Clashing metaphors about classroom teachers: toward a systematic typology for the language teaching...

Clashing metaphors about classroom teachers:toward a systematic typology for the language

teaching ®eld

Rebecca L. Oxforda*, Stephen Tomlinsona, Ana Barcelos b1,Cassandra Harrington c2, Roberta Z. Lavined, Amany Saleh e,

Ana Longhini faCollege of Education, 201 Carmichael Hall, University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, AL 35487, U.S.A.

bFederal University of Vic,osa, Minas Gerais, BrazilcAthens State University, Athens, AL 35611, U.S.A.

dUniversity of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742, U.S.A.eArkansas State University, State University, AR 72467, U.S.A.

fUniversity of Rio Cuarto, CoÂrdoba, Argentina

Abstract

This article explores the uses of metaphor to express various perspectives about the conceptof ``teacher''. The metaphors came from student-written and teacher-composed narratives,interviews, articles and texts by education theorists and methodologists. A variety of meta-

phors emerged to describe teachers, especially language teachers, such as Teacher as Conduit,Teacher as Nurturer and Teacher as Competitor. This article exhibits di�erent, often contra-dictory metaphors held about teachers, organizes them according to four major philosophical

viewpoints, and shows how language teaching methods relate to these metaphors. Identifyingand fully understanding these contrasting views can heighten ``perspective-consciousness'',increase tolerance and understanding, and make the language classroom a more welcoming

environment for students and teachers alike.

Metaphor is the omnipresent principle of language. We cannot get through three sen-tences of ordinary discourse without it. (Richards, 1936)

# 1998 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.

SYSTEM

System 26 (1998) 3±50

0346-251X/98/$19.00 # 1998 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved

PII: S0346-251X(97)00071-7

* Corresponding author.1,2 These are doctoral candidates at the University of Alabama, U.S.A., while serving as faculty

members at their own institutions.

1. Introduction

1.1. The focus and purpose of this article

This article concerns the metaphors that teachers, students and education expertsuse to describe teachers and teaching in classrooms, with a special emphasis onlanguage classrooms. These metaphors, some arising out of verbatim classroomstories and others gleaned from textbooks on theory or methods, can be clusteredinto four di�erent philosophical perspectives: Social Order, Cultural Transmission,Learner-Centered Growth and Social Reform. The purpose of this article is:

. to present the varied metaphors held about teachers and teaching, especially inlanguage classrooms;

. to demonstrate how these metaphors ®t into four main perspectives abouteducation;

. to show how di�erent perspectives and their associated metaphors are linkedto language teaching methodologies;

. to discuss the importance of understanding di�erent viewpoints so that we canreach a stage of greater ``perspective-consciousness''.

1.2. The nature of metaphor

Metaphor is broadly de®ned as ``any comparison that cannot be taken literally''(Bartel, 1983, p. 3). It involves employing a familiar object or event as a conceptualtool to elucidate features of a more complex subject or situation, as in the song``Love Is a Rose'' (Young, 1975). This song compares love to a rose: the beauty andsoftness of petals, the danger of thorns and the eventual death of the ¯ower oncepicked. The rose serves as an intellectual guide to the emotional labyrinth of humanlove. As the song suggests, while love is attractive, it is also dangerous ± so ``you'dbetter not pick it'' without knowing its perils.Lako� and Johnson (1980) argue that humans live by metaphors. Grounded in

subjective experience, emotion and imagination, metaphors ``provide ways of com-prehending experience; they give order to our lives . . . [and] are necessary for mak-ing sense of what goes on around us'' (pp. 185±186). Accordingly, while oftenassociated with myth or primitive reason, metaphor should be seen as an integralcomponent of scienti®c thought, providing insight and direction to even the mosttechnical or theoretical constructions. In short, metaphor is an essential mental tool,which should be harnessed as an instrument of imaginative rationality (Lako� andJohnson, 1980) ± a problem-solving device applicable to all ®elds, including lan-guage learning and teaching.

1.3. Voice, perspective-consciousness, metaphor and education

In research on education, as in other areas of the behavioral and social sciences,personal viewpoints are frequently expressed in narrative form and are understood

4 R. L. Oxford et al./System 26 (1998) 3±50

to re¯ect the voices of individuals, voices that often speak in metaphorical terms (seeBailey and Nunan, 1996, in the second language ®eld). The concept of voice istechnically de®ned as ``the set of textual signs that characterize the narrator in atext'' (Schwandt, 1997, p. 175). Hargreaves (1997) and Murray (1996) emphasizedthat listening to teachers' and students' voices is an important priority for researchand curriculum design.3 Other people might not share one's own particular per-spectives (Hanvey, cited in Miller et al., 1994). ``Perspective-consciousness'' is theawareness that the perspectives held by individuals or groups might be justi®ablydi�erent from one's own. Voices can clash. There is no epitome of the ``learnervoice'' or the ``teacher voice''.Metaphor has the power to enhance the subject's understanding of educational

problems and thus increase perspective-consciousness. Diverse instructional stylesand curriculum theories can be simpli®ed by showing, through metaphor, the rela-tionship between abstract concepts and something that is more familiar, concreteand visible. Indeed, metaphor can even reduce a whole philosophy of education to asingle comprehensible image (Greene, 1973). For our purposes, we recognize thatmetaphor can become ``an extraordinarily powerful tool through which the teachercan express more fully the meaning of what he or she does'' and explore ``what it isto be a teacher'' (Provenzo et al., 1989, p. 551), and of interest to this study, what itis to be a language teacher (Herron, 1982) or language teacher trainee (Woodward,1991).Cortazzi and Jin (1996), who found a rich range of metaphors in teachers' and

learners' discourse (such as teaching as a journey, as cooking, as plant growth andcultivation, and as searching for treasure), explained why teachers use metaphors:

. . . to verbalize what is unknown and di�cult to describe in other terms. Themetaphor serves to frame a problem by putting it into words, thus de®ning itsparameters . . . metaphors may express the meaning more concisely than prolix,non-metaphorical equivalents. At the same time, metaphors capture multiplemeanings of experience . . . metaphors have a function of organizing systematicconcepts in teachers' cultural-cognitive models of learning. (Quoted in Riley,1997, pp. 142±143)

Perhaps the most fruitful method for uncovering teaching-related metaphors hasbeen the narrative case-study approach employing personal stories. This approachwas used by Kelchtermans (1993a,b, 1996) and Kelchtermans et al. (1994) to exploreteachers' own ``subjective educational theories'' and sense of vulnerability. Flaitz etal. (1993), Katz (1996), Oxford et al. (1991) and Oxford and Green (1996) employed

3 Gilligan (1993) raised the concern that women and girls sometimes ``lose their voice'' ± that is, they

suppress their own perspectives from the fear that they might anger others, create con¯ict or risk rejec-

tion. However, new research (Harter et al., 1997) suggests that this phenomenon applies not to all females

but to a certain subset who, particularly in public arenas, feel they must demonstrate a particularly

unassertive demeanor. In the present study, we did not encounter a loss of voice among women and girls;

in fact, all participants took the opportunity to be blunt and forthright in their opinions.

R. L. Oxford et al./System 26 (1998) 3±50 5

various techniques, such as stories, letters, in-depth interviews, journals and class-room observations, to yield a rich ®eld of metaphor-laden data. Similarly, Provenzoet al. (1989) gathered numerous stories embedded with metaphor in the narratives ofEnglish language arts teachers and other instructors, as did White and Smith (1994)and Sperling (1994) in their work with English teaching candidates.4 Interestingly,unlike the other researchers, White and Smith adopted a four-part framework basedon di�erent views of language ± language as artifact or object of study, language asskill- and strategy-development, language as expression and language as social con-struct. While not able to ®t all their candidates' stories into these logical spaces(especially with subjects frustrated or anxious after ®eld-experiences), their approachis suggestive of the potential utility of a typology that underlies metaphors ofteaching.A complementary approach for exploring educational metaphor is illustrated by

Herron (1982), who studied theory-driven metaphors found in language teachingmethodologies. For instance, she described the ``brain-as-muscle metaphor'' adop-ted by the theorists of the traditional Grammar-Translation Method. Informed bythe psychology of mental faculties, these theorists compared the mind to the bodyand suggested that language teaching should be a rigorous, structure-based transla-tion exercise designed to strengthen reason while providing a knowledge of languageas an object, rather than a means of communication.5

1.4. Control, power, position, status and role in the classroom

The metaphors shown in this article re¯ect various concepts of control and power.Classroom control is the behavioral enactment of power in a formal educationalsetting. The classroom environment implies a set of power relationships, which arealmost always asymmetrical; that is, one person has more authority than the other.``The concept of power in the classroom should not be considered good or bad.

4 Others who used the narrative case-study approach in education and closely related ®elds include

Ball and Goodson (1985), Carter (1993), Clarke (1995), Goodson (1992), Huberman (1989), Nieto (1994),

Sarbin (1986), Shulman (1992) and Witherell and Noddings (1991).5 Two other approaches to educational metaphors exist: historical and linguistic. The historical

approach is exempli®ed by Beck and Murphy (1993), who analyzed the predominant metaphors of U.S.

educational leadership by decade: 1920s ± spiritual and moral values broker; 1930s ± scienti®c manager;

1940s ± democratic leader of teachers and students; 1950s ± theory- and data-guided administrator con-

cerned about e�ciency; 1960s ± bureaucratic executive; 1970s ± humanistic facilitator, encouraging self-

actualization; 1980s ± instructional leader, setting standards for accountability. The linguistic approach

focuses on language within groups rather than language in individual stories and is represented by Munby

(1986, 1987a,b), who presented a variety of linguistic-spatial metaphors such as: ``getting to that'', ``get-

ting past that'', ``getting carried away'', ``going back to the basics'', ``moving on'', ``going slowly'',

``plowing through it'', ``getting behind'', and ``getting to the point''; and by Hyman (1973), who studied

classroom language involving the manufacturing metaphor (e�ciency, promptness, frugality, foresight,

input, output, product, production, cost, pro®t, machines, factories, bureaucracy); the military metaphor

(arming the student with knowledge, battling with students, being on the ®ring line, getting the troops back

to the classroom); the gardening metaphor (planting the seed of knowledge, reaping the bene®ts of good

discipline, students sitting like vegetables); and the sports metaphor (carrying the ball in the argument,

pinch-hitting for someone, throwing in the towel, throwing the student a curve-ball on a test).


