue that changing these metaphors has crucial implications for teaching and teacher education; therefore, this paper highlights the value of foregrounding language change in teacher education programmes.

Our purpose is not to deny the importance of multiple other approaches which support teacher education (Tatto 2015) as these relate, for example, to the need to effectively prepare teachers academically on the theory and practice of school curriculum (Boyd et al. 2009) or the importance of preparing teachers to teach complex curricula to diverse learners (Darling-Hammond 2014). In fact, our effort here complements and strengthens these approaches by focusing specifically on making visible the often-unseen impact of educational language on teaching and learning, manifested in particular in terms of psychologised language.

We define ‘psychologized language’ as the language that utilises constructs (e.g. self, mind, cognition, identity), as if those were ‘things’ located within an individual. We argue that psychologised language creates and uses metaphors about/of students and teachers that constitute obstacles to learning/knowing. These metaphors also produce learning/teaching ‘technologies/pedagogies’ that bring about subsequent practices that work against the declared goals of schools (e.g. critical students, motivated individuals), while pathologizing individual minds (Furedi 2017) and holding them responsible for their school ‘failure’ or ‘success’. Such is the case when we speak about students as being ‘intelligent’ (or not), and/or when we say they lack motivation (or not), and so on. These metaphors represent knowledge as an abstract ‘thing’ in our minds and sustain ‘banking’ educational approaches. Based on preliminary findings from a pilot research project this paper highlights the perennial destructive power of psychologised metaphors that are dominant in teaching and teacher education and suggest some alternative paths.

The reader might wonder if there is anything ‘new’ in the argument we are making. Indeed, much on the issues raised here have been discussed before in teaching and teacher education (see, for example, Babichenko and Rubinstein 2021; Hager and Hodkinson 2009; Horn 2016). Although many of our reflections on educational reform, teacher education, and dualistic thinking have received some attention (e.g. see Giroux 1988; Kincheloe and Steinberg 1993; Popkewitz 2011), what distinguishes our effort in this paper is the epistemological and ontological critique of ‘psychologized metaphors’ as such and their implications for teacher education programmes. Hence, what is new in our effort is our emphasis on the need for language change in teaching and teacher education and not merely on the development of new curricula or better training in constructivist (or other) practices, for even if we manage to advance these, the reproduction of psychologised metaphors of learning will still obstruct our reform efforts.

Inspired by the work of Lakoff and Johnson (1980a) on the centrality of metaphors in our lives and subsequent work on metaphors in teacher education research, we focus on teachers’ metaphors, for we believe that the work to uncover them, mainly through research on teacher beliefs (Borg 2017; Craig 2018), has failed to heighten awareness of how metaphors sustain dominant ways of thinking and acting that create obstacles to teaching/learning and educational reforms.

Teacher Beliefs: Moving Towards Metaphors and Language

When pointing at language, we position ourselves within the area of reflection, which since the work of Donald Schön (Schön 1983), and in spite of emerging critiques (Beauchamp 2015), it remains a prominent theme in the literature on teacher education. The value of reflection in teacher education has been consistently reiterated (e.g. Korthagen and Vasalos 2010; Loughran 2002), for reflection is a social practice represented in language and inscribed with warranted repertoires for action (Ottesen 2007). Teachers’ reflexivity has been associated with the ability to think critically (Tsangaridou and O’Sullivan 1997) as well as the ability to link thought and action (Correa Molina et al. 2010). Kelchtermans (2009) has suggested that for teachers’ reflection to be relevant, it needs not only be broad and wide in content, but also deep. Reflection needs to reach the level of underlying beliefs, ideas, knowledge and goals, that is, the personal interpretative framework of those involved in the reflective process – all of which entail linguistic processes. We want teachers to be able to reflect on their language use for we believe that, as is, it creates problems in their educational work.

We are particularly interested in teachers’ reflections on their beliefs as to what learning and the learner are and what these reflections do on teachers’ work. Language use as well as the interpretative frameworks available to people, teachers included, is the product of rather long acculturating and socialising processes. Language is one of our main tools to create and express our cultural belongings; language serves and allows for our thinking (Vygotsky 1962) and functions as a window into the human mind but also is a social process whose study belongs to anthropology as much as to linguistics (Duranti 2001). Moreover, language reflects also individual and group values and beliefs (Bourdieu et al. 1991). In this sense the language we use, the discourses we share and the rhetoric we practice have the potential to both expand and limit possibilities for change.

