Reflecting on metaphors and the possibilities of ‘language change’ in teaching and teacher education

Abstract

ABSTRACT The paper suggests that ‘language change’ might hold an important key to aspects of educational reform and to the betterment of teacher education. The language we identify as contributing the most to the ineffectiveness of educational reform is the educational language impregnated by psychologised metaphors, which dominate educational discourses – a language that utilises constructs (e.g. self, mind, cognition), as if those were ‘things’ located within an individual. We argue that psychologised language creates and uses metaphors for students and teachers that constitute obstacles to learning/knowing. Psychologised metaphors produce learning/teaching ‘technologies’ that bring about subsequent practices that work against the declared school goals, while pathologizing individual minds and holding them responsible for departing from assumed universal patterns of normality. The paper suggests some alternative paths by proposing a different metaphor (learning as performance) and discussing its implications for teaching and teacher education.