Travels with a turtle: metaphors and the making of a professional identity

Abstract

This paper illustrates how metaphor can provide a vital link between the private and often idiosyncratic world of ‘felt‐reality’ and the propositional world of theories and constructs in which most academic and professional discourses are conducted. Drawing on Schön’s concept of reflection as ‘seeing‐as’ and Heron’s model of ‘ways of knowing’, it suggests that the exploration and articulation of an individual’s use of metaphor is an important element in the process of demystifying the passage of ‘intuitive’ knowledge into professional practice. The author demonstrates how part of her professional identity has been constructed through reflective writing but questions whether work of this kind has any place in the current outcomes‐driven climate of research assessment in academia.

Acknowledgements

My thanks are due to the Kathryn Ecclestone and Christine Bennetts for critiquing an earlier draft of this paper; and to the anonymous referees for their comments, particularly the introduction to Bateson.

Notes

1. As I understand the distinction, tortoises are land‐based turtles.

2. http://www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/turtles_all_the_way_down (accessed 3 February 2006). The Independent (13 February 2006, pp. 12–13) notes that Wikipedia contains ‘some 3.3 million entries … is available in more than 100 languages, and thousands of new entries are added everyday … [it] is one of the biggest experiments in the web’s democracy, communality and usefulness’. However, ‘there has been controversy over its reliability’.

3. See Morgan (1997) on the nature of metaphor and its practical application in organisational contexts. Hunt (1998a, 2001a) discusses metaphor in the facilitation of reflective practice.

4. During my writing of this paper a colleague has drawn my attention to one by Orland (2000) on the use of line‐drawing as a tool for both research and reflection. It cites Weber and Mitchell’s (1996, pp. 110–111) reference to visual images as ‘compelling sources of data that can express that which is not easily put into words: the ineffable, the elusive, the not yet‐thought‐through, the subconscious’ and (echoing much of my own thinking here about the way in which metaphor can facilitate the expression of a personal ‘felt‐reality’ within the public domain) as ‘repositories of meaning as well as mediators of meaning between the social and the personal’ (Orland, 2000, p. 199, my emphasis).

5. See www.scutrea.ac.uk. Hunt (2004, pp. 1–6) summarises changes which have taken place in the nature of university adult education departments and, correspondingly, in SCUTREA.

6. Hunt (2006) sets the worldview imagery in the context of mythopoesis and mythogenesis.

7. M. Scott Peck (1990) explores a felt‐reality of being ‘in community’ in his classic text, The different drum. It resonates closely with much of my own experience.

8. http://www.RAE.ac.uk.