Hume and Tea Time
The improvement of understanding is for two ends: first, our own increase of knowledge; secondly, to enable us to deliver that knowledge to others.
– John Locke
Education is a time for wonder and reflection, a time for creativity responsibility, problem-solving, and self-motivation. It is the role of the educator to ensure all students receive and understand the necessary skills for today’s competitive and complex world. For educators, to be able to achieve in preparing their students for life after school, it is first necessary to recognize the fact that “language is undoubtedly at the heart of learning”; “language has now replaced IQ as an explanation for social and education disadvantage.”[1] An educator plays an important role in a child’s development, and can significantly make a difference in the lives of children who come from poor families. Every child, with few exceptions, learns how to talk. However, the social and linguistic environments surrounding children as they begin to acquire language competence greatly differs cross-culturally. Educators need to recognize the role they play in bridging the gap between the use of language at home and in school. I believe literacy is one of the most important skills children need to learn in school in order to be successful in today’s developed world, and from this, I feel I can accurately state that skills in reading and writing are necessary for effective communication. This is where I believe the role of metaphor comes into play. The role of metaphor can be understood on two different levels: First, educators must recognize how metaphor helps to define one’s teaching philosophy. Metaphor helps to establish teacher-student relationships and helps in the organization of the classroom. Secondly, educators should recognize that metaphors are a powerful tool in linking unfamiliar ideas with the familiar. Analogies are an effective learning tool for reinforcing thinking skills and conceptual understanding. The in-depth analysis of metaphors’ role in students’ learning illustrates how metaphor is at the core of student achievement.
Before diving into discussion of metaphor, I think it is first important to provide some background information on what children come into the school system at a disadvantage. Studies done have shown that certain factors do not correlate with language learning. For example, race and gender do not affect a child’s ability to develop language and literacy skills. However, economic advantage plays a crucial role in children’s verbal communication development. The basic finding is this: Children growing up in less economically advantaged homes are exposed to a smaller vocabulary and have fewer interactions with people in comparison to more economically advantaged children. It is crucial for schools to provide an environment where children from all family backgrounds are exposed to rich language and exposed to the uses and functions of various prints. Children reared in poverty are exposed to fewer opportunities for experiences of many kinds, language just being one of them, and it takes this realization to understand why the education system needs to make an effort to help improve the language and cognitive performance of these less advantaged children.
To understand what creates this difference it helps to look into some studies that have been conducted: In 1995, Betty Hart and Todd R. Risley conducted a study on “ordinary families” and how they talk to their young children. The study focused specifically on how social interactions affect developmental growth. Evidence indicates that despite the strong efforts from preschool programs to equalize opportunity, children from less economically advantaged families fall behind their peers later in school. This is due to stunted vocabulary growth due to limited social interaction amongst parents and children in welfare families versus the amount of communication that takes place between parents and children of professional families.
A vocabulary, the stack of words (or signs) available to a person or a language community, comprises all the words a person knows, both those a person can understand and use appropriately. [2] Words are added to the vocabulary through experiences. These experiences also allow for the refinement or elaboration of meanings of known words. A person’s vocabulary is something that continues to grow throughout life as an individual has new experiences and gains understanding. “The more often a child hears different words, the more varied are the associated experiences and the more the meanings of the words for the child come to match the range and nuances of the meanings of the words for the speaker and the culture” (Hart and Risley, 98). The vocabulary terms parents use when they interact with their children set the foundations for the complex concepts and relationships the children will be asked to understand later on. “Children’s experiences with language cannot be separated from their experiences with interaction because parent-child talk is saturated with affect” (Hart and Risley, 101). Characteristics of language, such as tone and sound patterns, are captured by children even before they begin using words. As children develop, the exposure they have had to language shapes their motivation to learn and use words.
Hart and Riley recognized that the vocabulary an individual has reflects their intellectual resources, and for this reason rather than using an IQ test as a measurement tool, they used vocabulary growth. The measurement of vocabulary growth versus the measure of intelligence with an IQ test is culturally unbiased, allows for the obtainment of repeated measures without the child memorizing test questions, and allows for testers to infer from the child’s use of a word in context what the child took to be the meaning of the word (Hart and Risley, 6).
Hart and Riley began their study by recording each month – for 2 ½ years – one full hour of every word spoken at home between parent and child in 42 families. These families had been categorized as professional working class or welfare families. Following the recording stage came years of coding and analyzing every utterance in the 1,318 transcripts. The data from successive observations were displayed for each child as a developmental trajectory, or a cumulative vocabulary growth curve (Hart and Risley, 7).
