ABSTRACT
Teachers as chefs, teachers as gardeners, teachers as housewives. These passages-the first from a college freshman’s recollections of a favorite teacher, the second from a bank advertising campaign featuring a teacher, the third from a personal essay that appeared in a major composition journal-illustrate the rich verbal imagery people in our culture use to talk about teachers and teaching. It is not surprising that our language about teachers is so evocative and complex. After all, teachers work within a basic social institution where most Americans spend extended periods of their lives, and their function is at the center of current public debates over
Christy Friend University of South Carolina
educational reform. The teaching profession is a vital one to our culture, and our understanding of it is part of what Bruner (1990) called our “folk psychology,” the everyday, commonsense representations that structure our mental processes and our ways of understanding the world. A basic source of these representations, as W. Taylor (1998) and others have argued, is figurative and metaphoric language. Verbal imagery, Taylor said, is not “just the business of the poet or the literary critic” but a key means by which cultural knowledge is produced and preserved (p. 20).
