I hear Ken's comment about not getting carried away with metaphors, yet I think the language we use is very important. You are asking about metaphors for teaching and learning. In an aside, Jeff Nugent, Bud Deihl and I had a stimulating discussion this morning on the term "online learning". We have almost stopped using the term because much of our learning takes place within the Web 2.0 stream. It is powerful, personal, and rich with nuance. Yet faculty come in to us with preconceived notions of online learning as easy and simple. They assume that they can easily teach an online class even if they have never taken an online class. Metaphors give us an ability to draw out their expectations and open their eyes to possibilities that might be difficult to convey otherwise.

This is a fun thread! You've got me thinking as did Ken's simile and mixed metaphor-laden response. :-)

In direct response to your query as to how I use metaphor in teaching, I have to say that I wade about in them on a daily basis. In my role as a director, and a voice and text coach with actors, one of the first jobs is to assist them to actually sniff out a metaphor in a bit of text. Why? Well, as Ken rightly suggests, metaphor is a function of an understood language system. If my language system doesn't use them, then it's inappropriate to utilise I guess ... which leads me to ponder on whether all languages use metaphor and simile (no that's another thread!)

Anyhow, when working on a playscript, I'm dealing with compressed, structured language, and often what we in the trade call 'heightened language.' Think poetry, Shakespearean verse for example, and my students need to come to a visceral grip with what is 'meant' first and then how it makes the speaker 'feel' i.e., what kind of affect state does the language induce in him or her. The challenge then is to express that for the audience.

I find metaphor to be direct and effective as well as affective. It calls on the five senses and the imagination; the latter being very powerful ... but also elusive if the language system doesn't permit of understanding e.g., joining the dots. Ken wickedly mixes his metaphors above showing how understanding the intention and then deliberately breaking it, makes for a comic effect. A non-fluent, non-native English speaker would be left scratching the proverbial head!

That's enough I think for a start. Suffice it to say I use metaphor in daily conversation without even thinking about it, but if I do go to metaphor deliberately, I use it to connect to, and open up the listener's imagination ... e.g., when I am directing an actor in a rehearsal.

@Ken--as always, you've taken things even deeper and with great humor too! :-) I like what Kate says about how metaphor helps us tap into emotion, too, which in learning is something that I think we often forget. I find that when it comes to metaphors in learning I DO get a more "visceral" sense of a concept, which can have its own problems if the visceral sense is a negative feeling. This gets me to thinking about the difficulties of using metaphor for teaching and learning, because they can activate negative ideas, such as what Britt mentions in working with people to teach them about "online learning" and how that has taken on a new meaning for him that is richer and deeper.

Hey Michele,
Your post definitely got me thinking. In particular, I started thinking about using metaphors for learning when I was doing feminist organizing work. My work at that time involved leading lots of trainings on various feminist and/or reproductive rights issues. We were training college students which definitely involved a certain level of intricacy; they were young and unfortunately, had almost no adequate sex education to use as a base for the entire discussion. Plus, the national conversation around abortion and reproductive rights doesn't exactly lend itself to nuance.

For these reasons, I was using metaphors pretty constantly to try to get to our students "where they lived". Of course, as mentioned above, they had to be carefully crafted, which was part of our training. We had to make sometimes complex connections between race, socioeconomic and gender-related issues and that was where I found the metaphors to be most helpful.

The only catch that used to come up for me was whether or not I understood the metaphor based on my own life experience. Our group of organizers was pretty diverse, but what made sense to one or more of us, didn't always make sense to the others. Yet more complexities...