The Journey Metaphor’s Entailments for Framing Learning

Abstract

D framing is clearly becoming an important part of our work as writing teachers. This insight, made most notably by Linda Adler-Kassner, focuses on the use of conceptual metaphors and framing for communicating what writing instruction means to stakeholders and students outside the composition and rhetoric community. Yet Adler-Kassner argues that writing program administrators and writing instructors as a group have used frames that are all over the map, without any shared ideals or strategies, and so a more consistent use of framing is needed (5-6). Lad Tobin agrees that the pedagogical metaphors writing teachers use are often offered so haphazardly that “most are rarely integrated into the course as a whole or into the students’ own conception of and experience in composing” (446). This problem has culminated most recently in the position statement “Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing.” Created by the Council of Writing Program Administrators, the National Council of Teachers of English, and the National Writing Project—this document is designed to offer a shared set of ideals for discussing what is meant by “college readiness” in terms of writing. Though the document never explicitly states that its goal is to “frame” first-year writing, some of its authors, e.g., Adler-Kassner and Peggy O’Neill, have extensively researched and discussed framing as part of their own scholarship. Moreover, Judith Summerfield and Philip Anderson write that they applaud the “Framework’s” effort, even though they are disappointed with the result (544). For those outside the field, the document helps focus the conversation about the kind of framing consistency that writing teachers can use to discuss what it means to be prepared for first-year writing. While much of our use of conceptual metaphor remains tacit, we must pay careful attention to how shifting the use of conceptual metaphors can lead to a shift in the way that a concept is framed. As Keely R. Austin states, repeated and wide-spread metaphor use “offers the potential for change if a community chooses to strengthen a new, repeated pathway (270). When a discourse community collectively uses one set of conceptual metaphors over another, the cumulative effect reframes the concept being discussed.1 In recent years, writing teachers have shifted away from framing learning to write as collecting ideas (i.e., writing is a process of prewriting, drafting, revising, editing) to moving through space, following what Nedra Reynolds terms contemporary theories’ “fascination with ‘movement’” (“Who’s Going” 541). I would argue that this shift is occurring for two