This is what happens when my students get a hold of my camera when they are on a field trip
In thinking about metaphors in the classroom, it is important to acknowledge how metaphors help shape behavior. “Metaphors may create realities for us, especially social realities. A metaphor may thus be a guide for future action. Such actions will, of course, fit the metaphor. This will, in turn, reinforce the power of the metaphor to make experience coherent. In this sense metaphors can be self-fulfilling prophecies.”[1] When a metaphor is stated, it is important to then unfold what is being implied, because if the wrong metaphor is used, perceptions can be directed in a way that then leads to unwanted behavioral responses.
In the previous chapter, we saw how “education is growth” illustrates how an educator plays the role of a gardener, and is responsibility for nurturing his/her students, the way a gardener would his/her plants. With the proper nutrients, students have the ability to grow into well-rounded, mature, and unique individuals. This metaphor contains within it a good belief about knowledge and the expected role of students. Nurturing and fostering life are at the heart of this metaphor. It recognizes how students require the proper support and care in order to become enriched with knowledge and develop. “Effective teachers are like authoritative parents – they are warm, firm, and fair, and they have high expectations for student performance.”[2]
Now, we can look at a different metaphor, and look at how this one compares to “education is growth.” The metaphor, “education is production” became a conceptual framework during the industrial revolution in the United States. It provides reference to the roles, lexicon, and the actions and interactions of the nineteenth century business of production: the manager, the factory worker, the sorting machine. By the 1850s public discussion about educational policy illustrated the complete acceptance of the industrial model by educators.[3] Within this model, curriculum is “an assembly line down which students go,” and students themselves are “products to be molded, tested against common standards, and inspected carefully before being passed on to the next workbench for further processing.”[4] This concept of school led to “reductionistic, ‘parts-catalog’ approaches to teaching and learning.”[5] Both educators and the general public became obsessed with efficiency and scientific management, and embraced as well as idealized production as the model for education (Cook-Sather, p.44). However, I can think of many reasons why this is not a good model for education.
There are certainly benefits to good organization in the school environment, specifically in regards to social organization which takes into consideration five key aspects: 1) school and classroom size, 2) different approaches to age grouping and, in particular, how young adolescents should be grouped, 3) tracing, or the grouping of students in classes according to their academic abilities, 4) the ethnic composition of schools, and 5) public versus private schools (Steinberg, 2008, p.204). However, there are certain climates that are the best for enhancing student learning. Good schools have five characteristics: 1) They emphasize intellectual activities, 2) they have committed teachers who are given autonomy, 3) they monitor their own progress, 4) they are well integrated into their community, and 5) they have a high proportion of classrooms in which students are active participants in their education (Steinberg, 2008, p.229). Within the conceptual framework of education is production, teachers are considerably degraded. The structure for control aimed at efficiency is too intense. Teachers are given packaged curricula, readers, and textbooks, organized into tightly sequenced units and accompanied by teachers’ guides – forms of highly structured, step-by-step instructions. This type of system discourages creativity, critical thinking, or any kind of deviation from standardized manuals for learning (Cook-Sather, p.44). The teacher is also placed outside the system of learning, rather than inside; rather than being in charge of regulating the content and activities of the learner, the teacher is just a “manager” or “technician” in charge of implementing material that has already been established for the children to learn. “The school has been converted into the most dehumanizing institution that I have ever laid eyes upon, each child being treated as if he possessed a memory and the faculty of speech, but no individuality, no sensibilities, no soul.”[6] While there are modifications to this model, some being less drastic, overall, the meaningfulness of learning is lost when education is viewed as a means for production.
[1] Lakoff and Johnson
[2] Steinberg, 2008, p.204
[3] Cook-Sather,Education is Translation, p.43
[4] Schlechty, Schools, 42, 21.
[5] Stanley J. Zehm, “Deciding to Teach: Implications of a Self-Development Perspective,” in The Role of Self in Teacher Development, ed. Richard P. Lipka and Thomas M. Brinthaupt (New York: State University of New York Press, 1999), 43.
[6] Joseph Mayer Rice, The Public School System of the United States (New York: Century Company, 1893), 31.
Metaphor: Making the Abstract Concrete and Visual 