Source:Movements of Mind: The Matrix, Metaphors, and Re-imagining Education
Movements of Mind: The Matrix, Metaphors, and Re-imagining Education
This article revisits arguments made by educators, philosophers, linguists, and anthropologists that metaphors govern our ways of perceiving, naming, and acting in the world, whether we are aware of this phenomenon or not. The article invites readers to make conscious the metaphors that inform our
thoughts and actions, discern the "realities" we construct for ourselves and for others, and imagine the possibility of changing those. The argument made is for seeking, crafting, and embracing metaphors that cast students not only as active participants in their own education but as the principle creators of their education and themselves.
Below are portions of the article as well as an appendix of educational metaphors.
EDUCATION AS PRODUCTION
Education is production. This overarching metaphor generates a
whole set of associated metaphors that name the structures of and
participants in education: Schools are factories, teachers are factory workers
or managers, students are products. The lexicon of this metaphorical
system foregrounds things mechanical, efficient, repetitive, standard, and
passive and all but eliminates things imaginative, creative, various,
divergent, and active. When the dominant notion of education is the
manufacturing of students, there is no possibility of students' self-creation.
Rather, students are commodities produced by others, prepared to enter
and compete for purchase in what Sfard (1998) describes as an increasingly
materialistic world.
Embodying a much earlier version of a "cult of efficiency" (Callahan, 1962)
that was born of the industrial revolution in the United States, the
conceptual framework that the metaphor of education as production
provides includes reference to the roles, lexicon, and the actions and
interactions of the 19th century business of production-the manager, the
factory worker, "the sorting machine" (Spring, 1976). Critics coined the
metaphor, a school is a factory (see Bullough, 1988; Schlechty, 1991), to
illuminate how, during the early 19th century, urban schools in particular
"came to be viewed as institutions to be managed and a set of educational
experiences to be organized" (Schlechty, 1991, p. 21). Within these
institutions, "school leaders, like the industrial leaders they looked to as
models and guides, sought the Holy Grail of scientific management"
(Schlechty, p. 21). By the 1850s public discussion about educational policy
illustrated the "complete acceptance of the industrial model by educators"
(Schlechty, p. 21). The graded school that was conceptualized at that time
"was to be one of the chief tools used in the process of manufacturing good
Americans" (Schultz, 1973, p. 131).
Within this manufacturing process, curriculum is "an assembly line down
which students go" (Schlechty, 1991, p. 42) and students are "products to be
molded, tested against common standards, and inspected carefully before
being passed on to the next workbench for further processing" (Schlechty,
p. 21). Such a concept of school led to "reductionistic, 'parts-catalog'
approaches to teaching and learning" (Zehm, 1999, p. 43). This "bureaucratic
model" (Kliebard cited in Pinar, 1978) is characterized by, among
other things, its "allegiance to behaviourism and what Macdonald has
termed a 'technological rationality"' (Pinar, 1978, p. 205). Obsessed with
efficiency and scientific management, both educators and the general public
not only embraced but also idealized production as the model for
education. The metaphor "pervaded the larger culture" (Perrone, 2000,
p. 30) and continues to do so, as evidenced by the increasingly frequent
imposition on students of standardized tests (Kohn, 2000).
Within the conceptual framework of education as production, teachers
can be cast as workers, as machines themselves, or as managers. When a
teacher is a factory worker, she is "not very skilled, not very insightful, and, within the context of 'real' professions such as law and medicine, not very bright" (Schlechty, 1991, p. 23).
Furthermore, the control structures of the school are the control structures of the
factory: tight supervision and product inspection. Curriculum design
and the quest for teacher-proof materials dominate the thinking of
many center office functionaries, but the curriculum guides must be
made simple for teachers as well as students. Above all, the curriculum
must be articulated with the tests that will be used to inspect the
students who are the products of the controlled and rational process.
(Schlechty, p. 23)
An underlying premise here is that there is limited use for teachers to
fashion the curriculum; like workers in a factory, they are best off following
directions. Classic examples of control structures for teachers aimed at
efficient production are packaged curricula, readers, and textbooks
organized into tightly sequenced units and accompanied by teachers'
guides-forms of highly structured, step-by-step instructions that actively
discourage creativity, critical thinking, or any kind of deviation from the
standard set forth in the manuals.
Within this construct of education as production teachers can also be cast
as mechanical themselves. One teacher describes himself as "a well-ordered
machine," explaining, "My job seems to be like an engine that is well taken
care of. Everything works the way it is supposed to work. There is a set
rhythm and reason to why things work in the way they do" (Efron &
Joseph, 2001, p. 78). This machine works within "a time frame in which you
have a set of goals and objectives that need to be accomplished. You take a
student from this point to that point" (Efron & Joseph, p. 78). As Efron and
Joseph suggest, this teacher is "a technician" who keeps the "factory-the
educational machine-operating"' (p. 78).