Power by itself has no value structure. The use of power, however, gives it a good[or] poor . . . image'', according to Johnson et al. (1996, p. 412). Teachers have arecognized position indicated by the job title. However, their actual status (de®ned asthe amount of esteem, admiration and approval obtained from the society or theimmediate social group) depends on how positively or negatively the students, aswell as the parents or the administrators, evaluate the teachers' behavior. Anyteacher can lose status by not behaving in a way that the group interprets asappropriate to the expected teacher role (Wright, 1987). Unexpressed expectationsoften serve as the basis for evaluating a teacher's behavior and judging the status ofthat teacher.Teachers di�er in their orientation toward two key forms of classroom control:

humanistic and custodial. In an empirical study by Woolfolk et al. (1990), thestronger the teachers' belief in their own classroom e�ectiveness, the more likelyteachers were to assert a humanistic control orientation, stressing learners' self-actualization, autonomy and intrinsic rewards. In contrast, teachers who believedthey were less e�ective expressed a custodial control orientation, in which studentscould not be trusted, students' family backgrounds could not be overcome andclassroom management depended on extrinsic rewards. Biao (1996) elucidated mis-conceptions about the concept of control in second language classrooms and indi-cated that even in learner-centered language tasks, some form of teacher controloperates. For a deeper exploration of the meaning of control, see Shapiro et al.(1996).

1.5. Framework for this study

Theoretically grounded visions of teaching should point to the goals implicit in thetransformative process of schooling; that is, a theory of human nature and the socialgood. To this end, we identify four di�erent philosophies of education (Table 1) thathave shaped educational thought through the centuries, and which, in addressingbasic issues about the nature of mind, the individual and society, cause shifts in thecurriculum. We contend that all the metaphors teachers generate to make sense oftheir own beliefs and experiences, as well as all the metaphors created by students todescribe their teachers, can be encompassed within the following four-part typology:Social Order, Cultural Transmission, Learner-Centered Growth and Social Reform.

Table 1

Four perspectives on education

Key aspects Social Order Cultural

Transmission

Learner-Centered

Growth

Social Reform

Control Teacher control Teacher control Shared teacher-and-

student control

Shared teacher-and-

student control

Focus Shaping learners

through external

reinforcement

Unidirectional

information-giving

Facilitating development

of innate potential

Encouraging multiple

viewpoints in

community of learners

Archetype Molding Gatekeeping Gardening Democratizing


Though these four viewpoints are useful for any area of education, this article ±especially the stories presented in the Results section ± will demonstrate the par-ticular relevance of the perspectives to language teaching.

1.5.1. Social OrderAll societies must attend to their social reproduction. For Plato (1995), writing in

the 4th century BC, this meant ensuring that members of a city-state worked to-gether cooperatively and sel¯essly for the good of the whole under the guidance ofwise moral leaders. This concept of an organic society e�ciently employing indi-viduals according to their abilities, in a di�erentiated and integrated system of tasks,dovetails perfectly with modern technocratic visions of a scienti®cally ordered state.Just as Plato trained learners for di�erent occupations according to their innatecharacter, so the psychologically based educators of the Progressive Era utilizedmental testing as a meritocratic instrument for sorting the raw material in the pro-duction line of schooling ± a factory system in which statistical techniques of meas-urement and standardization were combined with laws of behavior modi®cation toproduce trained workers indoctrinated with appropriate social values. This modernmechanization of mind and body reduced the individual to some malleable mediumwhich can be shaped into a socially useful product. The teacher, often viewed as atechnician, was in the process of social engineering, molding learners for the needs ofsociety.

1.5.2. Cultural TransmissionThis perspective is traditionally associated with elitist visions of high culture and

the education of an intellectual and moral aristori (aristocracy). It includes curricu-lum theories that explain individual development as a process of enculturation orinitiation into the historical practices and achievements of a given society. Theraging debates between defenders of the Western Canon and advocates of multi-culturalism demonstrate just what is at stake in this process. One group argues thatmind and virtue are formed as individuals struggle to understand the content foundin the classics of Western civilization, while the other group, questioning ultimatestandards of truth, beauty and goodness, reduces knowledge to power and claimsthat the Eurocentric curriculum denies equal voice to all groups, thereby denigratingthe worth of minority cultures and women. For both sides, rights and freedoms,whether positive or negative, turn on maintaining the integrity of distinct culturaltraditions. Thus, despite their di�erences, classicists and multiculturalists stress therole of history and see the teacher as a gatekeeper who initiates learners into thegood life made possible by culturally evolved modes of understanding, value andexpression. Which culture this should be in the modern world is the contentiousissue played out in the arguments between conservative critics such as DinishD'Souza (1995) and his liberal adversary Stanley Fish (1994).

1.5.3. Learner-Centered GrowthIn contrast to the Social Order concept, in which learners must be molded

appropriately by society, and the Cultural Transmission perspective, in which learners


become initiated into the ``correct'' canon of a certain culture, the Learner-CenteredGrowth viewpoint considers that learners are born with a rich biological endowmentthat must be actualized. Ever since liberal philosophers and theologians rejected theconcept of original sin and the necessity of imposing external control on recalcitrantindividuals, the learner has been seen as source of goodness and beauty that issomehow corrupted by an evil word. Accordingly, rather than imposing order onthe learner, child-centered theorists of the Enlightenment followed Locke (1947) andthen Rousseau (1972) in devising protective educational schemes designed to shelterthe mind from error and the heart from vice, rejecting, in particular, the impositionof traditional authority ± in the form of book learning ± on the developing learner.Individuals had to learn to think for themselves, to discover the world throughexperience and to bring out all their inborn powers and capacities. Rather thanforcing students to comply with the will of the teacher, the teacher had to tailorinstruction to the interests of learners. Like a gardener, the teacher's job was toconstruct the optimal environment in which the inner nature of the mind could growand ¯ourish. This horticultural metaphor gained scienti®c respectability when fusedwith the theory of evolution and the important 19th-century principle of biologicalrecapitulation. In the work of Hall (1902), the idea developed that the curriculumhad to be structured around the emerging interests of the learner, as thoughtgradually evolved from primitive concrete perceptions to abstract scienti®c reason(supposedly retracing the history of the human mind). More recent defenders oflearner-centered or humanistic education, such as the linguist Noam Chomsky (1971,1975), still regard the teacher as a facilitator of personal growth and a protector ofthe individual from the controlling and corrupting power of the state.

1.5.4. Social ReformStressing elements from each of these other three movements, John Dewey (1933;

see also Archambault, 1964) initiated a fourth and often poorly understood cur-ricular approach, democratic social reconstruction ± or social reform for short. ForDewey, any curriculum theory that fractures the needs of society from those of thelearner or that separates the means and the ends of schooling can o�er only a one-sided conception of education. Rather than divorcing individual and society, subjectand object, learner and curriculum, the whole process of education had to bereconceptualized around the interactive character of life, as witnessed in the processof organic adaptation. To this end, Dewey's guiding image is that of the gradualspecialization of structures in response to environmental demands.6 For Dewey,human beings were re¯ective creatures who could assess their own situation and, byworking together democratically, employ the scienti®c method (which includedimaginative metaphorical constructions tested against experience) to gradually cre-ate a better world. To gain these intellectual and social skills, learners had to engagein cooperative work within miniature democracies that recapitulated, to some

6 Dewey's metaphor, like that of Piaget, was embryology: growth and achievement of control through

assimilation and accommodation to the physical and social environment. However, neither of these

theorists viewed growth as merely following the laws of biology or physics.


degree, the formation of knowledge through the history of social occupations. Thisphilosophy of life embraced the full actualization of each person's abilities, thepromotion of culture, the communication of rich and varied experiences, theimportance of individual creativity and the use of science as non-authoritarianinstrument of joint social problem-solving.

2. Methodology

This section presents the methodology used. The study is built on the premise thatit is important to consider teachers' metaphors about themselves and their work, aswell as students' metaphors about teachers. In addition, it is crucial to draw theseindividual cases closer to the metaphorical statements in texts on educational theoryand methods, and vice versa, so that we can create a more complete picture.

2.1. Participants and data collection procedures

The texts presented in this article came from many sources and re¯ect many dif-ferent voices. Key sources were personal narratives about teachers written by stu-dents, former students and teachers (see Table 2 for meanings of codes used for thepersonal narratives), and comments by educational theorists and methodologistsabout teachers, especially in the language ®eld.

2.1.1. Personal narrativesThe majority of the personal narratives were stories about individual teachers

selected from more than 250 written or oral responses to a series of open-endedquestions, such as: ``Describe a teacher whom you especially liked'', ``Explain aproblem you had with a speci®c teacher'', ``Describe an instance in which your styleharmonized with that of a teacher'' or ``Describe a style con¯ict you had with ateacher.'' Some experienced teachers were asked, ``Explain a situation in which youand your students experienced either harmony or con¯ict.'' Note that no e�ort wasmade to elicit the use of imagery, merely to have subjects re¯ect upon the nature ofteaching ± in all cases, the use of metaphor was initiated by participants, not theresearchers. All involved in the study gave permission for their stories to be used,and were assured that their comments would remain anonymous.Many of the personal narratives regarded the learning of a second or foreign lan-

guage. Others concerned the individual's native language development ± not onlyduring courses in the language itself, but also during courses in native language lit-erature, communications or journalism. In a few instances, we included relevantstories told about experiences in elementary school, where a large portion of the dayis spent on language activities.

