“Metaphor”: An apt metaphor for teaching
Image from wikihow.com: How to Peel an Orange (www.wikihow.com/Peel-an-Orange)
I’ve recently been conducting case study research with a few secondary-level English and social studies teachers. A component of my research involves lesson observations and interviews with these teachers, in which I prompt them to share their thinking about their pedagogical decisions. I’m trying to better understand their pedagogical reasoning in planning and implementing their lessons. One of these teachers is a high school English teacher; let’s call her Ms. Bhatti. Ms. Bhatti uses the concept of metaphor as an organizing big idea for teaching her high school English class. Like a good English teacher, for Ms. Bhatti, metaphor is a figure of speech, but metaphors are also a broader literary device.
Metaphor in Ms. Bhatti’s English Class
As an example, in a recent class, Ms. Bhatti and her students were reading and discussing the short story, “The Veldt,” by Ray Bradbury (Spoiler Warning: if you haven’t read the story and want to, you can pause now and read it here). “The Veldt” is a science fiction narrative, written in 1950, about a family living in a “Happylife Home” where many of the daily household tasks are performed by technology. The Happylife Home is also equipped with a nursery room, which has the capacity to simulate one’s imagination through visual, sound and smell projections, so that the children of the family can fully immerse themselves in their imaginations. “The Veldt” ends in a gruesome tragedy with both of the parents of the family devoured within the nursery by lions, conjured from the children's fantasies.
When discussing the book in class, Ms. Bhatti’s students were somewhat dismissive of the story because they found the ending unrealistic. They read the ending on a purely literal level, and were frustrated with an ending that involved lions “jumping out of the walls” to attack the parents. Ms. Bhatti had to help her students see that the author intended the ending metaphorically; the literal final scene was meant to provoke the reader to think of a different tragedy– our technology can erode and corrupt that which makes us human.
Of course, the above example scenario is common in an English class. The skill of recognizing the multiple levels of meaning within literature is a common focus in high school English. For Ms. Bhatti, however, metaphor operates on still another level within her class. Ms. Bhatti has expressed that, for her, a key purpose for teaching English is to help students make meaning of the world around them and their lived experience within it. Ms. Bhatti often sets aside time in her lessons, sometimes even whole lessons, to read and discuss current events, or to learn about important people in history. For her, this aligns with the purpose of an English class, because literature, and the study of it, is a metaphor for the human experience in the world. At this level, her understanding of metaphor is much more expansive, something more like what Lakoff and Johnson (1980), in their classic book, The Metaphors We Live By, refered to as “conceptual metaphors,” which they defined as a structure of "understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another.” For Ms. Bhatti, one purpose in the high school English classroom is to grapple with life and the world through the conflicts and characters of literature.
Ms. Bhatti’s class, and my interviews with her, left me thinking about metaphors. In fact, I went back and re-read The Metaphors We Live By, which left me pondering the question, “To what extent is the concept of ‘metaphor’ a good ‘metaphor’ for the task of teaching?” In the paragraphs that follow, I want to think through this question.
The Metaphors We Live By - Lakoff and Johnson
In their book, Lakoff and Johnson spend a lot of time dissecting human language and pointing to the preponderance of metaphor within it. They argue that we often take the metaphoric nature of language for granted. For example, they point out that we associate “more” with “up,” such as if we remarked on a hot day, “the temperature sure is rising,” or if we commented on the experience of economic inflation by saying, “grocery prices have really gone up.” These are now just common phrases, and so we miss the upward directional metaphor. These are considered “dead metaphors” because we now just take the language as literal. When we consider dead metaphors, even the etymology of many words reveals metaphors, though their origins may be in older languages. For example, I was recently writing about the etymology of the word “explain,” and I noted that it’s derived from the latin prefix “ex,” which means “out,” and the latin root “planus,” which means “level, flat or smooth.” When put together, we get the idea of “to flatten or smooth something out.” Relatedly, a woodworker might use a tool called a “plane” to smooth out a rough piece of wood. In other words, the term “explain,” by which we mean to systematically lay-out a complex concept or process, is derived from a metaphor for leveling and smoothing-out a rough physical object.