Teachers have strong beliefs about: the role that education can play, their explanations for individual students’ variations, how teaching works, and how learners learn (Kennedy 1997). We are told that teachers hold a great variety of beliefs: epistemological beliefs; beliefs about their students in relation to culture, motivation, and intelligence; beliefs about the work of pedagogies; and beliefs about how self-control, self-efficacy, and self-worth operate in them and their students (Levin 2014). If we want teachers to reflect on their foundational beliefs, which means reflecting on their language use, it is because we hope that doing so will help them optimise their educational work.

Drawing on Bruner (1986), we believe that it is of utmost importance to confront what he calls ‘folk pedagogies’ (and in our case ‘folk psychologies’), that is, teachers’ ingrained beliefs on how education works, if we want to transform present educational work. Knowledge on how teachers understand these complex issues may contribute to understanding how teachers’ learning-related beliefs affect their teaching practices (for a review, see Fang 1996; Kagan 1992) and help offer suggestions for how to transform our teacher education programmes to address these beliefs. All in all, teacher beliefs have been realised as a ‘missing paradigm’ (Shulman, 1986) and as standing at the very heart of teaching (Kagan 1992).

Although the importance of teacher beliefs has been realised and much has been written in the literature (Fives, Lacatena, and Gerard 2015), there is still a lack of a clear conceptualisation which limits the potential explanatory and predictive potential of teacher beliefs. Research today acknowledges that teachers’ beliefs are closely related to the practical knowledge that guides teachers’ behaviour and that they tend to be subjective and personal; also, these beliefs reflect a community’s agreed upon knowledge (Hoy, Davis, and Pape 2006; Lundeberg and Levin 2003). Of utmost importance to our present effort is the research which points at the powerful effects of teachers’ beliefs on their students’ achievements; beliefs which are communicated nonverbally and which heavily influence students’ sense of self-efficacy and motivation (Rosenthal 2003).

Teacher beliefs on students’ achievements and their theories of mind have mostly been examined separately, yet their mutual attention to how individuals develop appear to be addressing similar concerns and to be generated from some very basic metaphors (Skott 2015). Teacher metaphors though shaped by the environments in which teachers evolve are not fixed and unchangeable. Making explicit the metaphors that shape thinking and practice in education is not just a theoretical exercise; it is a matter of uncovering the assumptions that underlie our interpretations, so that we can, more deliberately direct our actions (Cook-Sather 2001). It is crucial, then, to pay more attention to how reflecting on our language will uncover our metaphors and redirect our educational work.

Metaphors

Lakoff and Johnson (1980a) suggest that metaphors stand at the basis of the ways in which we conform, encounter and perform that which we call ‘reality’. Metaphors do not simply describe reality, but rather create reality. Metaphors are ‘cognitive’ tools through which we construct meaning and understand the world (Lakoff and Johnson 1999). Changes in our conceptual system change what is real for us and affect how we perceive the world and act upon it (Lakoff and Johnson 1980a, 8).

Lakoff and Johnson’s, 1980b theory has been highly praised as well as criticised for reasons that are beyond the scope of this paper. Here it is sufficient to acknowledge two criticisms that are relevant to this paper and which we attempt to address later: the embodiment of metaphor; and its relationship to culture. Both point at the lack of attention paid to the ontological aspects of metaphors – an issue that is central to our paper. However, Lakoff and Johnson have taught us an important lesson: that metaphors are Janus-faced. They can offer both creative opportunities and limitations when confronting a phenomenon or an event. In short: metaphors enable ways of living in the world as much as they mislead us (Hayles 2001).

Metaphors in education have been addressed in the literature through research on teachers’ use of metaphorical language in their teaching practices as well as their beliefs about teaching and learning. For example, Cook-Sather (2006) has highlighted the metaphor of education as ‘production’ and education as ‘cure’; and their power to structure schools as mechanical, teachers as repetitive and students as industrial outcomes. Others have focused on how metaphors shape beliefs about knowledge and knowing (Burr and Hofer 2002) or on the need to disrupt Eurocentric notions of time that colonise our academic lives (Shahjahan 2015). In particular, teachers’ epistemological beliefs and perceptions of practice through the analysis of teacher-generated metaphors have been thoroughly researched (for a review see Patchen and Crawford 2011), including images of what the teacher, the learner, the principal, and the school are (Inbar 1996).