2.1.2. Other case-studiesIn order to illustrate the ubiquity and underlying structure of metaphorical

thought, we have also drawn selected narratives from case-studies conducted by


Table

2

Codes

forthepersonalnarratives

Sourceofthestory

(whichdata

sourceprovided

thestory)

Statusoftheperson

(statusoftheparticipant

when

thestory

wasgiven

toresearchers)

Role

ofthepersonin

thestory

(role

oftheparticipant

when

thestory'sevents

occurred)

A=

written

narrativein

Ashton-W

arner

(1963)

book

s=secondary

student

(middle

orjuniorhighschool,

highschool,gymnasium)

E=

elem

entary

schoolstudent

B=written

narrativein

Bratt(1997)new

spaper

article

c=college/university

student

S=

secondary

student

(middle

ofjuniorhighschool,

highschool,gymnasium)

F=letterswritten

bysecondlanguagestudents

totheirteachersin

Flaitzet

al.(1993)article

g=

graduate

student

C=

college/university

student

K=written

observationsaboutteacher

in

Katz

(1996)bookchapter

gt=

graduate

studentwho

isalsoanexperiencedteacher

G=

graduate

student

O=

written

narratives

provided

tothreeofthe

currentauthors

(1992±97)

t=experiencedteacher

notcurrently

enrolled

inagraduate

program

T=

experiencedteacher

O-i=

interviewsprovided

tothe®rstorfourth

author(1997)

nt=

new

teacher,student-teacher

orintern

NT=

new

teacher,student-teacher

orintern

P=

interviewsprovided

toProvenzo

etal.(1989)

pn=

post-doctoralnonteacher

TO=

teacher

observinganother

teacher

(acolleague)

S=written

narratives

inSperling(1994)journal

article

W=

written

narratives

inWhiteandSmith(1994)

journalarticle

Note:Manycombinationsofcellsare

possible.Currentelem

entary

students

werenotincluded

asparticipants

intheresearch,althoughsomeparticipants

commentedontheirpreviouselem

entary

schoolexperiences.


other researchers in the ®eld (Ashton-Warner, 1963; Bluestein, 1995; Bratt, 1997;Flaitz et al., 1993; Katz, 1996; Provenzo et al., 1989; Sperling, 1994; White andSmith, 1994).

2.1.3. Comments by educational theorists and methodologistsFinally, we have also included metaphorical statements made by educational the-

orists and methodologists in order to illuminate underlying themes in some of ourparticipants' responses. To this end, the ®rst author systematically examinedapproximately a dozen in¯uential books in the ®elds of language teaching7 and asimilar number in general education.8

2.2. Data analysis procedures

The personal narratives gathered, the case-studies from other researchers and thetexts from educational specialists contained two di�erent forms of metaphor: expli-cit and implicit. In some instances, the metaphors were explicit, as in ``sowing seedsfor future growth'' (the Teacher as Nurturer metaphor). In other instances, the textscontained implicitly embedded metaphors, such as ``the push to cover all the mate-rial in the shortest possible time'', which was taken to imply a concern for e�ciencyand therefore led to the inescapable, factory-related Teacher as Manufacturer meta-phor. Each text was analyzed according to the standard techniques for contentanalysis (Krippendorf, 1980; Miles and Huberman, 1984; Stempel, 1989). Severalresearchers read and classi®ed each work numerous times, with iterative veri®cation.The metaphors reported here could have been broken down still further. For

example, the metaphor of Teacher as Sca�older ± that is, the teacher who providesneeded help or sca�olding at the appropriate times and removes it when no longeressential ± could have been divided into multiple, smaller metaphors: Teacher asTool-Provider, Teacher as Structure-Giver, Teacher as Style-Adjuster and Teacher as

7 These books included Voices from the Language Classroom: Qualitative Research in the Second

Language Classroom (Bailey and Nunan, 1996), Principles of Language Learning and Teaching, 3rd Edi-

tion (Brown, 1994a), Teaching by Principles: An Interactive Approach to Language Pedagogy (Brown,

1994b), Second Language Learning Di�culties (Ehrman, 1996), Caring and Sharing in the Foreign Lan-

guage Classroom (Moskowitz, 1978), Methods that Work: Ideas for Literacy and Language Teachers

(Oller, 1993), Teaching Language in Context (Omaggio Hadley, 1993), Language Learning Strategies:

What Every Teacher Should Know (Oxford, 1990), Making It Happen: Interaction in the Language Class-

room (Richard-Amato, 1988), The Tapestry of Language Learning: Individuals in the Communicative

Classroom (Scarcella and Oxford, 1992), Contextualized Language Instruction: Teacher's Handbook

(Shrum and Glisan, 1994) and Conditions for Second Language Learning (Spolsky, 1988).8 These books included Teacher (Ashton-Warner, 1963), Becoming a Critically Re¯ective Teacher

(Brook®eld, 1995), Pedagogy of the Oppressed (Freire, 1970), Teaching with Style: Enhancing Learning by

Understanding Teaching and Learning Styles (Grasha, 1996), Rethinking Educational Change with Heart

and Mind (Hargreaves, 1997), Introduction to the Fundamentals of American Education (Johnson et al.,

1996), Motivation in Education: Theory, Research, and Application (Pintrich and Schunk, 1996), Invita-

tional Teaching, Learning, and Living (Purkey and Stanley, 1991), Educating the Re¯ective Practitioner

(SchoÈ n, 1987), Rousing Minds to Life: Teaching, Learning, and Schooling in the Social Context (Tharp and

Gallimore, 1989), Understanding Mentoring: Re¯ective Strategies for School-Based Practitioners

(Tomlinson, 1995) and Mind and Society (Vygotsky, 1978).


Coach. In fact, in the beginning of the data analysis, we considered adopting this``®ner'' level of metaphor for the entire project. However, we came to believe that amore general and more comprehensive level of metaphor would be more helpful toreaders, so we elected to present such a level here.After the identi®cation of the metaphors found in the texts, the material was

organized according to the four perspectives on education mentioned earlier. Again,this was an iterative procedure involving discussion among several of the authors.

3. Results

As Table 3 illustrates, combining the results of these parallel inquiries, 14 distinctmetaphors were recorded, which we classi®ed as species of the four perspectives.Comments are reported literally, with no changes made in punctuation, grammarand spelling, except in circumstances where a change was absolutely essential toensure the reader's comprehension.

3.1. Metaphors in the Social Order perspective

We start with this perspective because, from all the written and oral responses wereceived, this was the most prevalent image of schooling. In the belief that educationis primarily concerned with ensuring the well being of the society, students are seenas resources for meeting societal needs, with their own interests being identi®ed withmaking the most of their position within this communal e�ort. This stance has beenparticularly in¯uential in the modern world, since the 19th century realization thatnation states and developing industrial economies demand a compliant, faithful,skilled and knowledgeable work-force. The rise of industrial management, behav-ioral psychology and mental testing provided educational theorists at the turn of the20th century with the technological instruments for sorting out and processing lear-ners (raw material) in a scienti®cally controlled manner (through atomistic stepsmonitored by standardized measures of performance) into productive and coopera-tive citizens (social product). This leads to the frequently used educational meta-phors of the school as a factory and the Teacher as Manufacturer, shaping thestudent into the prescribed mold. As the Teacher as Manufacturer metaphor sug-gests, the distinctive characteristics of human subjects, such as creativity and intui-tion, are valued less than explicit means-end skills. Cost-e�ectiveness and time-cutting become the central concerns as the teacher is encouraged to treat students asobjects to be pressed and stamped out in assembly-line fashion (Hyman, 1973). Thecurriculum (as the word's Latin origin suggests) becomes a race-track to be coveredas fast as possible. Unlike the image of a craftsperson, a sculptor or an artist,schooling governed by the manufacturing metaphor reduces the teacher to aninstrument of an overarching bureaucratic authority, which seeks to manage everyatom of the process through standardized scienti®c practices. Central to the factorysystem, and of course the entire market economy in general, is the use of rivalry andextrinsic rewards and punishment as the essential motivators.


Table

3

Personalnarratives

from

whichmetaphors

emerged

SocialOrder

CulturalTransm

ission

Learner-C

enteredGrowth

SocialReform

Teacher

asManufacturer

(Shaw,Daniel,Lance,Clare

andanunnamed

languagestudent)

Teacher

asConduit(BillandNan)

Teacher

asNurturer

(Margaret,Allen,Reba,

Tim

,Miriam

and

severalunnamed

language

teachers)

Teacher

asAcceptor

(Reba,Beverly

andFaye)

Teacher

asCompetitor

(Maury,Larissa,Susie,

Brad

andDonna)

Teacher

asRepeater

(James,Tim

,Amanda,

Heather,David

andBirgitt

Teacher

asLover

orSpouse

(Ashton-W

arner

a,Ellen

and

oneofBluestein'srespondents)

Teacher

asLearningPartner

(Hamada,LarryandMaury)

Teacher

asHangingJudge

(Carrie,Kellie,

Scott,Herbert,

Leslie,

AnneandSonia)

Teacher

asScaffolder

(Margie,Maury,Hisashi,

Judy,Jeremy,LeA

na,Cassandra,Meredith

andoneofBluestein'srespondents)

Teacher

asDoctor

(Marilyn,Myra,Betsy,Raquel,

Dale

andanunnamed

language

student

Teacher

asEntertainer

(Ron,Hamada,Gay,Tom,Norm

,

Young,Mickey

andtw

ounnamed

languageteachers)

Teacher

asMind-and-Behavior

Controller

(Adam,Jimmy,Ilka,

Hal,Carl,Susan,Reba,Rahel

andtw

ounnamed

languageteachers)

Teacher

asDelegator(D

orothy)

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As Herron (1982) demonstrated, the Audiolingual Method of language teachingre¯ects the logic of the manufacturing process. Like an assembly-line supervisor, theAudiolingual teacher is expected to monitor students as e�ciently and e�ectively aspossible and to employ a regimen of mimicry and memorization so as to producelearners who can articulate sentences ¯awlessly. While this method worked wellwhen conducted by specially trained linguists during World War II, it has notbeen a communicative success in the ordinary language classroom (OmaggioHadley, 1993).Shaw, a high-school English student, captured something of the disenchantment

that results when qualitative experiences are forced into a quantitative mold. Histeacher:

. . . assigns 80 words of vocabulary and about 8 worksheets to be done in a 4±5day period. Then we get an outline and he brie¯y explains what we just did onthe worksheets. We then take an 80-question multiple choice test, then an essaytest. It is just too much. . . . This teacher has to understand that teaching iscommunication and [student] work. Not 95% work and 5% communication.The grades would come up if he would cut down on the work load. (OsS)