Lakoff and Johnson aren’t just interested in the metaphoric nature of language; for Lakoff and Johnson, we don’t just speak in metaphor, we understand and experience through metaphor. To help us think about how our conceptual understanding of the world has developed through metaphor, Lakoff and Johnson speak of “target domains” and “source domains.” A target domain refers to a new concept or experience that the person is trying to understand. The source domain refers to a concept or experience already understood by that person. Lakoff and Johnson posit that we cognitively make sense of new concepts or experiences through the concepts and experiences we already understand; we develop an understanding of the target domain via a source domain. For Lakoff and Johnson, conceptual metaphors are not just one way of human thinking among others; they are the very structure of human thought and understanding.
So where does this cognitive process begin? What’s at the foundation of the structure? Lakoff and Johnson make the case that it begins in our concrete human experience in the physical world. This explains many of the spatial and directional metaphors in human language. For example, since the Neolithic Revolution, humans have experienced harvesting and storing grain. We store that grain in piles in a storehouse. We experience the increase of grain as a pile that goes up; as we use the grain so that the quantity of it decreases, we see that the pile goes down. Thus we’ve come to associate “more” with “up” and “less” with “down.” We develop our understanding of abstract concepts by associating them with our concrete experiences in the physical world. We then come to understand additional abstract concepts through previously understood abstract concepts, and so, our knowledge edifice grows– we continually come to understand one kind of thing in terms of another.
Conceptual Metaphors and Piaget’s Theory of Equilibration
This aligns with how cognitive psychology explains learning. Piaget (1977), for instance, described cognitive development in terms of a process of equilibration. He posited that we organize information in the mind in knowledge structures (which he referred to as “schema”), and we process new information through either assimilation or accommodation. When the new information already aligns with our existing knowledge structures, we can assimilate this information, expanding those knowledge structures. When the new information is misaligned with our existing knowledge structures, we need to adjust those structures in order to accommodate the new information. Piaget is sometimes referred to as the father of cognitive constructivism because his theory of equilibration assumes that knowledge is “constructed” in the mind of the knower, and this process involves the knower making sense of new information in light of their already existing knowledge structures. In the language of Lakoff and Johnson, we always make sense of the target domain via a source domain.
The Pivot from Learning to Teaching: Shulman’s PCK
Up to this point, I’ve been talking about metaphors from the perspective of the cognitive structure of learners and learning. Lakoff and Johnson’s work was primarily descriptive; they sought to explain the conceptual metaphor structure of human understanding. In the paragraphs that follow, I’d like to pivot in a normative and prescriptive direction. I want to shift from the perspective of learning to that of teaching. Teaching is an act of fostering learning, so, given the conceptual metaphor structure of human understanding, how should teachers teach? To respond to this question, I want to turn to Shulman’s theory of Pedagogical Content Knowledge.
Shulman (1986, 1987) used the term Pedagogical Content Knowledge (PCK) to identify the unique knowledge domain of effective teachers. It’s a knowledge domain that develops through teaching practice, as the teacher draws on her content knowledge and on her pedagogical knowledge, in order to teach specific topics to particular students. Shulman (1987) argued that it’s a teacher’s PCK that enables him to engage in “pedagogical reasoning and action,” a key component of which Shulman called “transformation.” In this act of transformation, the teacher selects and creates the instructional strategies and representations that make the subject matter comprehensible to the students in the classroom. According to Shulman, in order to do this, the teacher must know the subject matter, including the aspects of it that will be difficult for students to understand, and the teacher must understand something of the students’ prior knowledge and pre-conceptions. In fact, subsequent researchers have identified two primary, but interrelated, components of PCK: a) a teacher’s knowledge of instructional strategies and representations and b) a teacher’s knowledge of students’ understanding (for example, see Park & Suh, 2015).
Conceptual Metaphors = Representations
I want to focus on Shulman’s term “representations” and make the claim that this aligns with Lakoff and Johnson’s term “conceptual metaphors.” A representation of something (a “re-presentation”) is a depiction of one thing as another thing. A world map or a globe is a representation of planet Earth; an x/y supply & demand graph is a representation of a market; a diagram can be used as a representation of a cell; a timeline is a representation of a sequence of historical events. Shulman argued that a key task of teachers is to transform a topic by determining the appropriate representations of that topic that will enable students to make sense of it. This is an act of transformation; teachers must actively figure out the best representations. In other words, teachers must select or create the “conceptual metaphors” that will help the students make sense of the target domain via a source domain. Recall that the source domain refers to an already understood concept or experience; when it comes to the transformation work of teachers, the source domain must be something already understood by the students.