Here we want to turn attention to the western understanding of ‘self’ which stands at the root of our understanding of humans in general and more particularly shapes teachers’ understanding of the learner and that which is learned. This understanding brings into interplay the three traditional leading philosophical figures of the West: Plato and his transcendental forms; Descartes and his dualism of body and mind/spirit; and Kant, with the transcendental subject which apprehends universal knowledge (Murray 1993). All three mediate and shape the peculiarities of the western self; the ‘I’ which denotes individuality and the self which denotes the physical and separately the individual permanent representation of his own person (Spiro 1993). The essential ‘self’ metaphor in Lakoff and Johnson (1999) highlights the idea that the individual has ‘within it’ an essence that makes it the kind of thing it is, and is the cause source of ‘natural’ behaviour (1999, pp. 214–215).

Sfard (1998) argued that metaphors of learning guide the work of learners, teachers, and researchers; she proposed that there are two major metaphors of learning: the metaphor of learning as individual acquisition and the metaphor of learning as participation. Sfard acknowledged that in the history of learning sciences, the acquisition metaphor has been the prominent one. A major contribution of Sfard’s analysis is her argument that ‘too great a devotion to one particular metaphor and rejection of all the others can lead to theoretical distortions and to undesirable practical consequences’ (1998, p. 5). Although we agree with Sfard’s admonition about the dangers of choosing just one metaphor while ignoring others, we argue that some metaphors could be more dangerous than others. Given that all metaphors are consequential, we are concerned by those metaphors of learning that are grounded in psychologised language; those positing that the individual’s (‘internal’) mind constitutes the locus of coherent meaning-making that takes precedence over body and materiality (e.g. ‘John does not understand, his mind barely grasps the concepts’). Changing teachers’ metaphors – and hence, their beliefs regarding learning and learners – means challenging the dualistic perspectives of mind/body that prevail in the western conception of the ‘self’; this is what we argue next for it constitutes a major task of teacher educators and teacher education programmes.

The Mind/Body Dualism: The Roots of Psychologized Metaphors for Learning

Dualism emphasises the radical difference between mind/soul and matter. It argues that the mind/soul and the body are composed of different substances. Plato parallels the body to a prison in which the soul is confined, thus having no choice but to reach the truth by means of the mind. This imprisonment of the soul in the body prevents it from reaching the highest of knowledge/truth. This is the direction that influenced Western modernity and brought to fruition the process of individuation and its accompanying process of universalisation that organise our understanding of that which is human on the constitutive dichotomies of self <>other, emotion<>reason, mind <>nature, mind <>body and more (Bateson 1979; Bauman 1999; Berman 1981).

Problems with this perspective were recognised rather early by philosophers and scientists and since then much has been written trying to correct this view (e.g. Dennett 1993). Though such attempts have been successful in correcting scientific perspectives, they seem not to have been able to influence daily folk perspectives, those which dominate education. As Bredo (2015) writes: ‘We continue – in both everyday and scholarly life- to value mind over body, theory over practice, reason over emotion or habit’ (p. 7). Our claim is that psychologised language – as an assemblage of knowledge, professionalism, methods, and forms of evaluation – is linked to education as a ‘technology’ of solving social problems, by looking at the inner selves of individuals. The main problem is that only a few and chosen (professionals) are authorised to argue about the nature of those selves. Thus, psychologised language constitutes a particular way of organising, exercising and legitimating certain forms of political power in everyday life, including education (Rose 1998).

Psychologized perspectives find their place in education where individuals are addressed not necessarily in light of acknowledging social injustices or stereotypical perceptions, but on the basis of judgements claiming objectivity, neutrality and hence effectivity (Rose 1998) (e.g. a student might fail because of their ‘cultural background’ or lack of ‘abilities’, not because of the lack of family resources to support their educational needs). It is the individualised minds of the marginalised and the poor that are supposedly in need of ‘correction’ rather than the systems within which they inevitably fail.

Educational approaches have for the most part focused on trying to conceptualise the learner and the learning within cognitive and/or situated and socio-cultural theoretical positions (Hodkinson, Biesta, and James 2008). It could be argued that acquisition perspectives are the ones more strongly anchored in the western Cartesian tradition and support dualistic perspectives of the learner and the nature of knowledge, and that participatory ones try to somewhat overcome this dualism and consider knowledge the product of collaborative social trajectories; however, both perspectives seem to acknowledge, in different measures, individual cognition and contextual situated activity. Doing so, both stay attached to a modern western epistemology and though somewhat overcoming the traditional individual/social duality, they retain the mind/body dualism.