A major concern expressed by students was the perceived need to cover thematerial or the textbook in a speci®c time ± an external agenda that did not permitstudents to explore their interests or ensure their understanding of the topics coveredin class. In fact, none of the students participating in this study had anything posi-tive to say about classes in which teachers emphasized cramming material. The fol-lowing narrative by a graduate student and experienced language teacher, Daniel, istypical of the sense of frustration students felt:

The beginning of the semester started out well. The [Spanish language] teacherwas very energetic, friendly, and enthusiastic; she claimed she would only speakthe target language, promised numerous chances for students to practice dialo-gues in ``real life'' situations, and the text and corresponding video seemedinteresting, attractive, and ¯exible. But rapidly I came to recognize that herprimary obligation was to ``cover'' the required amount of material in therequired amount of time. The students simply had to keep up or drop out. . . .Pages and pages of material, including dialogues, vocabulary lists, and newgrammatical structures, were required for memorization each day, and nearlyall of this was without being practiced or heard, and out of any context. Thedialogues that were practiced in class usually consisted of about ten minutes ofreading from the text with a partner. The video was generally fast-forwarded tothe demonstration of new sounds, again out of context, which the studentssimultaneously read as they appeared and then practiced no more. The tea-cher's enthusiasm rapidly turned to ironic badgering as the students droppedfurther and further behind any sort of ``natural'' or spontaneous ability toproduce the language. It was a race to keep a handle on the basics of grammarand vocabulary so they could be identi®ed on an exam. . . . In the course of the


semester my feelings ranged from hopeful enthusiasm to disappointed frustra-tion. (OgC)

Lance, a high-school student, echoed these sentiments:

The worst problem I have had has been with the teachers who rush through thematerial. They care more about where they are in the book by the end of theyear than how much their students have learned. I understand the fact that theyare required to cover a certain amount of material but I don't think it should beat the expense of their students. I mean what is the use of covering the materialif no one learns anything? (OsS)

Clare, a college Spanish student, stated:

In general I have di�culty in my Spanish classes when the class is rush rushrush because it doesn't give [me] anytime to think through what's being taught.I need more time so that I can formulate any questions I might have. I par-ticularly had trouble in a conversation class [because of this]. (OsS)

An anonymous student in the Flaitz et al. (1993) study wrote a letter to the languageteacher that captured the ``racing'' syndrome of the Teacher as Manufacturer:

I've been in your class so many times, but have felt that you've always been insuch a great hurry. . . . You hardly give us time to answer your questions, andwhen we're just about to answer, you break in with your answer. . . . Please slowdown, Ms. Ð. Have you ever wondered how it feels when you can't understandand nobody explains? We feel so lost when you race on with your questions. . . .Our questions get piled up inside our heads, but you're there like a tornado thatjust breaks them down ± ``womp!'' (Flaitz et al., 1993, p. 24; FcC)

Because the perspective of Social Order implies the interests of the student aresecondary to those of society, the teacher has the important goal of maintainingcontrol. If the students also want some degree of control or autonomy, the situationcan lead to competition between teacher and student and can result in the metaphorof Teacher as Competitor. This metaphor was found in our study in military (war-like) and nonmilitary (conventional) forms. Maury, a graduate of a doctoral pro-gram, described an elementary school teacher in militaristic terms during aninterview:

My ®fth-grade teacher was a battleaxe. She was a little, wizened lady who wassharply critical of everything and everybody. She seemed to enjoy her power inthe classroom, especially the power to order us around and tell us exactly howto speak and act during lessons. She appeared in my memory to take pleasure inthe control she had over us. I can remember her speaking in loud, impoliteterms. We were scared of her. (O-ipnE)


Larissa, a high-school student, described her English teacher as being ``still in awar:''

He seems to be to me old fashion or still in a war. He does not make the classfun for me. . . . To get up in someone's face and scream about things that are solittle and crazy doesn't make any sense to me. To teach something up in some-one's face and scream it out is not the way to teach everyone. Me, for one, Idon't learn like that and can not. (OsS)

Susie, a master's student and experienced teacher, wrote about her bellicose Englishprofessor:

Ð [the English professor] came in and wanted us to sit, write, and share. Thenhe was very critical. He was sharp with people and angry about somethingoutside of school. When he came to class he was ready for war! (OgtC)

Like Maury's, Larissa's and Susie's remarks, some of the most revealingcomments about techniques of classroom motivation centered on instances whenthe implicit discipline of the learning situation broke down or was strained by ateacher who was viewed by students as abusing authority. Thus, rather than pro-moting a culture of learning grounded upon equal treatment and respect for learn-ers' dignity, many teachers were criticized for publicly competing with or beratingstudents ± in some cases transforming lessons into a kind of protracted classroomwarfare.Of course, teachers can also feel the violence of students, who, like a lynch mob,

reject the authority of the classroom and take the law into their own hands. AsSperling (1994) reported, for Brad, a graduate student in English education com-pleting his ®rst semester of student teaching, the classroom became a feudal battle-ground:

. . . the teacher's desks and tables and podiums and bookshelves and extrachairs . . . form a bulwark between the kids and the blackboard . . . This fortress,this one man's castle, consumes nearly half the room, and, from the safety of itstwin podium/turrets, the lord of the keep can survey his small kingdom and itsdenizens. I am in one wing of the fortress. . . . (Sperling, 1994, p. 148; SgT)

Summarizing the ensuing fracas, Sperling described how Brad brought the war toa ``ballistic resolution''. The narrative leads to ``its critical moment, comprised oftwo words, SHUT UP! The words are executed in capital letters followed by anexclamation point, linguistic bullets shot into the classroom fray'' (Sperling, 1994,p. 148; SgT).A nonmilitaristic example of Teacher as Competitor came from Maury:

I had been trying to please the professor and do excellent work. Nevertheless,the professor gave me a ``B'' on a particular paper. I had worked hard on the


paper and knew it was good, so I submitted it to a national conference. Thispaper, which the professor had criticized and downgraded to a ``B,'' won thenational ``Best Student Paper'' award at the conference. At the same con-ference, the professor won the national ``Best Faculty Paper'' award. It wasthen that I realized the professor probably saw me as a rival. (O-ipnG)

In the following narrative from the study by Sperling (1994) an English teacher,Donna, is competing against a student, Terry, for the attention of the whole class.This is a classroom mini-battle:

``Eeeeyeeuuw! Ms. Naperson, Terry's got a booger on his ®nger!'' I was per-turbed. Terry's booger was in®nitely more attractive to the class than my dis-cussions of similar escapades in Tom Sawyer. How could I compete with that?What event, if any, in the novel, could rival Terry's booger for immediate,engrossing allure? (Sperling, 1994, p. 150; ScT)

The Teacher as Hanging Judge, or tyrant, like the Teacher as Competitor, isdeeply concerned about control. However, the Teacher as Hanging Judge ± acapricious and callous authority ®gure combining ``rigid and harsh enforcement ofrules with poorly reasoned and dictatorially set standards'' (Basic BehavioralResearch Task Force, 1996, p. 624) ± has resolved this issue by taking total controland severely punishing the student for errors or unanticipated behaviors. In thepioneering days of the U.S.A., a hanging judge was one who served as judge, juryand executioner all rolled into one. In our study, this was a widely cited teacher role,exemplifying the harshest control possible. For example, Carrie, a high-schoolstudent, described teachers who ``single out people in the class and yell at themfor half the time'' (OsS). A high-school student named Kellie described herteacher's brutal and indiscriminant response to the ``infraction'' of not takingnotes:

One day I was setting [sitting] listening to him talk about the subject. I wastaking notes, but he didn't know. He came to me and started yelling at me. Ithurt my feelings so bad that I started crying. That day and the rest of that yearhe didn't look [at] nor talk to me. (OsS)

Scott described his 10th-grade English teacher as succeeding in an attempt to exertcontrol through embarrassing students:

I did not learn anything my 10th grade english. She was very rude and wasalways embarrassing you in front of the class. . . . No teacher has the right tocall any student stupid. After she called us a bunch of stupid sophomores; andthat we didn't need to be in school b/c [because] we were so stupid it just turnedme away from learning in her class. I paid absolutely no attention to her. . . .For awhile she made you feel stupid and later she made you feel mad. Thewoman has got to go. (OsS)


Another high-school student, Herbert, told of emotional and physical punishmentwrought by his teacher:

If anyone asked a question on a subject that had already been covered, a typicalresponse was something to the tune of, ``What are you, some kind of retard?Duh! We've been over this a thousand times.'' . . . Another di�culty I had withMr. Ð was his idea of discipline. In his classroom there was a punishmentsimply known as ``The Block'' [involving social humiliation and the physicalsu�ering of sitting in a very painful position for an hour or more]. (OsS)

Leslie, a graduate student, described a punitive teacher encountered in college:

She came across to our class as very negative and over critical of our work. Thisclass quickly became defensive, and at times de®ant ± uncharacteristic of thisgroup. . . . Grudges are still kept today. (OgC)

A graduate student and experienced teacher, Anne depicted a Spanish professor whoused sexist comments to ridicule her:

I had a Spanish professor in undergrad that was very loud and extroverted. Iwas the only girl in the class and he embarrassed me all the time. We couldn'tunderstand him either. One day I dropped a pencil and he said, ``You woulddrop `something else' if they didn't have elastic on them.'' (OgtC)

Even doctoral foreign language candidates remembered with fright their earlyexperiences with hateful or punitive language teachers. For instance, Sonia, a Chil-ean doctoral candidate and expert in several languages, described her college teacherof English as a foreign language:

The whole class started with a very ``scary attitude'' toward English [as a for-eign language in college in Chile]. Whenever each of us made a mistake shescreamed at us, saying, ``You are potato sacks'' and ``Go to the blackboard anddo it right now,'' ``No mistake is allowed here.'' Being myself a very talkativeperson and extroverted, I turned little by little to become shy and astonishinglyintroverted, sweating each time I had classes with her. My classmates wereamazed that I rarely expressed any word . . . That professor always wonderedhow I could be so extroverted and shy at the same time. Years after, I gave herthe answer, ``I was so afraid of you that something in my mind didn't work andgot stuck in there, becoming a blank space, unable to think.'' As a whole, theclass had to bear this particular load for ®ve years. . . . I am marked by thisexperience. (OgC)

