ABSTRACT
Writing about teaching and learning is a bit like trying to ‘sing’ potatoes. Teaching and learning are experiences that we live through – any written account of these experiences can only be a shadow of the real thing. In moving from lived experience to describing it we commonly take metaphors from elsewhere to help our thinking: teacher as gardener, as musical conductor, as midwife. Teaching is teaching: do we need to compare it to something else in order to understand it? (Do surgeons understand their profession by likening it to, say, flower arranging?)
The writers Lakoff and Johnson (1980) suggest that much, if not most, of our language is metaphorical and that we make sense of abstract ideas by linking them to physical activity. Look at how we talk about our emotional states – feeling ‘up’, feeling ‘down’ – there are echoes of the literal physical positions we find ourselves in when healthy or ill (or ‘under the weather’). Teaching is a complex activity and we resort to metaphors to describe and make sense of it. Metaphors, by their nature, emphasize some aspects and play down others. Is teaching like gardening, with children small plants and flowers that the teacher has to water and nurture to help them bloom in the kindergarten (children garden)? Or is teaching similar to erecting a building that requires putting up ‘scaffolding’ to hold it up until it can support itself?