For example, there is a voluminous literature (e.g. Boud, Keogh, and Walker 2013; Körkkö, Kyrö-Ämmälä, and Turunen 2016) on the importance of reflection in learning that regardless of the conditions in which it takes place – individually or collaboratively – the assumption is that it is an activity that takes place ‘in’ the mind, detached from the body. This should come as no surprise, given that the view of inner mental things is indeed deeply embedded in western language, culture, and thinking (Floyd 2016). Hence, even if educators would fully align with participatory perspectives and develop their educational strategies based on an understanding that knowledge is produced in concert, still plenty of other conduits are left to apply dualistic metaphors to those involved in the educational context.

Emphasizing that knowledge is situated and constructed does not necessarily imply that educators (and students) will automatically abandon the psychologised language that is widely used regarding self, identity, mind, intelligence, motivation, emotions and many other elusive concepts. Recent relational materialist and non-representational perspectives (Barad 2007; DeLanda 2006; Manzotti 2006) go a step further and open up all sorts of new ways of looking at, talking about, and studying what we call mind, identity and self in schools (Zembylas 2017). In the next section we argue that our efforts to overcome dualistic metaphors and meanings will need tools that not only recognise dualisms, but also suggest ways of addressing them more effectively in teaching and teacher education settings.

The Ontological Turn and its Contributions to Dismantling Psychologized Language

The so-called ontological turn in the social sciences and humanities (Holbraad 2012; Paleček and Risjord 2013) suggests an approach to the understanding of phenomena which is more closely related to the concrete rather than abstracting phenomena to higher or lower levels. The ontological turn is an attempt to flatten the world (to ex-plain it), refusing to acknowledge there is anything other than that which is perceived by the senses; there is nothing above, behind, below, or inside of it. The ontological turn offers a different set of metaphors to understand the world.

For example, our common understanding of ‘knowing’ has changed. Knowing is not a mental capacity anymore but a doing in the world. We do not then reach understanding/knowledge intellectually and through concepts but by being immersed in activities and practices with artefacts and others. The move is oppositional to the one that has dominated the West since the Enlightenment, with its representational model of what accounts for knowledge (Dall’alba and Barnacle 2007). The representational approach posits knowledge as detached and decontextualised. A return to the ontological repositions knowledge in the world, making it non-reducible to thought or the discursive; it repositions knowledge in the social, cultural, and historical spheres. Knowledge is not any more information stored in a disembodied mind, but it is embodied through our actual being in the world; it is not any more an abstract concept unavailable to the observer, but a practical enterprise. The ontological turn brings back to transparent view, to our activity in the world, that which was attached in Western epistemology to the mind – namely, that which was before only accessible to the few, those institutionally accredited with the powers to interpret that which mind hides (e.g. counsellors, educators, psychologists) (Bekerman and Zembylas 2018).

On the one hand, then, psychologised language in education focuses mostly on changing or teaching the individual self. The success of the educational intervention depends on the ability of the educator to properly inform/teach/transfer to the individual self the necessary knowledge to become part of society. In a sense, what these perspectives are after is helping the individual acquire the knowledge not yet present in their system. These perspectives hold to traditional modernist outlooks that see the self and/or their identity as a neatly packed item carried in the head of passive individuals, somewhat fixed and isolated and in need of help so as to be able to become an active member of society.

On the other hand, ontologically inclined education – that is, one that acknowledges the materiality of bodies and the in-corporeality of thought as well as the critique of the tendency of over-coding all activity in terms of language-based meaning (Hayles 2001) – pays attention to the ways in which language is part of a material chain that goes beyond language; therefore, there is always something that exceeds propositional meaning and resists the laws of representational epistemology. The materialist critique of representation and language has radical implications for teaching/learning and consequently, for teacher education (Zembylas 2017). The move towards materiality shifts the focus from issues of correspondence between descriptions (words) and reality to matters of practices, activities, events and doings. This approach brings to the forefront important issues of ontology, materiality, and agency in teaching/learning and teacher education. Meaning cannot be separated from matter, but rather they are entangled. In this sense, we turn our attention to events and their trajectories happening and becoming, rather than on individuals having agency and objects being passive.