Finally, when the teacher is the mastermind that oversees the work of
production, the teacher is an executive. Here the teacher is the manager of
a system, located not "inside" the process of teaching and learning but
rather "outside," a position from which he or she "regulates the content
and the activities on the learner" (Fenstermacher & Soltis, 1992, p. 16). This
model casts teachers as "highly skilled technocrats: professionals in the
sense that engineers, accountants, and architects are professionals"
(Schlechty, 1991, p. 23). Within the conceptual framework of this metaphor,
the teacher appears to be "the manager of a kind of production line, where
students enter the factory as raw material and are somehow 'assembled' as
persons" (Fenstermacher & Soltis, 1992, p. 16).
The root metaphor of education as production and the multiple
branches that spring from it-school as factory; curriculum as assembly
line; teacher as factory worker, machine, or executive; and students as
products-create a version of reality that is scarcely more humane
than the construct of the Matrix. Rice (1893) sharply critiqued the factory
model of schools at the time of its emergence: "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" (p. 31).
Although the root metaphor of education as production includes three
different metaphors for teachers, each of which accords teachers a
different degree and kind of authority, all three cast students in basically
the same role: they are marched through drills and hurried through
worksheets that test them on discrete, disconnected, and deadly boring bits
of information; they are taken "'from this point to that point"' (Efron &
Joseph, 2001, p. 78); they are "'assembled' as persons" (Fenstermacher &
Soltis, 1992, p. 16). Within this metaphorical framework and the practices it
engenders there is no place or incentive to "attend to whether or not
learning is meaningful or satisfying for the students" (Greene in Efron &
Joseph, 2001 p. 79). And as Dewey (1938) queries, "What avail is it to win
prescribed amounts of information... if in the process the individual loses
his own soul?" (p. 49).
The experience of students, even at privileged and ostensibly "good"
schools, is indeed one of being shuffled along a conveyor belt. One student
describes his life as follows:
6 o'clock in the morning my alarm goes off and I go to school all day
long, and then I go to work for five hours, I don't get home until eight
o'clock, and then I do four hours of homework, and then I wanna just
sit back and just do nothing, and I can't, I gotta hurry up and fall
asleep but I'm so wired from the day that I can't fall asleep and before
I know it, the alarm, and I gotta do it all again, and the next day.
2002)
Pope (2001) suggests that "we are creating a generation of stressed out,
materialistic, and miseducated students," and this student's description of
his life offers some evidence for the truth of this assertion. If students are
trained to enact highly scripted, grueling, preset motions that are going to
lead them to prescribed ends, they are little more than the automatons in
The Matrix.
By making arguments for the betterment of the economic state of the
country and the maintenance of the United States as the primary
world power, proponents of education as production actually effect a
worsening of the human state. Students enact the production metaphor
themselves: studying to compete and complete rather than explore and
examine, and wearing themselves out in the process. Any innovative
thinking or behavior, although it might invigorate students, would hinder
production. Thus, such a metaphor, under the pretext of advocating
advancement, argues for and effects ways of keeping the social structure the
same. As within the Matrix, education as production carried to its extreme
sacrifices the human spirit and soul for the efficiency of scientific
management and mass production.
EDUCATION AS CURE
The root metaphor of education as production eclipsed the human with the
mechanical; the root metaphor of education as cure reasserts the human.
But just as production in the educational realm was seen as inefficient, this
second root metaphor is premised on another perceived problem that
needs remedy. The characters and themes of The Matrix once again serve to
illuminate these issues in education. Discussing at one point the construction
of the Matrix, one of its gatekeepers, Agent Smith, explains how an
earlier iteration of the Matrix construct failed because the programmers
had created "a perfect human world, where none suffered" (Silver & the
Wachowski Brothers, 1999). Agent Smith suggests that the reason the first
Matrix failed was because human beings define their reality through misery
and suffering; therefore, they rejected a "reality" in which everyone was
healthy and happy. He goes further to suggest that people are the cause of
their own and others' suffering-"human beings are a disease"-and in the
face of this illness, the artificial intelligence that has created the Matrix is "the cure" (Silver & the Wachowski Brothers, 1999).
The centrality of sickness, as a constituent and also an obsession, is clearlymanifest in this second root metaphor for education in the United States.
