Pedagogical metaphors, orientation of meaning

The art of metaphor

Metaphor is to pedagogy, what foreplay is to love. It prepares our understanding with lightness and gentleness. Rather than going straight to the lesson of experience, metaphor is a kindly detour that allows us to come into contact with the subject matter being expounded in a sensitive way.

Metaphor is the use of one form of language to speak of something else. It is a substitution of words or situations that reveal a meaning than the one supposedly stated. Metaphor is a transfer or even a transport of meaning tells us Bruno Dufour recalling St. Matthew's "metaphor of the talents" which lends to the story of the differentiated gift to servants a teaching according to the use of the gifts received and prompts us to ask ourselves questions about what we do with what we have inherited.

The best pedagogues are adept at disseminating metaphors they use devices such as role-playing, practical training or workshops, visits to an inspiring place, images or the telling of an experience to advance the purpose of their talk.

In the beginning, the metaphor is a detail, an anecdote, a little nothing from which the speaker will weave his or her point and make it more and more explicit.

Like an illusionist who diverts our gaze to a point to better guide our attention where he or she wants, the user of the metaphor leads us to where the heart of the lesson lies. I remember an admiral evoking a tiny story in the galley of a frigate to evoke and explain the entire chain of command. A didactic presentation would have been tedious but the staging of the issues, its visualization in the galley offered grips to grasp the point.

The connected sense

When Al Gore speaks of "the information superhighway" uninterrupted streams of light and the whole imaginary of internet traffic control materialize before our eyes.

Metaphors play multiple functions:

• Metaphor and analogical reasoning: you remember that metaphor of the level going up or down as to students' intelligence, culture or achievement. The "school level" appears as the liquid metaphor of the brains that are filled, incidentally, it carries with it an educational vision exclusively based on contents. Incidentally the image of the level suggests a form of education based on filling.
  
  
• Metaphor and argumentative power: metaphor is used to argue and make decisions or change behaviors. When activists wrap themselves in cellophane and slather themselves with tomato sauce in imitation meat trays, the message of their protest against our meaty, industrial way of eating is made visual. In the same way, the educational metaphor can be used to stage events. Staging a historical crime to investigate will stimulate understanding.
  
  
• Metaphor access to complexity: to perceive the world in its nuances and connections, images such as the brain can be brought forward. The brain with its links between neurons its nested organization opens to multiple meanings.
  
  The human brain metaphor is used to describe how organizations make decisions, or how they are organized. It is an analogical bridge that allows for element by element comparison of similarities in structure. In a way the metaphor acts as a mirror.
  
  
• Metaphor and generative change: "The essence of a metaphor is that it allows us to understand something (and experience it) in terms of something else."Lakoff, 1980. This is a practice used in coaching to move clients forward in solving their own problems. The questions asked tap into the resources of our imaginations to get us to move through on our own ese the function of the jug. This metaphor is useful for the learner, because if his head is already filled with ideas and beliefs, will there be room for other knowledge? Unless learning is drawing and using the liquid in an endless motion?
  
  
• Visual metaphors for moving mental representations: In pedagogy images of the tree, the boat, the village, the path are regularly offered. Each of these images evokes a world of its own, in which "learning can unfold."
  
  These images are organizers of thought and allow elements to be situated, one in relation to the other, providing a medium for links and association of patterns to memory. Teaching aids become more effective when they combine text with visual metaphors.
  
  
• Metaphor promoting symbolization: in the Abraham Moles Scale of Iconicity objects are represented from the most representational to the most abstract. Metaphor might be the last and most suggestive stage, almost an erasure of the barely representable concept, a mere wake. This discretion of representation would offer the imagination an empty field to explore to symbolize as it pleases and according to its feelings and experience.
  
  
• Therapeutic metaphor: fairy tales have a real therapeutic function, gingerbread houses to be devoured, dragons or other imaginary figures help to access an unconscious part of knowledge. Metaphors used in this sense open up fields to learners that would have been difficult to expose directly.
  
  
• Pedagogical amplifying metaphor: did your physical science teacher ever grab watermelon, melon, peach, orange and plum or any other sphere to show the distances between the planets of the solar system and their relative sizes? Here the metaphor is a medium for understanding a variety of scales of distance and size, apprehensible at a glance. It amplifies the context by making it accessible beyond long speeches.

Metaphor in the various approaches outlined is a valuable learning aid that every educator will benefit from mastering, to better approach their subject matter or present a singular experience.

Sources

Thot Cursus - 10 Visual Metaphors for Training
https://cursus.edu/10192/dix-metaphores-visuelles-pour-la-formation

Fries, M. H.., & Hay, J. (2002). On the utility of metaphors as a tool for action research: the case of guided self-training. Research and pedagogical practices in specialty languages. Cahiers de l'Apliut, 21(3), 45-65.
https://journals.openedition.org/apliut/4302

Modena, S. (2018). Analogical reasoning for terminological learning in the "Dr. Cac" educational series. Ela. Studies in Applied Linguistics, 192(4), 479-488.
https://doi.org/10.3917/ela.192.0479

ICF Quebec The Power of Metaphors
https://icfquebec.org/activite/546

Hyperpaysage - Metaphors https://hyperpaysage.be/spip/spip.php?article13

Multimedia Lab - Iconicity Scale
http://www.multimedialab.be/doc/projections/doc_a_moles_iconicite.pdf