As noted earlier, the dominant framework of educational practices in schools understands children in terms of what they supposedly have (or lack) ‘inside’. On the contrary, the ontological approach offers a different path. Instead of debating what children have or lack inside them or what is incomplete in their ‘mind/identity’ towards adulthood, relational materialism turns our attention to the material assemblages and the events that are taking place when children engage with the world and learn (de Freitas and Curinga 2015). The entanglement of meaning and matter in these events is never complete or absolute; thus, a focus on activities rather than on communication (transmission) and on what ‘entities’ are represented through language-based meaning helps us reassemble the lost entanglements between meaning and matter. This change of lens in how we look at the language of teaching and learning also changes what needs to be foregrounded in teacher education programmes, when we prepare teachers to deal with such events in schools.

Learning as Performance: An Alternative Metaphor

Learning through practice is not a new concept in education; notable educationalists such as Dewey (1936), and Rogers (1959) have presented us with learning theories that focus on learning through experience, and work. Similarly, performance is not new to the field of education and learning; among others, it is associated with leading theoreticians such as Perkins (1989) when considering teaching for understanding framework, Schön (1995) when theorising knowing in action, and Lave and Lave and Wenger’s (1991) peripheral participation which emphasises performance in social contexts as a precondition for skilled activity. Our own effort here is to bring into conversation these seminal understandings of learning with recent developments in the ontological turn and foreground an ontological understanding of performance. It is not that our metaphor of learning as performance is dramatically different from previous understandings that emphasised learning based on experience, action and performance. However, foregrounding the ontology of learning (as opposed to its epistemology) enables us to pay attention to the explicit and often complex ways that meaning and matter are entangled in practice, that is, how the use of certain metaphors create realities that have material consequences (e.g. separating students into groups by ‘ability’).

Metaphors, we have emphasised, are not inner constructs but ways of being in the world that guide our educational imagination and work. Changing these metaphors though possible, for we have learned them, might not be easy. Also, changing our metaphors will certainly not ‘solve’ the complexities of the problems schools face; however, if we go back to the ontological critique we presented and accept that metaphors are not merely cognitivist schemes, but material enactments, then we might be able to see a bit clearer the significance of adopting a different language – and thus a different practice through which to develop our educational work. We, therefore, want to suggest a third metaphor (to the two discussed by Sfard) that addresses the critiques identified for the previous two metaphors in the literature, namely, learning as individual acquisition, and learning as participation in community. We call this metaphor learning as performance. Table 1 summarises the key characteristics of each of the three metaphors discussed in the paper.

Table 1. Three metaphors of learning.

	Acquisition Metaphor	Participation Metaphor	Performance Metaphor
Definition of learning	Knowledge acquisition	Participation, community building	Performance, embodied/social practice, material activity
Emphasis	Individual mind	Social interaction, situated cognition	Practice/performance developed collaboratively, materiality
Role of Student	Recipient (consumer)	Participant, apprentice	Researcher, experimenter
Role of Teacher	Provider, facilitator	Expert participant	Mentor, co-researcher
Nature of Knowing	Having, possessing	Belonging, participating	Acting, doing, material

Source: First two metaphors of learning, adapted from Sfard (1998, 7).

A major difference between the three metaphors is their epistemological and ontological assumptions about learning. The acquisition metaphor is fully cognitivist, while the participation metaphor, though different, is in danger of falling back into narrow cognitivism (constructivism as individual mental activity). We argue that although the performance metaphor is not immune from its own pitfalls – e.g. it requires a paradigm shift that, even if it is adopted, does not guarantee a remedy to the problems of education – it nevertheless provides a considerable epistemological and ontological shift in our understanding of learning (learning as performance) that is worthwhile to explore further.

The fields of linguistics, literary theory, ethnology and sociology have examined multiple aspects of performativity (Butler 1997; Goffman 1959; Parker and Sedgwick 2013). Performativity, as tightly connected to meaning production, is understood as the constitution of meaning through its practical execution, meaning as a practice, as a performance – something done. Furthermore, language is a performance because statements at a given time and space are always performative (Austin and Urmson 1962; Foucault 1973); hence, a linguistic formation is to be understood as the regular, practiced performativity of language (Kidwell 2009). Language does not just say something; it also does something. Language performs.

We suggest applying performativity to our understanding of learning, hoping it can help us overcome our inclination to explain its products through that which is not available to our senses. We also hope, if this is achieved, that we can improve present educational activity for it to become accessible to all. For example, an analysis of learning as performance becomes more instructive when it focuses not on what utterances ‘mean’ but on what they do: what connections they do (or do not) allow in the classroom, or what this metaphor enables students and teachers to learn, to feel, to have disappointments and fulfilments in specific contexts. If we revisit the examples of psychologised metaphors mentioned earlier, then the emphasis will shift from the student’s mind to what the student does. For example, the concern will not be whether the student can ‘digest’ or ‘understand’ the information or ‘give’ his/her knowledge to everybody around, but rather how he or she is enabled to ‘open new spaces’ of ‘entangled experiences’.