Schlechty (1991) suggests that the notion of the school as a hospital was an
outgrowth of "the perception that the legitimate purpose of schools is to
redress the pain and suffering imposed on children by the urban industrial
society" (p. 25). But the reaction against industrialization was not the first
manifestation of the root metaphor of education as cure. The original ill
that schools were established to remedy was one that colonists brought with
them to the "new world" and is strikingly close to Agent Smith's assessment
of human beings as a species: children's innately sinful and evil nature. In
colonial America children were thought to be "'born into sin and creatures
of Hell, Death, and Wrath and therefore corrupt natures" (Mather in
Allison, 1995, p. 9). Characterized as "'depraved, unregenerate, and
damned,"' children "had to be broken so they could be taught 'humility
and tractableness"' (Robinson in Allison, 1995, p. 9). Among the first laws
passed in the United States requiring the establishment of schools was the
Old Deluder Satan Act passed in 1647 in Massachusetts (Allison, 1995;
Spring, 1994). The purpose of the law was to ensure that young people
learned how to read the Bible and thereby be "treated" for their innate ills
and immunized against future depravity.
Words such as "illness" and "remedy" need not appear in this discourse
for the root metaphor, or what Schon (1979) calls the generative metaphor,
to underlie the story. Throughout United States history the root metaphor
of education as cure has taken different forms:
some nineteenth century supporters of education argued that crime
could be eliminated in a society only through the proper education of
children ... In the twentieth century this impulse continued and
expanded as schools adopted programs designed to end drug abuse
and alcoholism, reduce traffic accidents, and improve community
health. (Spring, 1978, p. 3)
If education is a cure, the job of educational institutions, personnel, and
processes is to assess perceived illnesses or deficiencies and implement a
regimen to remedy them. Within this metaphorical framework, the
curriculum becomes a prescription, with the ideal prescription being highly
individualized-administered to each student depending on his or her
needs and deficiencies (Schlechty, 1991) and capitalizing on his or her
strengths. These deficiencies and needs are assessed and treated through
diagnostic testing, the use of scientific instruments, and "intervention
strategies (treatments) based on research and derived from clinical trials"
(Schlechty, p. 26). This metaphor privileges faith in rigorous medical
practice, and it assumes and asserts that such practice is the answer to
persisting problems in the United States.
Within the realm and lexicon of the metaphor of education as cure, two
metaphors drawn from clinical practice cast the teacher as clinician. One is
the idea that a teacher is a diagnostician. "[A] diagnostic teacher is one who
casts oneself as an observer, scrutinizer, and assessor, as well as an engaged
leader" (Solomon, 1999, p. xvi). Diagnostic teachers "seek to know
students' current understandings and misconceptions." They aim also to
"deepen their own subject-area knowledge and make judgments about
what concepts are worth teaching." Furthermore, they "assess their own
beliefs and practices, selecting, designing, and redesigning appropriate
pedagogical strategies and curriculum materials that make sense given
students' understandings and the concepts and skills they want to promote"
(Solomon, p. xvi-xvii)-like a doctor assessing the needs of a sick patient. A
diagnostic teacher assumes "a stance of critical scrutiny" (Solomon &
Morocco, 1999, p. 231).
A second metaphor for teacher has its roots in progressive models of
education and in the advent of various forms of psychoanalysis-where
these work to humanize education: A teacher is a therapist. A teacher is "an
empathetic person charged with helping individuals grow personally and
reach a high level of self-actualization, understanding, and acceptance"
(Fenstermacher & Soltis, 1992, p. 4). According to this model, the teacher
does not impart knowledge and skill to students; rather, he or she helps
students gain their own knowledge and skill (Fenstermacher & Soltis, p. 33).
Teachers in the role of therapist are certainly situated in greater proximity
to students and the learning process than those who are guided by
industrial metaphors, but the persisting underlying assumption of illness
needing remedy is troubling. The premise of illness keeps students passive
and ailing (or potentially ailing) with the only remedy being the active
intervention of educators. Furthermore, this metaphor can prompt some
teachers to feel a conflict regarding their responsibilities. Many teachers see
themselves as "providing emotional support for their students" (Fischer &
Kiefer, 2001, p. 108). But some feel that "balancing their major role of
educating with that of therapist or counselor" is a challenge (Fischer &
Kiefer, p. 108).