A di�erent controlling function of the Social Order perspective was well expressedby Marilyn, an English teaching candidate, who invoked the ideal of the Teacher asDoctor and the goal of eradicating sickness to explain how the teacher must correct


student errors. Like the doctor's prescriptions, the teacher's exercises are remediesthat return students to a healthy state of language use:

Teaching is optometry. Patients come in for a routine visit, and the optometristinforms the patient of the quality of his vision after a series of tests. Under herobligation to the patient, the optometrist informs him of what the tests havediscovered and suggests methods of correction. Just as the optometrist obligatesherself to the discovery and recti®cation of the patient's vision problem, thepatients improved vision is contingent upon his accepting and doing what thedoctor prescribes. There is an unspoken contract that exists between them. Thedoctor must bring all her skill, and the patient must bring a receptiveness andtrust in order to have a successful visit. Likewise, there is a contract that existsbetween teacher and student; sometimes it's spoken, sometimes it's not. Teach-ers agree to examine students' analytical, mechanical, and grammatical visionfor ¯aws. Students must agree to the examination and to the usage of the pre-scription. (White and Smith, 1994, p. 164; WcT)

Almost without fail, those students who described the error-killing teacher werenegatively a�ected by such a teacher.While there might be somemerit in the metaphorof Teacher as Doctor, because errors can sometimes stand in the way of progress, themetaphor also suggests a vision of knowledge and learning in which the learner mustbe directed to externally determined patterns of understanding and conduct. There isno room in this metaphor for an ``interlanguage'' concept; only perfection is accept-able. For example, Myra described her stern high-school Spanish teacher this way:

The teacher was very stern, forceful and expected us all to catch on instantly.Many of us had never had Spanish in high school. She came into class on thesecond day and started having us say the name for the month of August. I satway in the back behind a much larger person thinking I would not have to sayanything. She walked right back to me and asked me to say agosto. I could nottrill the ``g'' as she expected. She made me say it over and over again, feeling mythroat; then she made me feel her throat as she said it. I was so embarrassed. Aswe left, a nice looking young man in the elevator said ``I really felt sorry for thatgirl.'' I said, ``That girl was me.'' I was petri®ed every time I had to go into thatroom again. I had to take three more quarters of Spanish, and I would takeanyone but her, even if I had to skip quarters and risk forgetting everything Ihad previously learned. (OcS)

Betsy, a master's teaching candidate, revealed similar feelings, interestingly refer-ring to a body part to depict the loss of personal identity under the mechanisticpractices of her college Spanish professor:

Because the instructor drilled students ``to the bone'' and concentrated on [oral]mistakes, heavily penalizing students for them, emotion was high. Studentswere put on the defensive. (OgC)


Raquel, a graduate student, expressed a parallel feeling about her college Englishprofessor's denial of students' worth and insistence on technical precision:

The class was called Advanced Expository Writing and included instruction forwriting di�erent types of exposition (informative, persuasive, etc.). . . . Everyword in a student's paper had to be exact, with unquestionable meaning. Anystatement with the least ambiguity would be penalized. The professor did notallow use of advanced language, metaphor, or anything that was remotelypoetic. He taught writing as a highly technical task, not an expressive form ofart. (OgC)

An anonymous learner in the Flaitz et al. (1993) investigation wrote the followingletter to a second language teacher explaining the crippling consequences of thiserror-killing approach:

I know that you are a good teacher, and you enjoy teaching; however, as one ofyour former students, let me suggest something that will make you an evenbetter teacher. . . . It seems to me that grammatical accuracy is your biggestconcern. I noticed you were always monitoring our English and encouraged usto speak it correctly. Monitoring is okay. Actually, I think it's supposed to beone of the teacher's functions. What I thought inappropriate was when youtried to correct us and made us repeat the form until we could say it correctlyeven when we were talking about what we did over the weekend. I felt intimi-dated when I had to open my mouth to talk about my vacation. When I had totalk in your presence, I had to turn each page of my grammar book in my head!(Flaitz et al., 1993, p. 24; FcC)

A master's student, Dale described the focus on details and errors shown by one ofhis professors in a college course in the English Department:

During my sophomore year, I took an American Literature course. . . . Theprofessor . . . would give ®fty-question, ®ll-in-the-blank tests. . . . Because of thenitpicking nature of the course, students were very upset and consequently didpoorly in the course. (OgC)

Several forms of strict shaping of students by teachers can be clustered into themetaphor of Teacher as Mind-and-Behavior Controller. For example, Adam dis-cussed reservations about the role of his high-school English teacher who preachedto the class:

She felt the need to explain every detail of everything. . . . She also felt the needto tell us how we should live our lives. I prefer to live the way I see ®t. She toldus we should follow the Bible, and follow perfect morals, but if doing that willmake me be like her, then leave me out. In her class I would look around andno one would be paying attention to her. (OsS)


Jimmy, a high-school student, revealed a parallel theme in his essay, ``My Teacherthe Preacher'':

I had a teacher that talked about kids that have gotten in trouble, and how theywerent [sic] any good. The problem wasn't that she felt that way. The thing thatupset me was how she constantly Preached, and my fellow classmates weregetting brainwashed. I believe that if you do something wrong then you shouldbe punished fairly and given a chance to clear your name. (OsS)

A veteran English teacher in the Provenzo et al. (1989) study described in a verypositive way her ``preaching'' based on literature. This teacher did not express thesense of preacherly domination seen above:

Half the time I think I am a preacher. I seem to ®nd myself constantly relatingliterature, even if it had been written 160 years ago, to the present day ± to whatthese kids ®nd as their major problems. (Provenzo et al., 1989, p. 553; PtT)

Similarly, another language arts teacher in the Provenzo et al. study shined a posi-tive light on the preaching role:

Even as an adult you need something to hold onto. You need an anchor. Chil-dren feel the same way. . . . You've got to be . . . the preacher, the teacher, andeverything. (Provenzo et al., 1989, p. 553; PtT)

Several of the respondents complained about the ways their teachers employedto ``play with our minds'' or ``treat us as objects''. Recognizing the suggestibility ofyouth and the e�ects of manipulation on an immature character, some teachers``played favorites'' as a means of boosting their own status. As Hal wrote, his high-school teacher did `ènjoy the company of the prettier girls and the athletes, who ofcourse got special treatment'' (OsS), a remark echoed by a peer, Carl, wholamented, ``My teacher picks favorite students to teach instead of treating us asequals'' (OsS). As Susan expressed it, the high-school teacher's ``pets made bettergrades than everyone else, whether they deserved it or not'' (OsS). Reba, cur-rently a language teacher, stated fact that her sixth-grade teacher initially treatedher and her classmate Charlie as equals. Both were the teacher's pets, but `às theyear went by, the teacher gave Charlie a brand-new typewriter, took him on trips,and made friends with his family, so I lost my place in the sun.'' (OtE) Rahel, now ahigh-school student in America, did not like her former status as ``the favouritestudent'' in her German high school, where ``you feel who the teacher likes and whonot'' and where her star billing came from her good grades, her presidency of thestudent body and the fact that ``my grandfather makes a lot of political activities.''(OsS) Comments about the use of manipulative techniques ± from cajoling tobribery (`Ìf you do so-and-so, I will reward you by giving no homework today'')(Wright, 1987) ± were legion. Several students made reference to manipulatingthe teacher through means such as ``memorizing information for the test'',


``repeating what the teacher said we should say'' and ``doing whatever it takes to getgood grades''.A more subtle kind of mind-and-behavior control comes from Suggestopedia.

This method is sometimes used in the foreign and second language ®eld. In thismethod, the teacher helps students become as relaxed and suggestible as possible, sothat they are able to imbibe information more rapidly and e�ciently. Brown (1994b)described this form of language instruction:

In applications of Suggestopedia . . . [the creator of this method] Losanov andhis followers experimented with the presentation of vocabulary, readings,dialogs, roleplays, drama, and a variety of other typical classroom activities. . . .The primary di�erence [between Suggestopedia and other teaching methods] layin a signi®cant proportion of activity carried out in soft, comfortable seats inrelaxed stages of consciousness. Students were encouraged to be as ``childlike''as possible, yielding all authority to the teacher. . . . Students thus become``suggestible.'' (p. 61)

In the suggestible, ``infantilized'' state (Omaggio Hadley, 1993, p. 117), learnersare led through a series of musical concerts in an aesthetically pleasing environment.Suggestopedia is designed to relax the learner, produce joy and easiness (Stevick,1990), speed up learning through suggestion and activate the unconscious mind. Theteacher has utmost authority and control in this situation. ``Suggestopedia . . . con-siders the authority of the teacher (and of the school, and of Suggestopedia in gen-eral) to be an integral part of the method, and not just a desirable characteristic ofthe teacher'' (Stevick, 1990, p. 238). Ilka, in a structured interview, disagreed com-pletely. At the time of the interview, she was a graduate of a doctoral foreign lan-guage education program and an experienced language teacher in Germany. Shesaw no outlet for adult forms of creative or critical thinking in the version of Sug-gestopedia employed in her school. Her students, who wanted to use their advancedcognitive skills, were discouraged from doing so and therefore could not relaxenough to become ``suggestible'':

My supervisor made me use Suggestopedia as my method for teaching Englishas a foreign language. She had dedicated her entire institute toward Suggesto-pedic principles and practices. I think that these ideas would be useful for manypeople, but these practices ± in the rigid way that I was told to use them ± drovemy adult students crazy. Most of these students had been away from formallearning for many years, although some had advanced degrees. They came frommany di�erent countries. These adults wanted to seriously analyze and under-stand what they were learning, but I was not allowed to explain adequately.Some of them felt that they were being slowed down by the materials, and I wasnot allowed to prepare individualized materials for them. They felt constantlyanxious, not relaxed or suggestible. They begged for visual aids and a greatervariety of activities. A combined methodology would have worked much better.(O-igtT)


3.1.1. Summary of the Social Order perspectiveEach of the metaphors included here includes strict control of students. The

techniques of domination vary: manufacturing the necessary kinds of students,competing with students, doctoring student errors, using intimidation or ridiculeand shaping students through preaching or manipulation. For the students in thestories, the teacher substituted control for creativity; the goal of learning was astandardized product, a prescribed set of skills, knowledge or values that ultimatelyconstrained individuals into mechanical behaviors. While control is clearly impor-tant, so is creativity.

