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Finding/Creating New Metaphors for EducationAlison Cook-SatherThe most fundamental values of a culture will be coherent with the metaphorical structure of the most fundamental concepts in a culture. - George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, 1980, p. 22 Two metaphors that have dominated how schools are conceptualized and run since the advent of formal education in the United States are education is production and education is a cure.
Both these metaphors keep students passive, as products or patients, confined within institutions that contain and control, like factories and hospitals, and managed by teachers who are technicians or managers on the one hand or diagnosticians and therapists on the other. (I go into great detail about metaphor and the metaphors that have dominated notions and practices of schooling in Cook-Sather, A. 'Movements of Mind: The Matrix, Metaphors, and Re-Imagining Education,' Teachers College Record, 105, 6 [August 2003], 946-977; references cited in the above table are given in full in that paper). Disturbed by these and other metaphors used for teachers, schools, and education, I developed a new metaphor to capture what I see as the essential processes of education:
Definition: Translation means to bear, remove, or change from one place or condition to another; to change the form, expression, or mode of expression of, so as to interpret or make tangible, and thus to carry over from one medium or sphere into another; to change completely, to transform A student is a translator of herself. When a student engages in education, she engages in both the literal and metaphorical processes of translation. The literal and the metaphorical levels are always working together; they are inseparable. On the literal level, she must learn to recognize a new vocabulary, think in new ways, and speak and write using these new ways of thinking and these new words. There are stages as well as recursive qualities of this kind of translation. Through this level of working with language and ways of thinking, if she engages in it fully, she translates oneself in a more metaphorical sense: she makes a new version of herselfÑ she integrates the old and the new into a renewed self that has elements of both. In both the translation of language and the translation of self, she preserves something of the original or previous versions, and she renders a new version appropriate to a new context and to the relationships with herself, with others, and with the content she explores within that context. A teacher is the creator of a context in which she or he can facilitate, support, and encourage the studentsÕ translation of themselves. The school is a site of translation, one context among many in which students learn, but the one whose specific responsibility is formal education. When I conceptualize education in these terms, I emphasize its primarily language-based nature, I foreground interpretation, expression, and communication as rich, complex human processes, and I argue for ongoing transformation - ongoing interpretation and articulation not only of meaningful words but also of meaningful relationships and selves - rather than a static state or relationship, as its desired goal. Essential to this formulation of this process is the notion that the student, the person who is engaged in the formal process of education, is both the translator and the thing translated. This assertion is part of what takes the notion of translation out of the literal realm in which it is usually applied and into the realm of metaphor. Such an assertion prompts us not only to rethink what translation is but also challenges the tendency in education for teachers to try to transform learners - to make them into versions of knowers that the teachers themselves have in mind. The metaphor of translation as I use it not only argues for a new way of understanding education, it also shifts these relational dynamics. By reconceptualizing education as a process of translating languages and selves, and by shifting the locus of control for that education, for that translation, to students, we can shift these unequal power dynamics. By defining translation as I define it and by altering our notions of the participants in and the processes of education, we re-understand both translation and education. Further Reading: Here are some publications about education as translation. I welcome further dialogue about these either on this forum or by email (acooksat@haverford.edu). Cook-Sather, A. (forthcoming). Education is Translation: A Metaphor for Changing Learning and Teaching. The University of Pennsylvania Press, forthcoming. Cook-Sather, A. (2003). "Education as Translation: Students Transforming Notions of Narrative and Self." College Composition and Communication, 55, 1 (September), 91-114. Cook-Sather, A. (2001). "Between Student and Teacher: Teacher Education as Translation." Teaching Education, 12, 2, 177-190. Cook-Sather, A. (2001). "Translating Themselves: Becoming a Teacher through Text and Talk." In Christopher M. Clark (ed.) Talking Shop: Authentic Conversation and Teacher Learning. New York: Teachers College Press.
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