The root metaphor of education as cure and the multiple branches
that spring from it-the school as hospital, curriculum as prescription,
the teacher as diagnostician or therapist, and the student as sick
patient-create a version of reality that, although ostensibly more
humane, casts students as ill and in need of remedy. The positive
face of this metaphor is that education can be understood as care: caring
for students and caring that they become healthy-or using their strengths
to help overcome weaknesses. But the assumption that they are unhealthy
and the schools' prescribed courses or remedies constitute the only possible
cure is problematic. Theoretically, the metaphors of school as hospital and
education as cure elevate the student from the role of "product," which
students occupy within the education as production metaphor, but it keeps
the student in a dependent role: "the role of client dependent on the
expert" (Schlechty, 1991, p. 26). Students are patients who accumulate
records of tests and regimens of treatments. It is these records and
regimens that define students and what happens to them. Nowhere is the
language of this metaphor more pervasive than in special education and
remedial programs-two places in school where one is most likely to find
academic "'casualties"' (Schlechty, p. 27). The "at-risk" student who needs
the "remedy" of a remedial program is cast as sick or at risk of falling out of
society unless ministered to by the school and its personnel.
The recent proliferation of possible diseases with which students can be
diagnosed-multiple forms of attention and physical "deficits" and
"disabilities"-as well as the rise in prescription of drugs (such as Ritalin)
and of programs of treatment (such as Individualized Educational Plans)
clearly illustrate our culture's construction of student disability (McDermott
& Varenne, 1985). If students want to receive the services and interventions
of the school, they must be sick, and if they want to keep receiving attention,
they must get sicker and sicker. Therefore, students' restlessness of body as
well as mind, for which we generate ever-new diagnoses, suggest that the
cure we offer students called education is actually intensifying their
supposed illness.
Although the root metaphors of education as production and
cure are premised on different lexicons and engender different notions
of educational practice, they have similar effects on students. Both
keep students passive, as products or patients, confined within institutions
that contain and control, like factories and hospitals, and managed
by teachers who are technicians or managers on the one hand or
diagnosticians and therapists on the other.
METAPHORS FOR SCHOOLS
A school is a melting pot
The term "melting pot" first appeared in 1908 as
the title and theme of a play written by Israel
Zangwvill, in which a great alchemist "'melts and
fuses' America's varied immigrant population 'with
his purging flames"' (Carnevale & Stone, 1995, p.
14). Within this metaphorical framework, the job of
the school is to "educate students from many
cultures through a common language, a common
history, and common goals, principles, and values"
(Ehrensal, Crawford, Castellucci, & Allen, 2001, p.
65). This approach assumes a "predetermined
standard of desirability" (Wong cited in Ehrensal et
al., p. 65) and asserts "that the American experience
molds all into modern-day clones of the (mainly)
white, Protestant Anglo-Saxons who founded the
Republic and established cultural hegemony here"
(Carnevale & Stone, 1995, pp. 14-15).
Schools are educational wastelands
Contending that schools were promoting the
degeneration of the American mind, Bestor (1953)
argued for the rejuvenation of United States public
schools, and lamented the vanishing sense of
purpose in education. He asserted that unless those
concerned with education "make substantially the
same assumptions there cannot be an educational
system at all, only a hodgepodge of schools." The
"unity of purpose" Bestor sought was to find its
manifestation in the body of knowledge
taught-"what every American needs to know" to
heal himself and contribute to a healthy body politic
(HIirsch, Kett, & Trefil, 1987). This work paved the
way for the writings of Alan Bloom, E.D. Hirsch,
and others concerned about "the closing of the
American mind" (Bloom, 1987)-what they suggest
is the intellectual atrophy and decay of the collective
U.S. brain.
Schools are shopping malls
During a phase of relative prosperity and
complacency in the United States, after the
turbulent, alternative, and powerful movements of
the 1960s and 1970s, Powell, Fararr, & Cohen
(1985) wrote: "If Americans want to understand
their high schools at work, they should imagine
them as shopping malls" (p. 8). They describe
secondary education as a "consumption
experience" (p. 8). The consumers vary greatly:
some know what they want and "efficiently make
their purchases"; others "come simply to browse";
and still others do neither: "they just hang out" (p.
8). Within the shopping mall high school are
"specialty shops" for students with particular
preferences, "product labeling" for the array of
course options available, and special and
"unspecial" students to select, or be selected by,
those options (pp. 118, 22, 172). The shopping mall
high school offers accommodations "to maximize
holding power, graduation percentages, and
customer satisfaction" (p. 1).
METAPHORS FOR EDUCATION
Education in banking
Freire (1990) explains this metaphor he coined:
when the teacher is assumed to know all and the
students nothing, education "becomes an act of
depositing, in which the students are the
depositories and the teacher is the depositor" (p.
58). The student's role within this model is limited
to "receiving, filing, and storing the deposits" (p.
58). As passive recipients of others' knowledge,
students are, according to Freire, denied the
opportunity to "be truly human"-the ability to
engage in inquiry and praxis, to create, not simply
receive, knowledge, which "emerges only through
invention and re-invention, through the restless,
impatient, continuing, hopeful inquiry men pursue
in the world, with the world, and with each other"
(p. 58).