3.2. Metaphors in the Cultural Transmission perspective

This perspective has gatekeeping as its archetype. The teacher, utmost guardian ofthe wisdom that the society deems valuable, initiates learners into this knowledge bitby bit, thus controlling entry into the inner sanctum. The teacher is overtly revered(but often secretly resented) for having access to knowledge and for being ``correct''all the time, while students are viewed as having little or nothing to o�er to the situa-tion. These were common themes throughout our inquiry. In the Cultural Transmis-sion perspective, the language teacher must exert strong control over both thecurriculum and the students. Language is regarded as an object of study, a historicaland cultural achievement that must be appreciated for its intrinsic worth ± certainlynot something to be negotiated or questioned, but a body of knowledge that must beingested. The metaphors in the Cultural Transmission perspective tend to representeducation as a one-way ¯ow of information, skills and values from the teacher asexpert to learners as empty receptacles. The key pedagogic strategy is compliance tothe external intellectual (and consequently physical) authority of the teacher:

Learners are not expected to be active verbally in the learning process, but aregenerally expected to be receivers and practicing users of teacher-given infor-mation, . . . selected and given to the learner in the particular way in which theteacher wishes the student to acquire it. (Johnson et al., 1996, p. 412)

Such schooling tends to generate a degree of social distance, and sometimes evenfear, between the teacher and students, a dissonance that can alienate those whocrave a more intimate learning environment centered around open-ended tasks. Themetaphor of Teacher as Conduit ± unidirectional information-giver ± is central to theCultural Transmission perspective.9

Bill, a graduate student and experienced teacher of English as a second language,said he was quite comfortable studying under knowledgeable instructors who exertstrong classroom control. He was happy with the Teacher as Conduit:

9 A famous metaphor related to Teacher as Conduit is that of Teacher as Bank Depositor (Freire, 1970;

also described by Richard-Amato, 1988). In this metaphor, the teacher makes deposits of knowledge into

the empty bank vault, the student's mind. None of the participants in the current study directly men-

tioned this metaphor, but it is a ``twin'' of the Teacher as Conduit.


The teacher knows the subject and knows what he or she is doing. In order tohelp myself the most and learn as much as I can, I am going to follow his or herdirections and advice with regard to how my learning takes place. (OgtG)

In contrast, a high-school student named Nan was unhappy that her languageteacher lectured all the time:

Mrs. X makes a very interesting subject extremely dull for us students. Instead ofsimply lecturing, Mrs. X should inspire and encourage class participation. (OsS)

Clearly, Bill and Nan expressed fundamentally di�erent beliefs about who createsknowledge and meaning, and how, given these epistemologies, the teacher can bestserve learners in the classroom. Understanding their own tacit assumptions on thesematters provides a ®rst step by which teachers and students can construct a moreinclusive approach to learning ± or at least appreciate their situation within theauthoritarian classroom.Because many traditional teachers believe that learning demands disciplining the

unformed mind to external structures, a process that can necessitate repetitious,uninteresting and routinized tasks, the metaphor of Teacher as Repeater is some-times invoked to characterize what, for some students, is the dull and unrewardingside of learning. Of course, not everyone views this side negatively. James, a high-school student, preferred consistency to chaos and admired teachers who main-tained an ordered learning environment with predicable activities:

I do not like teachers who never do the same method twice such as reading,then notes, then viewgraphs. I feel that if a teacher would decide which waythey like to teach then stick to it I could adapt my self to their teaching. (OsS)

James's longing for security in the classroom seemed to arise from the clash ofpedagogic cultures within the modern school, as his teachers vacillate between theCultural Transmission perspective and other approaches to education. However, themajority of the students in our study expressed the opposite feelings to James. Timspoke for many when he complained:

If the teacher bores you with the same routine, same voice, and no enthusiasm,then the student will be turned o� and will not want to learn. (OsS)

For a cynical high-school student named Amanda, rote and repetition were not eveninstructional devices, but simply mechanisms of classroom control designed to keepstudents docile, occupied and quiet for a certain period of time. Her language teacher

. . . was extremely boring. From day one the class began with her telling us toopen our books to the appropriate section. Before each chapter she gave us alist of vocabulary words and a study guide. Every day she would attempt to goover the chapter. For a whole period she talked in a monotone and basically


read the chapter. . . . She would give us our ``busy work'' and assign test datesand ``discuss'' the chapter. I really do not think you could call what she wasdoing actual teaching. (OsS)

Heather, an American high-school student, concurred:

The same schedule day after day, week after week for an entire nine monthsmakes the learning process stale and boring to say the least. For example, alecture every day and perhaps a vocabulary test on exactly the same day everyweek tends to breed disinterest among the students. One clue a teacher shouldnotice is if more than one half of a class is in a deep coma, maybe it's time tolook at her style of teaching. (OsS)

Yet the opposite expectations are sometimes found in other cultures. In manyAsian countries, but also in some European contexts, teaching has a stronglyuniform national character based upon the performance of objective tasks. TheGrammar-Translation Method, which involves ¯exing the ``brain muscle'' and viewsthe language as a cultural achievement to be studied as an object rather than as acommunication tool (Omaggio Hadley, 1993), is still widely used in certain culturesaround the world. Its emphasis on translation and its lack of concern for oral lan-guage use, except in tightly teacher-controlled exercises, are well known. At the timeof the study, David was a graduate student and teacher of English as a foreign lan-guage. He explained that in his classroom in China the students:

. . . sat in rows facing the blackboard and the teacher, who lectured on the text.Any production . . . was in choral reading or in closely controlled, teacher±student interaction. Thus the approach was text- and teacher-centered, and theperceptual channels were strongly visual (text and blackboard), with mostauditory input closely tied to the written. Emphasis was on analytic study. . . .When confronted with kinesthetic and global styles of teaching [such as myinitial use of role-play or pair work], my students therefore reacted with con-fusion and occasional hostility, perhaps identifying these activities as ``play,''not ``real study.'' . . . In teacher±student interaction as well as student±studentinteraction, it was di�cult to elicit more than minimal oral responses. Re-sponses to questions about a text tended to consist of relevant passages quotedfrom the text, seldom even paraphrased to ®t the question. (OgtT)

If some students felt out of step with David's attempts at non-traditionalpedagogy, others, like Birgitt (an exchange graduate student from Germany pre-paring to become a language teacher), ¯ourished in the open classroom and wereuncomfortable with traditional-style repetition and regimentation. Back home, sheexplained:

. . . the lesson always followed a planned sequence, in which the teacher was thecentral person. Blackboard and books were the media in every day's English


class, and with the introduction of a new text the tape recorder was added toplay the text from the tape to the class. Learning English was no fun for me.There was no freedom for the learner's thoughts in the framework of myschool's teaching strategy. We never played games. We never did group activ-ities because the teachers were afraid of losing control over the class. . . . Allthose points characterize my English classes within the ®rst ®ve years of thestudy of this language. (OgS)

3.2.1. Summary of the Cultural Transmission perspectiveIn all of these cases, whether students respected the authority of the teacher or

rebelled in favor of their own beliefs ± whether, that is, they acquiesced to theregimen of pedagogic methods designed to inculcate external structures or deman-ded greater license to construct their own imaginative understandings ± essentialquestions were raised about human nature and the social purpose of knowledge.Directing teachers and students to these questions, explaining the implicit assump-tions in their metaphoric constructions, helps all involved to arrive at a greatercommand of the educational situation. Teachers who treat language as an end initself must recognize the epistemological implications of their position and recognizethat many students, while appreciating cultural achievements, desire knowledge forother reasons ± to create new meanings and serve new purposes. Likewise, thememorization, recitation and translation that are the mainstay of some traditionallanguage teaching methods tend to re¯ect the language as an object of study ratherthan a means of communication. What the Teacher as Conduit and Teacher asRepeater metaphors can do is open serious discussion between students and teachersabout the means and ends of learning.

3.3. Metaphors in the Learner-Centered Growth perspective

This perspective contains the teacher-role metaphors of Teacher as Nurturer,Lover or Spouse, Sca�older, Entertainer and Delegator. In each case, the underlyingtheme is that the teacher facilitates the full and harmonious development of thelearner's inner powers. Following Enlightenment philosophers such as Locke andRousseau, this orientation holds that individuals are born with the capacity to con-struct their own understanding of the world, with vice and error being the result ofenculturation in a corrupt society (Darling, 1994). By fostering the right conditionsto promote these inner potentialities, in accordance with the developmental needs ofthe student, the teacher follows the logic of nature, rather than, as in the previoustwo perspectives, the structure of knowledge in the curriculum. In the Learner-Centered Growth perspective, student interests replace discipline as the central focusof schooling.An important metaphor in the Learner-Centered Growth perspective is Teacher as

Nurturer. One aspect of this metaphor shows the teacher as a gardener, nurturingstudents as though they were seedlings or plants. In the study of English teachingcandidates by White and Smith (1994), Margaret saw herself as a gardener, allowingstudents to grow at di�erent paces and express themselves freely:


As a gardener, I would not always be right on top of the ¯owers; instead Iwould check on them daily and monitor their growth; however at night I'd goback inside giving them room to develop for themselves. I should provide soil,fertilizer, and water in the form of well-planted (and hopefully interesting) les-sons. In addition, I would take into account the in¯uence of outside factors,such as rain or draught, or in the case of the classroom family life or peerpressure. Furthermore, I would remember that each ¯ower grows at its ownpace, some need more nurturing than others ± picking one ¯ower over another[because] of its beauty will only cause its premature wilting anyway. Finally, Iwill try to get rid of or at least deal with the weeds such as racism, sexism, andwhatever issues are harmful. (White and Smith, 1994, p. 167; WcT)