This language of “conceptual metaphors” and “representations” may feel a little abstract, so let me employ some other terms that are familiar to teachers. When a teacher provides an example, they are representing one thing as another, usually a larger principle with a specific case that exemplifies that principle. A teacher might say, “A compound sentence is a sentence with two or more independent clauses, often joined by a coordinating conjunction.” Then the teacher might say, “Let’s look at some examples.” When a teacher provides a model or diagram of something, they are representing that thing through the model or diagram. Sometimes the best way to represent a concept is with a metaphor in the narrower sense (or a simile, or an analogy). A science teacher discussing electrical current may say, "an electrical current on a wire is like water in a hose.” The teacher would then go on to compare electrical voltage to water pressure, current to flow rate, and resistance to a kink in the hose. I think demonstrations, labs, or simulations are also types of representation, for these all involve forms of experiential learning. Recall that Lakoff and Johnson argued that our experiences in the physical world are the foundational source of our conceptual metaphors.
An Example from Teaching Geography
Let me present an example from my own classroom when I’ve taught geography. Map projection is an important geography concept. Stated simply, map projection is the process of turning a three-dimensional physical landscape into a two-dimensional plane. For example, what happens when you take the three-dimensional sphere that is planet Earth and portray it as a two-dimensional square wall map? There are different methods for doing this, but each creates some form of distortion in shape, size, or relative location of the landscape. Take the classic Mercator Projection map as an example. In order to project the globe onto a square navigational grid, the terrain gets increasingly stretched-out east-from-west as the map moves north and south from the equator. As a result, Greenland, on a Mercator Projection map, appears larger than the continent of Africa, despite having a land-area only slightly larger than Mexico. To help my students understand what’s happening with a Mercator Projection map, I have represented a globe as an orange, and map-projection as the process of peeling an orange. Let me talk you through the lesson.
I might start the lesson by saying, “map projection is like peeling an orange” (a simile). I then pull out a dozen oranges and proceed to make a single cut with a parring knife along each orange from stem-end to blossom-end, referring to these ends as the “poles” of the orange. I then distribute these oranges around the class, together with a bunch of spoons, and I tell the students to work in pairs to peel their orange so that the peel comes off as one single piece without any tearing. Of course, the students struggle to do this, but I make sure I’ve already accomplished it with my demonstration orange, so after a few minutes, I direct the students’ attention back to me where I show them my orange peel, which I am holding as a hollow sphere. I then ask them, “What’s going to happen to this orange peel if I decide I want to lay it out flat and square?” I then unfold my orange peel, lay it on a table so that I have two connected half-spheres, take a textbook, put it on top of the orange peel, and push down hard. When I lift the textbook, my orange peel is laying flat, but it’s also ripped along the edges. Of course, you’re getting the point, as are the students by now. As the teacher, I then direct student attention to a globe and I mimic the same process of “peeling the landscape” off the globe and then forcing it flat. The poles will have to stretch to accommodate that, and thus we have the distortion of the Mercator Projection world map.
This is an example of transforming the subject-matter through representation. Through simile, extended metaphor, and demonstration, I represented map projection as peeling an orange; I actively created a conceptual metaphor. I helped my students make sense of the target domain (map projection) via a source domain (peeling an orange). This brings us to the idea of “aptness” of metaphor (Tourangeau & Sternberg, 1981). An apt metaphor is one that works; it’s one that effectively uses the source domain to facilitate understanding of the target domain. An inapt metaphor is one that fails to do this.
Apt Representations of the Subject Matter
Recall that I’m using Lakoff and Johnson’s idea of “metaphor” and Shulman’s notion of “representation” synonymously. Also note that, inherent to its definition, a metaphor is never the thing itself (clearly the Earth is not an orange); it’s always a partial representation of the thing. Further recall that I’m discussing the task of the teacher in transforming a target domain through representation with the goal of making the target domain comprehensible to the students. With all of this in mind, I think there are two criteria for an apt metaphor (or an apt representation). One, the representation, though never perfect, must be sufficiently coherent that it captures the essence and meaning of the target domain; two, the representation must make use of a source domain that is already understood by the students. The representation will fail if either or both of these criteria are not met. I think my map-projection-as-orange-peeling metaphor works, first, because it sufficiently captures the essence and meaning of the target domain (surface area of the Earth ≅ the peel of the orange; map projection ≅ removing the peel and rendering it two-dimensional; Mercator projection ≅ rendering the peel flat by tearing / stretching the stem- and blossom-ends). Secondly, it works because the students already have an understanding of peeling an orange; if they don’t, they gain that understanding through the experience of my in-class demonstration.