Education is growth
Informed by thinkers such as Rosseau (1762/1965)
and Herbart (1901), this metaphor argues that
students should be nurtured and let to learn in their
own ways at their own pace, and, if properly
nurtured, will act morally according to their own
free will. Dewey (1916) built on these premises,
arguing that continuity of life means continual
readaptation of the environment to the needs of
living organisms (p. 2) and proposing childcentered
education and rejecting the notion that
children are blank slates or empty vessels to be filled
(Dewey, 1964). Proponents of progressive education
have continued to argue that we must start "where
the learner is" (Bruner, 1977, p. xi) and design
educational experiences, such as those in Waldorf
and Montessori schools and in pockets of
progressivism in all school systems, in which
students can build their own knowledge
(Duckworth, 1987)-in which students can grow
themselves.
METAPHORS FOR LEARNING
Learning is acquisition
This metaphor reflects the basically materialistic
culture of the Western world. Nowhere is this
materialism more fully embraced than in the United
States, established as it was in the wide, open space
of what was considered free but was in fact acquired
land rich in resources. Explicating the metaphor of
learning as acquisition, Sfard (1998) explains that
concepts are "basic units of knowledge that can be
accumulated, gradually refined, and combined to
form ever richer cognitive structures" (p. 5). The
lexicon of the acquisition metaphor includes words
like "fact," "material," "sense," "idea," and
"notion," (p. 5) and underlying these words is the
impulse toward accumulation of material wealth,
signaled by Sfard's use of words such as
''accumulated," "refined," and "richer." The actions
according to which one makes the commodities of
facts and ideas one's own include "construction,"
"appropriation," "transmission," "attainment," and
"accumulation" (p. 5). Within this metaphor, "[I]ike
material goods, knowledge has the permanent
quality that makes the privileged position of its
owner equally permanent" (p. 8).
Learning is participation
Comparing this to the learning as acquisition
metaphor, Sfard (1998) explains: "the terms that
imply the existence of some permanent entities have
been replaced with the noun 'knowing,' which
indicates action" (p. 6). She argues that this
linguistic shift signals a profound conceptual shift:
"[t]he talk about states has been replaced with
attention to activities ...the permanence of having
gives way to the constant flux of doing" (p. 6). The
vocabulary of this conceptual framework includes
words such as "situatedness," "contextuality,"
"cultural embeddedness," and "social mediation"
(p. 6). Learning is "conceived as a process of
becoming a member of a certain community. This
entails, above all, the ability to communicate in the
language of this community and act according to its
particular norms" (p. 6). This metaphor for
learning stresses "the evolving bonds between the
individual and others... [it] implies that the identity
of an individual, like an identity of a living organ, is
a function of his or her being (or becoming) a part
of a greater entity" (p. 6).
METAPHORS FOR TEACHERS
A teacher is a scholar
In a survey of the roles, images, and metaphors used
to represent teachers and teaching in textbooks
published in the United States before the 1940s,
Joseph discusses a number of "ideal images,"
including this one (Joseph, 2001, p. 139). The
notion of the teacher as an intellectual sharply
contrasts the teacher as technician or as clinician.
This "open-minded scholar" must engage in the
same intellectual pursuits in which he asks his
students to engage, because "[s]cholarship [can]
bring delight to the teacher who [grows]
intellectually along with his students" (McFee, 1918,
pp. 16, 245, quoted in Joseph, 2001, p. 139) and
also because "there must be a thinking teacher
before there can be a thinking child" (Snyder &
Alexander, 1932, quoted in Joseph, 2001, p. 139).
The metaphor of the teacher as scholar positions
teachers alongside other serious investigators into
the nature and workings of things of the mind. It
runs the risk, however, of privileging the realms of
scholarship into which adults who have already
been through the educational system make forays
over the realms within which students still in their
formal process bf education explore.
A teacher is a reflective practitioner
The phrase "the reflective practitioner" was coined
by Sch6n (1983). The reflection in reflective practice
is on one's self and how one enacts in practice the
theories one espouses. Advocates of fostering the
development of reflective practitioners (Colton &
Sparks-Langer, 1993; Richert, 1990; Rudney &
Guillaume, 1990; Zeichner & Liston, 1987) argue
that, in the absence of reflection, "one runs the risk
of relying on routinized teaching and... not
developing as a teacher or as a person" (Reiman &
Thies-Sprinthall, 1998, p. 262). The ongoing
interplay of reflection and action, or what Freire
(1990) calls praxis, although not generally built into
the "structure of teaching" (Elbaz, 1987, p. 45), is
essential to good pedagogical practice. As Zehm
(1999) points out, reflection on the human
dimensions of teaching is a useful tool for selfexploration
as well as professional development
also Zehm & Kottler, 1993). Furthermore, not only
does becoming a reflective practitioner mean
developing the disposition to reflect on practice, it
means "finding the words to express those
reflections to others-through collaboration,
building a shared language and a shared knowledge
of practice" (Yinger cited in McLean, 1999, p. 68).