In general, the notion of performativity is particularly useful in helping us highlight two major ideas in teaching and teacher education: first, it allows us to problematise concepts (e.g. intelligence, cognition, identity, culture) as acts/performances in the context of teaching/learning as well as in teacher education settings; and second, it enriches our theorisation of the place of these concepts in the practices of subjectification and possibilities of action. This means that the enactment of intelligence, cognition, identity, culture and so on in teaching and learning is an embodied affair and that there is a continual rediscovery of the concepts that become embodied performances. Such performances are enmeshed in spaces, times and materialities. All are part of the same phenomenon of performativity.

Performativity implies that many of the concepts we problematise are practices, ways of embodied knowing, and social interactions. These insights are particularly relevant to our efforts to challenge psychologised language, because it is important to pay attention to the ‘rules’ that are constructed in schools as those are enacted through particular practices. These practices need to be explored in the social context within which they are performed and within which they acquire meaning. They could become the basis for a revealing and engaging curriculum.

Central to the metaphor of learning as performance is understanding thought and activity as entangled in teaching and learning rather than as two distinct ‘things’ – a remnant of psychologised metaphors. This is true for all things we learn, yet we seem to be more prone to understand these when considering, for example, football, painting and surgery than when we consider, for example, history or democracy. While the devices to do football, painting, and surgery might be easily recognisable (ball, shoes, scalpel, gauze, colours, brush) the ones needed to do history and democracy are not as easily realised and even if a few might be clear (parliament, archaeological artefacts), these might be sensed as too difficult to enact in schools.

To learn something within this paradigm is not to ‘have’ knowledge about how to do it, but to do it. Learning is not something we have, something we acquire but rather something we do, thus overriding any psychological detached concepts which imply an inexistent duality deniable from any empirical scientific perspective. This implies that what we ‘know’ is not something that exists within us as separate from how we know it. Therefore, learning is rejected as a matter of knowledge representations; learning is an ongoing practice in which thought and action are inseparable. Hence, a knower and their motivation are not required in the process; just mere active work, which may or may not produce the effects envisioned. In case they do not, corrections might be in place, ones again done in the performance of the task at hand rather than ‘within’ the knower (Line and Wees 1936). In addition, when considering knowledge as doing it makes little sense to organise it as chunks of information which we want others to store; we are better off finding ways to allow those, that need to do, access to the time and the resources which allow for the performance itself. Paradoxically, when assessing the outcomes of learning, schools seem to realise we cannot directly assess the minds of learners. In tests and exams, students are not asked about what is in their minds (unless the test mainly aims at reproduction), but are asked to solve problems, to produce artefacts (all performances), which relate testing in education strongly to the third metaphor. Yet, when thinking about the individual results of the exams, teachers turn back to the epistemology of psychologised metaphors (with their emphasis on mind) and thus might end up finding unproductive solutions how to help those who fail.

We argue that all of these assumptions have important consequences for how we organise teacher education, and thus the last part of the paper shows our experimentation with language change in a teacher education setting.

Experimenting With Language Change in Teacher Workshops

Covid-19 offered us the opportunity as well as the constraints for experimenting with language change in teacher education. We conducted a series of teacher workshops with three different groups. These activities were not conceived as a research framework but more as an opportunity to assess our theoretical insights. Yet we were careful in proceeding ethically (by making sure participants were well aware of the experimental nature of the workshops) and as much as possible with the care and ‘objectivity’ which traditionally characterises research undertakings (using a similar schedule for all three workshops, recording the proceedings for future analysis). We could think of the process as similar to action research for teacher education, that is, as a form of self-reflective enquiry undertaken by participants in social situations in order to improve the rationality and justice of their own practices – in our case, theories of learning and how to teach about them in teacher education. In the workshops we were involved in finding out about the results of presenting our theories and testing their repercussions with teachers, who were the aim of our work.

Each teacher workshop consisted of five one-hour-and-a-half zoom meetings offered once a week. In each workshop, five, six, and seven pre-service or in-service teachers from a variety of schools in Israel participated. Participation was voluntarily, and the workshops offered no accreditation. Participants in the first group were students in a special teacher training programme for candidates who had decided to move from careers in science/technology to the field of education. Participants in the second group were mid-career educators participating in an educational leadership programme. The third group included university students studying for their master’s degree in education. Except from the participants in the third group, all other participants held a master’s degree. Their ages ranged between 26 and 43 years. All workshops were fully recorded, something that allowed us to repeatedly hear the events and reach some first conclusions that we briefly report next.