Representations: An Often Neglected Component of Teaching
From my observation, many teachers neglect the work of transforming the subject matter through selecting or creating representations. I’m not certain of why this is the case, but I have a hunch that it often relates to one or more of three common teacher perspectives on teaching and learning. First, I think many teachers maintain – sometimes, unaware – a transmissionist understanding of knowledge. Put simply, some teachers tend to hold that it’s the teacher’s job to simply present the content. They assume that learning = student passive reception of information. If the teacher is the data transmitter and the students are data receptors, then it’s the teacher’s job just to transmit. However, presenting a target domain is not the same as representing it. To “present” something is to say “here it is as is; do as you wish with it,” while representation, as we’ve discussed it, involves selecting or creating apt conceptual metaphors. At best, a transmissionist approach to teaching produces inapt representations that fail to consider source domains understood by the students.
I think a common teacher misunderstanding of “constructivism” contributes to a second reason teachers sometimes neglect representations. Teachers embrace the principle that knowledge is constructed within the mind of the knower, but some teachers then make the mistaken leap that students must learn everything on their own. These teachers see their job as facilitators of activities, curators of resources, and initiators of inquiries, but because of the mistaken assumption that students learn things more deeply when they discover it on their own, they intentionally avoid helping students structure their learning. While opportunities for free exploration and discovery are sometimes appropriate in the classroom, it is misguided to believe that this is the meaning of “constructivism.” In addition to the influence of Piaget, constructivism also draws from the sociocultural cognitive perspectives of Vygotsky (1978) and Bruner (such as in Wood, Bruner & Ross, 1976) who argued that learning takes place within a social context where a more knowledgeable other provides conceptual scaffolding to support the learner’s knowledge construction until it can stand on its own. I would argue that the teacher’s work of selecting and creating representations of the subject matter is an example of conceptual scaffolding that supports learner knowledge construction.
Finally, my third hunch for why some teachers neglect the work of transforming the subject-matter relates to teacher fears about authority. Some teachers rightly recognize the unequal power relationship between teacher and student; they note how schools, curriculum, and teachers can serve the propaganda interests of dominant power structures in a society. In an effort to promote democratic learning spaces, while rejecting the authoritarian possibilities in the teacher-student relationship, some teachers eschew any role that could be construed as manipulating the thinking of students. These teachers might say that the idea of teachers transforming the subject-matter feels coercive, paternalistic, and authoritarian; they’d see it as undermining the free, independent, democratic, critical thinking of their students. I understand this persuasion; until I became a parent, I held it somewhat myself. However, as a parent, I came to understand the need to be authoritative, without being authoritarian (see Baumrind, 1971). Teachers, as mature adults with a certain level of knowledge, training and expertise, act disingenuously by denying or rejecting their authority in the classroom. Instead, the teacher needs to use their authoritative position (not as an authoritarian) to support students – who are still children and adolescents – as they develop socially, emotionally and cognitively. To scaffold student knowledge construction is not to coerce or manufacture consent.
An Example from Mr. Navarro
To emphasize the importance of teachers transforming the subject matter through representations, let me provide another classroom example. In addition to Ms. Bhatti, my research has involved also working with another English teacher; let’s call him Mr. Navarro. Mr. Navarro teaches middle school English Language Arts, and recently started a new unit on historical fiction. In an interview prior to the start of the first lesson, Mr. Navarro noted that his students often struggle to understand the characteristics of the genre of historical fiction. He noted an example from the previous year where the students were insistent that the Netflix series Squid Game was an example of historical fiction because the inspiration for the series came from labor strikes at the Ssangyong Motor Company in South Korea in 2009. Because this came up the year prior, Mr. Navarro decided to use Squid Game as a non-example in his lesson; he anticipated that it would help students understand historical fiction by discussing why Squid Game doesn’t fit the genre. I then observed the lesson where Mr. Navarro used this Squid Game non-example. It didn’t go as planned.