Thus the metaphor of teacher as reflective
practitioner would appear to strive for more of a
balance between calling for dwelling in the world of
scholarship, like the teacher as scholar, and dwelling
in the world that that teacher creates in the
classroom.
A teacher is a researcher
Aiming to disrupt the one-way flow of educational
knowledge from university-based researchers to
curriculum and policy specialists to teachers
(Houser, 1990, p. 56), the teacher research
movement has aimed to bridge the worlds of theory
and practice in another way. This movement argues
that teachers can and should generate legitimate
knowledge about educational practice (Cochran-
Smith & Lytle, 1993). Teacher researchers use the
sites of their own educational practice as subjects of
inquiry (Berlin, 1990; Cochran-Smith & Lytle,
1993; Martin, 1987) with the more far-reaching goal
of developing, assessing, and revising theories that
inform practice (Calkins, 1994). Teacher research
positions "the classroom teacher as 'practitionerinquirer'
rather than perpetuating the exclusive
claim of the university professor as the 'scientisttheorist'
of the educational research past"
(Burnaford & Hobson, 2001, p. 235).
A teacher is a sculptor
The child "is clay, and the teacher imposes a fixed
mold on this clay, shaping it to the specification of
the mold" (Scheffmer, 1991, p. 47). Scheffler suggests
that, "The sculptor's statue does not grow of itself
out of the rock, requiring only the artist's nurture;
the artist exercises real choice in its production, yet
his initial block of marble is not wholly receptive to
any idea he may wish to impose on it" (p. 48). This
metaphor, in Scheffler's discussion, throws into
relief the power and control of the teacher but does
not take into consideration those aspects of teaching
and learning that are not within the teacher's
control. It casts the student as something
inanimate-clay-yet something that can take
shape. The consistency of the clay, of the student,
the properties it brings to the creative process, help
shape what is created.
A teacher is an artist
The artist knows what it takes "to fashion works
whose form and structure are holistic and unified"
(Dewey, 1934, p. 6). An artist is someone who sees
the "all-overness" of their process and who knows
how, through that process, to create a new image
(Burnaford & Hobson, 2001, p. 232). Gage (1978)
writes of teaching as a "practical art" which calls for
"intuition, creativity, improvisation, and
expressiveness-a process that leaves room for
what is implied by rules, formulas, and algorithms"
(p. 15). Art embraces both sensory and intellectual
dimensions of the human mind. One teacher who
sees herself as an artist states that in her classroom
"the air is full of possibilities"; within such a
classroom, a teacher must be comfortable with
ambiguity and flexibility (Burnaford & Hobson,
2001, p. 233). Teaching, writes another teacher, "is
an art full of subtle nuance" (Rachel Allender
quoted inAllender, 2001, p. 125). Words such as
"holistic," "all-overness," "intuition," and
"possibilities" highlight the indeterminate nature of
this metaphor. An artist "disturbs, upsets,
enlightens, and he opens ways for better
understanding" (Henri, 1923, p. 15). The technique
an artist uses must be "evoked by the spirit of the
things she wish[es] to express" (p. 44). To create a
work of art, or to inspire others to create a work of
art, teachers must both be guided by their own
internal and individual visions and also "go to
kindred spirits-others who have wanted [to create
a particular] thing-and study their ways and
means, learn from their successes and failures"
(p. 55).
A teacher is a coach
Teachers as coaches share the responsibility of
making sure that students achieve excellence
with other members of the school community,
parents, and the students themselves (Ladson-
Billings, 1994, p. 23). Coaches understand,
explains Ladson-Billings, that "the goal is team
success" (p. 24). Although they operate "behind the
scenes" and "on the sidelines," coaches are always
present to "players" through their expectations
(p. 25).
A teacher is a director
Allender (2001) explains, "I think of teaching as if I
were directing a play-an improvised play in which
there are no lines for the players to read or only a
few at most.... The script is a set of notes, and at
every juncture, detailed directions on how to
proceed are given. What unfolds, in contrast, is
undetermined and can be surprising" (p. 5). In
analyzing his own teaching practice, Allender
narrates instances of role-playing and
rehearsing-opportunities he offers his students to
explore their roles, critique their own and others'
performances, and co-construct the ultimate
production of the course.