Findings showed that by age 3, the spoken vocabularies of the children from the professional families were larger than those of the parents in welfare families. For all 42 parents, the average number of utterances to the child per hour was 341 utterances. “The parents in the professional families addressed an average of 487 utterances to the child per hour in contrast to the average of 178 utterances addressed to the child by the parents in families on welfare, and the average of 301 utterances addressed to the child in the 23 working-class families” (Hart and Risley, 66). This is a difference of almost 300 words spoken per hour between professional and welfare parents. If this number is transferred into the number of words a child would hear per year, a child in a professional family would hear 11 million words; a child in a welfare family would only hear 3 million words.
Follow-up studies done age 9, show that children’s language experience is tightly linked to large differences in child outcomes. Vocabulary growth rates were strongly associated with rates of cognitive growth. This seemed to predict that in high school many children from impoverished families lack the necessary vocabulary to understand more advanced textbooks (Hart and Risley, 11). Hart and Risley realized the goal of their intervention needed to be changing the developmental trajectory; the rate at which welfare children added words to their dictionaries in daily use needed to be accelerated. Slow vocabulary growth rates are not due merely to the lack of extensive and varied experiences, but due to a lack of adult mediation.
For this reason, “the clear message here is that the welfare of poor children can only be served by enhancing the experiences they receive at home – by making the vocabulary and language they will need for expression and interpretation, in the wider contexts of their lives, available to them from those who are for them and also care about them” (Hart and Risley, xiii).
Hart and Risley calculated that in order for welfare children to receive language experience equal to that of working-class children, the welfare children would need to receive 63,000 words per week of additional language experience (Hart and Risley, 201). “Just to provide an average welfare child with an amount of weekly language experience equal to that of an average working-class child would require 41 hours per week of out-of-home experience as rich in words addressed to the child as that in an average professional home” (Hart and Risley, 201). What needs to be done to make this happen? A national commitment needs to be made to support and provide a voice to those who are left at a disadvantage.
However, for the purpose of this paper, I think it helps to focus on a more micro level, and to think about what strategies are effective and ineffective at helping to give these struggling children a boost within the classroom setting. This is where we need to look at the first metaphoric level – the first part of being a good teacher comes from recognizing the role metaphor plays in shaping one’s teaching philosophy. There are various metaphors often used when discussing education. A common metaphor that comes up is “education is growth.” Thinkers such as Rousseau and Herbart, argue that students need to be nurtured and given the opportunity to learn in their own ways at their own pace, and if given the proper sustenance, they will act morally according to their own free will.[3] This metaphor identifies how an educator can either help or hinder a child’s learning experience. An educator can think of him/herself as a gardener and his/her students can be thought of as plants. With sunlight, good soil, and water, seedlings will grow tall and strong and blossom into colorful flowers; with the right amount of instruction, advising, and encouragement, students will grow internally.
One metaphor that I created to use when thinking about education is “education is a ship”. If education is the ship, then the teacher is the wind and the students are the sails. This metaphor identifies how an educator has the power to direct a child’s learning, and with the right amount of positive reinforcement, the time a student spends in the classroom can be “smooth sailing”.
It helps to look at Psychologist Lev Vygotsky’s social learning theory to better understand how educator’s can help children’s learning and cognitive development. According to Vygotsky, the most important learning by the child occurs through social interaction with a skillful mentor. The mentor may model behaviors and/or provide verbal instructions for the child. The child seeks to understand the actions or instructions given, and then internalizes the information, using it to guide or regulate his/her own performance.[4] Vygotsky suggests that teachers use cooperative learning exercises where less competent children develop with help from more skillful peers within the zone of proximal development. He believed when a student is at the zone of proximal development for a certain task, providing the appropriate amount of assistance, scaffolding, will give the student the necessary “boost” to achieve the task. The scaffolding can be removed once the student masters the task and can complete the task again on his/her own.[5]
As John Locke said, the human mind is a blank slate, and therefore educators furnish it with ideas to think on.[6] Humans are not born with full-fledged ideas in their heads, but rather slowly form them through the sensory input of the material world. In thinking about language, educators fill the minds of their students with the skills necessary to understand the structures of a text, assess the logic of an argument, and develop and awareness of how language is consciously deployed to achieve meaning and input.[7]
Now that we have established the role educators play in helping children develop, we can think about what strategies educators can use to help render the unfamiliar more familiar to their students.
[2] Hart, Betty, and Todd R. Risley. Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experience of Young American Children. Baltimore: P.H. Brookes, 1995. Print. Further reference to this source in parentheses (Hart and Risley, p#).
[3] Cook-Sather, pp. 49-50
[6] Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Book II Ch1
Metaphor: Making the Abstract Concrete and Visual 