If we had to judge from the feedback offered by all participants at the end of the fifth workshop in each of the three groups, the experiment had worked well in the sense that the participants had enjoyed their participation and the dialogues sustained throughout the sessions. The participants also mentioned they had a sense of having been left with ‘big’ questions that needed time to consider and with numerous queries regarding the potential of implementing the issues discussed in their daily work. It is worth mentioning that no substantial differences were noticed among the participants’ reactions in spite of the age and experience differences among them.

In the first workshop, we offered a short introduction to our foundational premises. We stated what we believed to be a major ‘problem’ in teaching and learning – the existence of an educational language much influenced by folk psychology and lacking ‘true’ analytical or explicative power. We indicated that the workshop was guided by an empirical (scientific) perspective which emphasised the senses as the main tool for the perception and understanding of reality. We acknowledged that there were other possible discourses that deemphasized empirical work which we could see as relevant, though we asked participants to focus on empiricism for the time of the workshop. We justified our request by suggesting the following idea: when looking for the best surgeon to undergo a difficult surgical intervention, the practical (empirical) experience and seniority of the surgeon would become important factors in our decision; education seemed to us to be no less important. Participants found these statements intriguing and challenging and seemed to be wondering how they could indeed justify any difference when approaching such situations.

Following, we offered a short historical review of the development of present western understanding of that which is human as being a duality first known as soul/body and later as mind/body, yet always related to ‘psyche’ (in Greek ‘ψυχή’ for the goddess of the soul and for breath) and psychology. The review surprised them a lot, as if for the first time what had been taken for granted (natural) was now open to critical reflection. We then introduced participants to the evolving etymologies of categories such as identity, culture, intelligence, motivation, and other much used educational concepts. The analysis presented showed their present meaning to be rather new and the product of cultural, economic and political developments and that in the past these same concepts served to construct different realities. We also questioned the fact that only a few are authorized/accredited to argue about the nature of the selves involved in education based on inner (unavailable to the senses) information; when doing so, these accredited agents justify their interpretations based on individual traits (available only to those accredited). Last, we questioned the need to connect between efforts towards teaching/learning and the sorting out of student populations through ongoing assessments into different tracks. Throughout, participants were surprised by what seemed to have been taken for granted without being questioned.

Two more steps are worth mentioning. The first relates to our attempt to help participants reconsider their understanding of language as carrier of meaning (which fits the acquisition metaphor). The second relates to our attempt to help them refashion present metaphors by abandoning static reified apprehensions of reality (content, knowledge, learning/cognition, etc.), while moving towards process-like representations of reality through the use of verbs/process-like/active-like descriptions. We exemplified this move at the level of individual characterisations (e.g. you ‘are’ not a boy or a girl or genius or stupid, you ‘behave/perform’ as one) and at the level of wider processes such as learning (e.g. moving from a cognitive mental perspective to an active representation of learning as performance). Within this context, we pointed at the fact that throughout the workshop issues related to disciplinary contents were seldom raised or discussed. The last steps described were organised under the idea of re-ontologizing education. The reactions here were similar to the ones reported above: interest, surprise, at times doubt. Especially serious consideration was given by participants to the possibility of understanding psychologised language as imposing the sole responsibility on individuals rather than social systems and their structures.

In general, the participants expressed fear of abandoning the ‘soul’, the ‘mind’ and the ‘self’, for they feared that by abandoning them, they would be abandoning humanity and sensibility. We had to counter these fears by trying to remind participants that these unchecked assumptions on humanity had been shown as clearly negating it in our historical account, the history of western colonialism being a classic example. They were puzzled by having to agree with the fact that what they had considered the best humane language might have served the opposite of what they intended.

Our last move was to engage participants in trying to practice what we discussed using language differently to describe previously known phenomena. They were asked for synonyms or examples when using the scripted psychologically tinted language of education. They found these requests very difficult; the more abstract the terms used by them, the more trouble they found in offering synonyms. They were asked to be attentive and describe any differences they perceive when using a different language, one which does not position them as powerful judges of character based on unfounded interpretations, one which obliges them to be articulate about the activities which they interpret as being right or wrong in the educational process, etc. The participants reacted with ambiguity to these efforts. Although they did seem to understand the issues and even agreed with them, they thought it would be difficult to adopt the implied change in a world in which psychologised language is hegemonic.