A teacher is a conductor
"We can visualize an orchestra conductor who
approaches the orchestra stand; all members of the
orchestra have their eyes fixed on the conductor"
(Ladson-Billings, 1994, p. 23). The members of the
orchestra are the students. Teachers as conductors
take responsibility for assuring that the students
achieve excellence; they lead their students toward
it. But as is often the case in performances of
orchestras, "so powerful can the personality of the
conductor be that the audience and musical critics
describe the quality of the performance in terms of
the conductor's performance, even though the
conductor did not play a single note" (Ladson-
Billings, p. 23).
A teacher is a gardener
Scheffler (1991) contends that "there is an obvious
analogy between the groping child and the growing
plant," specifically in the sense that "in both cases
the developing organism goes through phases that
are relatively independent of the efforts of gardener
or teacher" (p. 46). Scheffler argues that this
metaphor constructs the teacher's role as one of
studying and then indirectly helping the
development of the child rather than shaping him
"into some preconceived form" (Scheffler, p. 47).
Growth and development "may be helped or
hindered by [the teacher's] efforts" (p. 47). But
growth and development is the focus, and it is based
on "an inner growth principle"-the notion that
something simple grows into something complex
"through various preordained stages" (Turner,
1974, p. 31). A prospective teacher in an education
course describes how this metaphor wvorks for her.
She writes an extended story within which she
describes students as a "mixed bag of seeds" that the
teacher "has to find a way to nurture." She "wants
the best for the seeds" that she plants; to be the best
teacher she can be, she learns "how to learn from
the seedlings"; and "watching the stems, the leaves,
and the blossoms dance in the breeze, the gardener
too began to dance" (Pakola quoted in Allender,
2001, pp. 123, 117, 118, 123).
A teacher is a dentist
The teacher who crafted this metaphor to describe
her work explains that "the dentist tells you what
you have to do to have good teeth, but essentially,
you have to do it" (Efron & Joseph, 2001, p. 75).
This teacher explains that some days in her
classroom "it is as hard as pulling teeth" and that
sometimes students come in and "if they didn't
brush their teeth last night" not only can you not get
near them because they have bad breath, but "you
have this faint feeling as if they failed you in some
way, or you failed because you did not impress upon
them the importance of doing it" (Efron & Joseph,
p. 75). Perhaps because the teacher herself
formulated and explained this metaphor, one can
vividly see the way that it works within its own
terms. As Schon (1979) suggests, new and
potentially generative metaphors can be triggered
when one is immersed in an experience of a
particular phenomenon; at the same time that
one is reflecting on the phenomenon one is
experiencing it. There seems to be a measure of
humor as well in this teacher's explanation, and as
Efron and Joseph point out, this metaphor is one of
struggle, of compassion, of failure and perseverance
(p. 75). The deeply complicated sense that teacher
and student can fail one another in education
represents a recognition of one of the most
powerful aspects of education: that education is-or
should be-a reciprocal dynamic, a coconstructed
endeavor.
METAPHORS FOR TEACHING
Teaching is persuasion
Arguing for the metaphor of teaching as persuasion,
Murphy (2001) dismisses the pejorative meanings
of persuasion-"influencing," "convincing,"
"manipulating," "tempting"-to assert that "at its
simplest" persuasion can be understood "as evoking
a change in one's understanding or judgment
relative to a particular idea or premise" (p. 224).
Teaching as persuasion is premised on the notion
of scaffolded instruction: "a joint venture in which
students and teacher share responsibility for
learning and refining strategies" (Palinscar, 1986,
p. 73; see also Applebee & Langer, 1983; Woods,
Bruner, & Ross, 1976). Murphy argues that
persuasion "rejects the idea that there can be a
simple transmission of knowledge from teacher to
student, or [sic] the assumption that all students will
accept whatever information is introduced into the
learning environment fully or in part" (p. 224). I
suggest, though, that persuasion is a fundamentally
conservative metaphor of transmission and
maintenance of the status quo. As Hynd (2001)
writes, "Educators are concerned that students
use...lknowledge to gain influential positions in
society (knowledge is power) in order to contribute
to citizenship, safety, and productivity" (p. 273).
This is true of conservative educators, but liberal or
radical educators are more interested in self
actualization, challenging the status quo, and
developing thinking skills, which Hynd goes on to
acknowledge aren't so well suited to this
metaphor. Underlying the arguments presented in
this collection of articles is the implication that
students don't have the capacity, or can't be trusted,
to actually prove/discover/come to understand
things themselves (see Cook-Sather, 2002, for a
discussion of this point). Thus while it might make
very good sense to think critically about bow and
why teachers try to persuade students, to argue that
persuasion should be the guiding metaphor for
teaching seems to undermine what the authors are
arguing for as a collaboration between teacher and
students.