When I met with Mr. Navarro after the lesson, he noted that his plan to use Squid Game as a non-example didn’t seem to work for helping students understand historical fiction. What he realized in the midst of the lesson was that the show Squid Game was not in the minds of this years’ students. None of the students had heard about the Ssangyong Motor Company strikes as the inspiration for the series, and some of the students weren’t familiar with the series at all. However, during the lesson, a student brought up Stranger Things, another Netflix series that was in everyone’s minds. The student argued that, because it was based on 1980s conspiracies about the Montauk Air Force Station in New York, Stranger Things was an example of historical fiction. For the next class, Mr. Navarro decided to try again with a non-example to help define historical fiction in the minds of the students, this time using Stranger Things. This time was more effective; the students started to understand that, despite its historical setting, Stranger Things, with its elements of horror, fantasy and science fiction, didn’t fit the genre because historical fiction is a subset of realistic fiction.
Mr. Navarro recognized that historical fiction was a concept that his students often misunderstood. He knew that he needed to transform the concept to make it comprehensible to his students; he knew that he needed to create a representation of the target domain by using a source domain that the students already understood. Despite his best efforts, Mr. Navarro’s initial representation didn’t work because the source domain was not well understood by his students. Mr. Navarro then did what good teachers do; he reflected on the lesson, recognized that students were still confused, and regrouped with an apt representation for the next lesson. His Stranger Things representation worked because a) it conveyed the essence and the meaning of the target domain (interestingly, by providing a non-example), and b) did so through a source domain already understood by the students.
The Metaphors We (Should) Teach By
I want to conclude with a few final thoughts about the teaching task of transforming the subject matter. First, teachers need to approach their content conceptually. Representations – “conceptual metaphors” – assume a conceptual structure to knowledge construction. When teachers identify and articulate the conceptual big ideas in the content, and then employ apt representations of those big ideas in their lessons, this helps students construct the conceptual knowledge “coat hangers” (Hattie & Yates, 2013) on which to cognitively hang (i.e. assimilate) additional content information. Second, teachers need to take care with their representations to ensure that they don’t lead to misconceptions. As already noted, metaphors are always partial; the wrong metaphor can misrepresent the target domain. Flusberg (2025) refers to the idea of metaphor triangulation; sometimes the best way to represent the target domain is through more than one metaphor, each representing different important aspects of the target domain.
A third important take-away about representations is the importance of the teacher having knowledge of student understanding. The teacher needs to have a sense of student source domains in order to select and create apt representations. This is easier said than done; the teacher can’t peer into the minds of the students. By questioning and prompting, the teacher has to force students to make their thinking visible. This is the purpose of formative assessment. The teacher needs to be constantly checking for student understanding. Fourth, teachers need to build routines for some short reflection after each lesson. Without the moment for reflection, Mr. Navarro above, after the unsuccessful Squid Game representation, might have just moved on. It was in that moment of post-lesson reflection that Mr. Navarro was able to articulate why the Squid Game representation didn’t work, and grab on to the Stranger Things example instead. As a final take away, I want to note that teacher regrouping at the end of a lesson – and sometimes in the midst of a lesson – should not be viewed as a failure of the lesson. Instead, this should be understood as simply the on-going task of the teacher, always seeking to refine how to transform the subject matter to make it comprehensible to the specific students in the classroom.
As a play on Lakoff and Johnson’s classic book, I wanted to title this essay, “The Metaphors We Teach By.” Unfortunately, a quick google search revealed that I wasn’t the first to think of that title. Thus, I went with a different overall title, and modified this section’s sub-title to “The Metaphors We (Should) Teach By.” I think an important piece of the teaching craft is the teacher’s ability to transform the subject matter, representing it in ways that provide the scaffolding necessary to help students construct their own understanding.
Educators sometimes debate the nature of teaching– Is it more science or is it more art? Of course, as with many debates, the answer lies in the middle. In the case of transforming the subject matter, cognitive science supports the conceptual metaphor structure of human sense-making, but no one can deny that there’s an art to creating a good metaphor…
“And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.”
— Theseus in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act V, Scene I
References
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