An English language arts teacher in the Provenzo et al. (1989) study linkedhis belief in the learner's positive inner character to his belief in the goodness ofnature:

I think this is my greatest satisfaction ± seeing something grow. I'm also intoplants. I love to see plants grow. I love to see people grow. That's just mynature, to see things grow. . . . I like to see things grow. . . . I get a high, and it'sthe same with seeing a student learn new vocabulary. ``I didn't know thatword.'' Then they start using it. . . . That's what makes me stay in the profes-sion. I love to see the growth. (Provenzo et al., 1989, pp. 553, 560; PtT)

Stevick (1980) suggested that the gardening metaphor for language teaching``brings out the lapse of time and season between planting and reaping, and remindsus that the one who cultivates the plants, or who reaps the harvest, may not be thesame one who planted the seed'' (p. 109). Even Vygotsky (1978), known for hissymbolic interactionist perspective, in discussing the Zone of Proximal Development(area of potential growth with optimal help from the teacher), also employed a gar-dening image:

The Zone of Proximal Development de®nes those functions that have not yetmatured, but are in the process of maturation; functions that will maturetomorrow, but are currently in an embryonic state. These functions could betermed the buds or ¯owers of development rather than the fruits of develop-ment. (Vygotsky, 1978, p. 86, emphasis in the original)

Similarly, Brown (1994b) described the ecology of language teaching and learning:

The rainclouds of input stimulate seeds of predisposition (innate, geneticallytransmitted processes). But the potency of that input is dependent on theappropriate styles and strategies that a person puts into action (here repre-sented as soil). Upon the germination of language abilities (notice not all theseeds of predisposition are e�ectively activated), networks of competence(which, like underground roots, cannot be observed from above the ground)


build and grow stronger as the organism actively engages in comprehension andproduction of language. The resulting root system (inferred competence) iswhat we commonly call intake. . . . The fruit of our performance (or output) isof course conditioned by the climate of innumerable contextual variables. Atany point the horticulturist (teacher) can irrigate to create better input, applyfertilizers for richer soil, encourage the use of e�ective strategies and a�ectiveenhancers and, in the greenhouses of our classrooms, control the contextualclimate for optimal growth! (p. 295)

Ever since Pestalozzi, the notion of the teacher as a care-giver has been a centralfeature of learner-centered education (Darling, 1994). The image of a caring cultureof love in which learners can naturally express their interests is brought out byMoskowitz (1978) in the book Caring and Sharing in the Foreign Language Class-room and is explained by Scarcella and Oxford (1992):

Teachers are, above all, caring. The act of caring has certain distinguishingfeatures. . . . Caring actions grow out of a concern for ``the welfare, protection,or enhancement of the cared for'' . . . as well as for oneself. . . . Caring for stu-dents involves stepping out of one's personal frame of reference and consideringthe students' needs and expectations. It begins with an attitude of openness andreceptivity. Teachers are aware of who their students are, what their strengthsand weaknesses as learners are, and what is conducive to their language devel-opment. Teachers know how to respond to student needs and are aware of theirown teaching abilities. Caring also includes some kind of action on behalf of thestudents. These actions include assuming instructional responsibility and actingresponsively. . . . Teachers contribute to the development of nurturing class-room communities. These communities are essential because they foster caring,growth-inducing relationships that enhance the quality of lives. These commu-nities develop when students and teachers meet together in the pursuit of com-mon causes. In such communities, students and teachers experience a sense ofmembership, in¯uence one another, have personal needs ful®lled, and share asatisfying relationship with those around them. (p. 4)

Citing a variety of experts, Beck (1994) portrayed caring or nurturance in theeducational setting as `ìnterdependence'', `èngrossment'', ``connectivity'', and an`èthic of care'' (p. 10). Caring involves commitment. Mayero� (1971, quoted byBeck, 1994, p. 10) termed this commitment ``devotion'' and described it as:

. . . shown by . . . being ``there'' for the other in a way that is the converse ofholding back and ambivalence. Viewed over an extended period, it is shown by. . . consistency, which expresses itself in persistence under unfavorable condi-tions and . . . in willingness to overcome di�culties. (Mayero�, p. 6)

The role of Teacher as Nurturer is apparent in the interview statement made byAllen about his Latin teacher:


I had a very patient, caring instructor who taught step-by-step and helped meextensively. I wanted personal attention, and he gave it in abundance. He was aJesuit priest from Mexico who had taught for 30 years. He could be very strict,so some students thought he was an asshole, but I didn't. He called on us inclass and wanted us to have our homework done on time. He guided me verywell, told lots of stories of the old country, was very nostalgic, and showedtremendous patience, following the pace of every student. He made sure Iunderstood everything. (O-igS)

Nurturance, love and energy are intimately related, as suggested by a language artsteacher in the research of Provenzo et al. (1989), indicating that the caring teacher isvitally concerned with students' emotional development as well as their intellectualgrowth. This teacher described a loving colleague in the following fashion,introducing still another metaphor:

She's like a bottle of champagne, you shake it up and it's all over the place. . . .When she teaches she puts out more energy in that hour than I could in a week ora day. It's just pure love ± energy absolute. (Provenzo et al., 1989, p. 554; PtOT)

Reba, a language teacher, experienced the caring of her ®rst-grade teacher:

I had polio while in kindergarten in California. My father was transferred toBrooklyn Navy Yard in New York, so the family moved. I was shipped, totallyparalyzed, by train to New York. By that time I was supposed to be in the ®rstgrade. Even with regular physical therapy, I could not walk without fallingdown. I could not climb the steps to Public School 104 in Brooklyn. I had dif-®culty breathing, and I got colds all the time. I ®nally started going to schoolone day a week. Miss O'Brien, the ®rst-grade teacher, was new, young, andcaring. She ensured that the other students in the class did not treat me like afreak and gave me lessons to do at home so I could keep up with the class. Shebecame my second-grade teacher, too. When my family moved again, this timeto Florida at the close of the second grade, Miss O'Brien asked the students inthe class to write me personal cards and letters as part of their language artsassignments. For two decades I kept these treasures safely hidden in a shoe boxas a remembrance of the kindness of the students in the class ± and of thewonderful teacher who taught them to be caring instead of cruel. (OtE)

Caring teachers attempt to make students feel welcome, competent and secure,and bring out the best in students, assuming that each learner has a rich innerpotential. Ashton-Warner's images of the teacher as the loving channeler of thestudents' personal creativity and as the supportive bridge between two cultures aregood illustrations of this point (Ashton-Warner, 1963).A specialized form of nurturance is re¯ected in counseling behaviors, which

include showing compassion and listening empathically to troubled students. ForTim, a high-school student:


The teacher should not be limited to the subject of teaching. He or she needs tobe a friend, a helper, an advice giver, a moral supporter. (OsS)

The school, in addition to its cognitive functions, is expected to serve as a site forthe development of the whole person (Oxford, 1990; Spolsky, 1988); and sometimesthis implies the need to counsel students who are experiencing emotional di�culties.Scarcella and Oxford (1992) described counseling behaviors of language teachers:

Teachers know when to serve as counselors and friends. They provide emo-tional support just when it is required and help learners feel secure andcon®dent about second language learning. They recognize psychologicalproblems that may hinder their students' progress in acquiring [the second lan-guage] and help students overcome these di�culties. (p. 5)

Brown (1994b) explained the function of the teacher in the Counseling±LearningApproach ``as a true counselor, to center his or her attention on the clients (thestudents) and their needs'' (p. 59).

In his ``Counseling±Learning'' model of education, Charles Curran wasinspired by Carl Rogers' view of education in which learners in a classroom areregarded as a ``group'' rather than a ``class'' ± a group in need of certaintherapy and counseling. . . . In order for any learning to take place, . . . what is®rst needed is for the members to interact in an interpersonal relationship inwhich students and teacher join together to facilitate learning in a context ofvaluing and prizing each individual in the group. . . . The anxiety caused by theeducational context is lessened by means of the supportive community. (Brown,1994b, p. 59)

According to Stevick (1980), many of whose students appreciated the quiet assis-tance of the counselor,

The whole CL [Counseling Learning] system is built on the assumption thatwhen people feel secure, they will not just curl up and fall asleep in their secu-rity, but that they will push out from it ± ``burst the cocoon.'' (p. 111)

Counseling±Learning is the foundation for Community Language Learning(CLL). In CLL, the counselor or knower provides feedback and assistance to eachlearner. As stated by Omaggio Hadley (1993),

The ®rst principle of CLL is that the teacher serves as the ``knower/counselor''whose role is essentially passive. He or she is there to provide the languagenecessary for students to express themselves freely and to say whatever it is theywant to say. The class is comprised of six to twelve learners seated in a closecircle, with one or more teachers who stand outside the circle, ready to help. . . .(p. 112)


The counseling aspect of the Teacher as Nurturer role is not always accepted bystudents. Miriam, a high-school student, actively disliked this aspect, feeling it wasnot appropriate in the classroom:

She [the teacher] was easily overrun by students' opinions and feelings. I feelthat she was more concerned with playing counselor than teacher. (OsS)

In addition to the metaphor of Teacher as Nurturer, the Learner-Centered Growthperspective includes the metaphor of Teacher as Lover or Spouse. The idea of``spousal'' relationships between teacher and student emerged several times. Asstated by one of the respondents in a study of excellent teachers by Bluestein (1995),``Teaching is a process of seduction: the teacher seduces the pupils toward himself orherself, and then redirects the seduced attention toward the subject matter'' (p. 29).For Ashton-Warner (1963), love-making is part of the ``grand espousal'' that occursin the classroom, particularly through language:

When I teach people I marry them. I found this out last year . . . To do what Iwanted them to do they [the children] had need to be like me. More than that.They had to be part of me. . . . I found that for good performance we had to beone thing. One organ. And physically they had to be near to each other and tome. There is quietly occurring in my infant room a grand espousal. To bringthem to do what I want them to do they come near me, I draw them near me, inbody and in spirit. They don't know it but I do. They become part of me, like alover.