Concluding Remarks

Adopting a position which aligns with learning/knowing as performance and practice implies abandoning a dualistic stance not only for the learner, but also for teachers, who are now also learners – not only in teacher education settings, but also in the context of their everyday teaching practices. According to this view, teaching is a doing, a performance and so is learning. We are suggesting, then, that what is needed is a an ontological shift in teachers’ understandings of the world and its design in order to allow for language change; one which will work against premises that support clearly differentiated qualities of minds and group characteristics. At this point we might either despair and say this shift is impossible; or, we might redirect educational activities from their focus on cognitive categories towards changing power relations through active participation in the world. We choose the latter option, so we conclude with some general implications of these insights for teacher education.

Teacher education can make a crucial contribution to providing opportunities for teachers to identify and critically reflect on the metaphors which guide their work, while pointing at how psychologised metaphors of learning obstruct their teaching as well as reform efforts more generally. Teacher education should also create opportunities for participants to put into words their living/teaching experiences, using different metaphors, namely, changing the language they use to adopt alternative ontological perspectives (e.g. the performance metaphor). Teacher educators need not only organise these activities; they have also to provide mentoring and facilitation for this critical reflection process, while offering theoretical knowledge and concepts with which teachers can describe their experiences in different ways from the hegemonic language used. Last, the critical reflection process should encourage teachers to reconsider the place of disciplinary contents in their efforts to secure success. Doing the above might help teachers realise that ‘therapeutic’ educational language sets them as judges of the inaccessible when pointing at the individual’s mind as the main force behind failure or success, and that when doing so they seal multiple social/interactional/dialogical educational strategies to better their students’ lot.

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Additional information

Notes on contributors

Zvi Bekerman

Zvi Bekerman teaches anthropology of education at the School of Education, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and is a faculty member at the Mandel Leadership Institute in Jerusalem. He is also an Associate Fellow at The Harry S. Truman Research Institute for The Advancement of Peace. His main interests are in the study of cultural, ethnic and national identity, including identity processes and negotiation during intercultural encounters and in formal/informal learning contexts. He is particularly interested in how concepts such as culture and identity intersect with issues of social justice, intercultural and peace education, and citizenship education. His recent work has examined the intersection between civic and religious epistemologies in educational contexts. In addition to publishing multiple papers in a variety of academic journals, Bekerman is the founding editor of the refereed journal Diaspora, Indigenous, and Minority Education: An International Journal. Among his most recent books: Bekerman, Z., & Zembylas, 2017). Psychologized language in education: Denaturalizing a regime of truth, Palgrave Macmillan – Springer; Bekerman, Zvi (2016), The Promise of Integrated and Multicultural Bilingual Education: Inclusive Palestinian-Arab and Jewish Schools in Israel, Oxford University Press; Bekerman, Z. & Michalinos, Z. (2012), Teaching Contested Narratives Identity, Memory and Reconciliation in Peace Education and Beyond. London, Cambridge University Press; C. McGlynn, M. Zembylas, & Z. Bekerman (Eds.) (2013) Integrated Education in Conflicted Societies, Palgrave, Mcmillan; and Bekerman, Z. & Geisen, T. (Eds. 2012) International Handbook of Migration, Minorities and Education Understanding Cultural and Social Differences in Processes of Learning. New York: Springer.

MIchalinos Zembylas

Michalinos Zembylas is a professor of education at the Open University of Cyprus. His research interests are in the areas educational philosophy and curriculum theory, and his work focuses on exploring the role of emotion and affect in curriculum and pedagogy. He is particularly interested in how affective politics intersect with issues of social justice pedagogies, intercultural and peace education, and citizenship education. Zembylas is the author of the books, Teaching With Emotion: A Postmodern Enactment (Information Age, 2005); Five Pedagogies, a Thousand Possibilities: Struggling for Hope and Transformation (Rotterdam, The Netherlands: SensePublishers, 2007); and The Politics of Trauma in Education (New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). He is also coeditor of Peace Education in Conflict and Post-Conflict Societies: Comparative Perspectives (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, coeditors C. McGlynn, Z. Bekerman, & T. Gallagher,) and ICT for Education, Development, and Social Justice (Greenwich, CT: Information Age, 2009, coeditors C. Vrasidas & G. Glass).