Teaching is improvisational dance
Heaton (2000) argues that teaching itself is
fundamentally improvisational, and she uses the
metaphor of improvisational dance to describe a
mathematics classroom full of improvisation moving
towards meaning. To discuss this metaphor she
draws on the language of "preparation,
improvisation, and contemplation" (p. 60).
Describing her experience, Heaton writes: "I found
myself in teaching in ways I had not experienced
before. For a moment I felt what it was like to
improvise, to be responsive, beyond the first few
moves, to students' understanding and the
mathematics I was trying to teach" (p. 68). This
metaphor focuses on "the interdependent
relationship among the participants" in the dance
(p. 90). It involves making different decisions at
different points about who is going to lead and who
is going to follow. Heaton opposes this metaphor to
traditional textbook math teaching, which she sees
as closer to traditional, rote dance. She discusses a
sharing of leadership and control creation through
action and response. Implicitly important is
expecting the unexpected and letting the learning
emerge through the process of collaborative
improvisation.
Grand Visions and Possible Lives
Finding the Public Good Through the Details of Classroom Life
By Mike Rose, Education Week, October 11,2206
We can all agree,” wrote a contributing editor for The Weekly Standard not long ago, “that American public schools are a joke.” This way of thinking and talking about our public schools has been with us for some time. It was what led me, in the early and mid-1990s, on a cross-country journey to observe a wide variety of public schools that had been judged by their teachers, students, and parents to be good and decent places of learning. This journey was both geographical—recording actual classrooms and communities across the United States—and philosophical, trying to gain a lived, felt sense of what public education means in a democracy. The result was a book called Possible Lives. Now, a decade after its publication, the same kind of reflective journey is more needed than ever.
In the midst of the culture wars that swirl around schools; the fractious, intractable school politics; the conservative assault on public institutions; and the testing, testing, testing—in the midst of all this, it is easy to lose sight of the broader purpose and grand vision of the common public school. For me, that grand vision came through, fresh and vibrant, in the common, everyday detail of classrooms, the words and gestures of a good teacher, the looks on the faces of students thinking their way through a problem.
We have so little of such detail in our national discussion of teaching, learning, or the very notion of public education itself. It has all become a contentious abstraction. But detail gives us the sense of a place, something that can get lost in policy discussions about our schools—or, for that matter, in so much of our national discussion about ourselves. Too often, we deal in broad brush strokes about regions, about politics and economics, about racial, linguistic, and other social characteristics. Witness the red state-blue state distinction, one that, yes, tells us something quick and consequential about averages, but misses so much about local social and political dynamics, the lived civic variability within.
The details of classroom life convey, in a specific and physical way, the intellectual work being done, day to day, across the nation—the feel and clatter of teaching and learning. I’m thinking right now of a moment from a chemistry class in Pasadena, Calif., that I observed. The students had been conducting experiments to determine the polarity of various materials. Some were washing test tubes, holding them up to the windows for the glint of sunlight, checking for a bad rinse. Some were mixing salt and water to prepare one of their polar materials. Some were cautiously filling droppers with hydrochloric acid or carbon tetrachloride. And some were stirring solutions with glass rods, squinting to see the results. There was lots of chatter and lots of questions of the teacher, who walked from student to student, asking what they were doing and why, and what they were finding out.
The students were learning about the important concept of polarity. They were also learning to be systematic and methodical. And moving through the room was the teacher, asking questions, responding, fostering a scientific cast of mind.
This sort of classroom scene is not rare. And collectively, such moments give a palpable sense of what it means to have, distributed across a nation, available by law to all, a public educational system to provide the opportunity for such intellectual development.
Without a doubt, there is much that is wrong with our schools. Citizens in a democracy must continually assess the performance of their public institutions. But the quality and language of that evaluation matter. Before we can evaluate, we need to be clear about what it is we’re evaluating, what the nature of the thing is: its variables and intricacies, its goals and purpose. We should also ask why we’re evaluating. To what end?
Neither the sweeping rhetoric of public school failure nor the continual focus on test scores helps us here. Both exclude the important, challenging work done daily in schools across the country, thereby limiting the educational vocabulary and imagery available to us. This way of talking about schools constrains the way we frame problems and blinkers our imagination.
There have been times in our history when the idea of “the public” has been invested with great agency and imagination. Such is not the case now. An entire generation has come of age amid disillusionment with public institutions and public life, disillusionment born of high-profile government scandal and institutional inefficiency, but, more so, from a skillful advocacy by conservative policymakers and pundits of the broad virtues of free markets and individual enterprise.