The approach, little di�erent. The askance observation ®rst, the acceptancenext, then the gradual or quick coming, until in the complete procuration, thereglows the harmony, the peace. And what is the birth? . . . From the infant roomit is work. A long, perpetuating, never-ending, transmuting birth, beginning itslabour every morning and a rest between pains every evening.

. . . All the rules of love-making apply to these spiritual and intellectualfusions. There must be only two, for instance. As soon as another allegiancepushes in, the ®rst union breaks apart. Love interferes with ®delities.

Integration. That fatal, vital word continues to press upward before the innereye. Married to life about you. However small or however big the social ho-rizon. . . . I'm glad I know this at last, that to teach I need ®rst to espouse. . . . Iremember AndreÂ Gide: `` . . . I live only through others ± by procuration, so tospeak, and by espousals; and I never feel myself living so intensely as when Iescape from myself to become no matter who.'' . . . As for Buber, the German,he speaks of teaching as the ``pedagogical intercourse.'' These men have theirdi�erent characteristics of expression: but to me the core of thought is the same:I teach through espousal. (Ashton-Warner, 1963, pp. 209±213; AtT)

Sexual love is a metaphorical part of Curran's concept of instruction, de-scribed earlier in the discussion of Counseling±Learning. ``Curran often spokeof his approach to education as an `insemination model.' He made much use of


metaphors from human reproduction . . . in which living knowledge is passedbetween persons who are intimately bound to one another in mutual `love'''(Stevick, 1980, p. 109).Ellen, an undergraduate English education major preparing to do her student

teaching, used the metaphor of a give-and-take marriage, in which there is plenty ofsharing on both sides:

In marriage, each partner tries to maintain an equilibrium. I would like to strikea balance between my students and me. I would like to have a give and takeprocess rather than my constantly feeding them information, or their dominat-ing the classroom to the point where I have no control over them. The sameholds true for marriage. . . . Another reason I chose marriage for my metaphoris that there is familiarity and comfortable feelings associated with it. I do notwant to appear unapproachable to my students. I want them to be comfortableenough with me that if they are having trouble with anything they will come tome. Finally, in marriage there is an implied obligation and commitment to oneanother. I feel I owe my students my best e�ort and I expect that feeling to bereciprocal. (White and Smith, 1994, p. 167; WcT)

Another metaphor found in the Learner-Centered Growth perspective is Teacheras Sca�older. This metaphor suggests that as each learner develops, the teacherprovides sca�olding (individually tailored tools, assistance, coaching and structure)until the learner no longer needs that particular form of assistance. The concept ofsca�olding comes from the building construction trade. A sca�old is a temporarilyerected structure used to support a building that is under construction. The scaf-folding is gradually removed bit by bit, as the building itself emerges and growsstronger and more stable.The remarks of Bruner (1983) on ®rst language development are relevant to

second language acquisition: ``[The teacher] provides a sca�old to assure that the[learner's] ineptitudes can be rescued or recti®ed by appropriate intervention,and then removes the sca�old part by part as the reciprocal structure can standon its own'' (p. 60). Vygotsky's concept of assistance (Vygotsky, 1956, 1978),described in detail by Scarcella and Oxford (1992) in the language teaching ®eld,is similar to the idea of sca�olding. Followers of Vygotsky call for a newde®nition of teaching as ``assisted performance'' (Tharp and Gallimore, 1988,p. 12).An important aspect of sca�olding is the provision of learning strategies or tools

that students can use on their own (Oxford, 1990). Here is an example from Margie,discussing her college Spanish classes:

I have learned very well from the maps, slides, and pictures which the professorgave us to learn. . . . When I took the conversation classes (311, 312), I foundthe teacher's use of movies helped me to follow and focus more on the lan-guage. Ms.Ð had her class (311) keep a little vocabulary notebook which wasthe biggest help for me to grasp more of the language. (OcC)


Maury described his college journalism professor as a provider of precisely the rightkind of assistance:

My professor gave me the speci®c strategies and tools to write news articles.One of these was the ``inverted pyramid'' format, with who, what, when, where,why, and how coming ®rst and with the less important details coming later.These tools were very formulaic, but I needed them, and the teacher providedthem. (O-ipnC)

An interesting type of tool or sca�olding might be the ``comprehensible input''provided by the language teacher as a key part of the Natural Approach, theTapestry Approach, and many other versions of the general CommunicativeApproach (Omaggio Hadley, 1993; Scarcella and Oxford, 1992). The languageteacher must o�er language input that is at least to some degree comprehensible tothe learner but at the same time a little above the learner's current level of pro®-ciency. In this way, the learner is challenged to push beyond the present level but isnot totally overwhelmed. The input is authentic, but its di�culty gradient graduallychanges as the learner proceeds to higher levels of competence.Another kind of sca�olding involves shifting the teacher's instructional style when

students need something they are not currently receiving. Hisashi, an Englishteacher in Japan, explained how he had to provide more e�ective sca�olding whenthere was a con¯ict between his teaching mode and his students' learning style:

When I was an English teacher at a high school in Japan, I happened to have areading course which included relatively fast reading material. My attitudetoward that material was to make the students follow the plot and enjoy thestory, not to make them focus on grammar or translate it in a word-to-wordmanner. . . . But some of the students, who were supposed to have enoughknowledge both of grammar and vocabulary for the material, claimed that theyneeded more detailed explanation of the structure and the meanings of thewords. Though I explained my philosophy to them, it didn't work well. Con-sequently, I had to change my style. (OgtT)

A di�erent angle on sca�olding comes from the world of sports: coaching. Thecoach reminds, encourages and prods the learner to perform well, that is, to ``win''at the game of learning or at least play the best game possible. Sports metaphors arecommon in education (Tomlinson, 1995; Wiist, 1997). Bartel (1983) noted that thesports term coach ®rst referred to a vehicle to help someone move ahead, and then itbecame related to the idea of a tutor or teacher, who provides coaching to students.Judy, a high-school English teacher, described in an interview her use of the coach-ing role in a dangerous school environment:

It was a high school of around 2,000 and I knew that they were socio-economically deprived. But the one thing they had there that they could reallybe proud of was their football program, and many of the boys played on the


team. So that was what gave me the idea. So before school started, I went to thesports store and I bought a Bruins cap ± baseball hat and a whistle, a coach'swhistle. . . . I put on my real dramatic act and I said, ``Now I want you tohuddle up.'' And they didn't know what in the world. And I said, ``No, I meanit. Huddle up. I want your desks real close together cause this is a team andwe've got to huddle up. We've got some things to talk about.'' A few sort ofgingerly pushed their desks together, and it took me a while to get them tobelieve I really meant for them to huddle up. Anyway, I got them all in a hud-dle, and everybody's desks were touching each other, and that's when I intro-duced myself. I told them that my name was Coach Ð, and I was going to betheir English Coach. And they thought, ``God, this woman is crazy.'' . . . And Itold them that I thought we needed to be a team in here, and I explained whatteamwork was and how I was really going to be their coach and I was going toget them through eleventh-grade English. And I told them at the end, ``Now ifyou really want to be on my team, I expect you to call me Coach. . . . '' Most ofthem called me Coach for the whole year. . . . It really broke the ice in this reallydi�cult place ± very violent, very mistrustful of authority . . . I think that it gottheir attention and [pulled] them nearer to me. . . . It made those kids feel that Iwas on their side because we were a team. (O-itT)

A respondent in Bluestein's study of excellent teachers (Bluestein, 1995) wrote abouta creative-writing professor's coaching-style advice:

Fred said, ``You're out there on your own, but if you will apprentice yourself toyourself for about a decade and write for at least an hour every day, and if youcan learn that writing is rewriting, and if you can learn that it is an undertakingmuch like a job as opposed to an inspiration, you might become a writer. . . .''He had the unique ability to make me feel as if I truly had the ability to besuccessful and, at the same time, he made it clear that he would not pull anypunches with me. . . . He told me once that I was the most talented young per-son he'd ever seen. (p. 55)

The Teacher as Sca�older provides structure when needed and in the rightamounts. Such a teacher organizes the materials and activities systematically forstudents so that they can develop essential sets of skills and competencies. Jeremy, ahigh-school student, described an organized teacher who systematically used multi-ple instructional modalities, such as visual, auditory and hands-on:

I can learn by listening, watching, and actually doing the work. So I guess Iwill talk about the teacher who could make me understand things best. . . . Hedidn't treat his students like children, nor did he treat us like adults. He taughtus as young teenagers. He would come down to our level and explain it as wewould understand it. This teacher also wrote on the board quite frequently.This helped as the visual aspect of his teaching. The writing on the board letus stay up with his lectures and not [be] left in the dust like I was with some of


the other fast-talking teachers when I was trying to take notes. His auditoryteaching was how I already said. He talked in our language and on our level,in a way that we could understand. He didn't confuse us with big four-syllabled words or mile-long sentences. He taught us with somewhat simplesentences and short, concise words we could understand. We also had hands-onlearning experiences in his class. We did di�erent projects as groups and as awhole. I think everybody, especially myself, learned alot. . . . We also learnedalot about each other. I think he was the best teacher I ever had. . . . His classmade a di�erence in my learning because I learned how to learn in so manydi�erent ways. (OsS)

LeAna, an undergraduate student, praised her Spanish language professor's sys-tematic structuring of the situation to provide multiple routes to learning and to payattention to di�erent learning style preferences. These were good illustrations of therole of Teacher as Sca�older:

I'm a transfer student and had Dr.Ð for 301 and now again for 302. I think shetries to do a little of everything ± written homework, reading Spanish stories inclass and discussing them, speaking Spanish aloud, discussing analytical andcontroversial (emotional) topics, and we write out answers to questions on theboard. I personally feel this is the best and most well-rounded way of teaching aclass because it touches all parts of the senses (except smell and taste) whilemaking us use both sides of the brain. . . . In 302, Dr.Ð is making us think andre¯ect even more. (OcC)

Cassandra, a doctoral candidate in English education and experienced teacher,expressed great comfort with an English professor who gave her extensive amountsof structured detail ± the type of sca�olding she needed:

I was teamed with an analytic professor who handed out a seven-page syllabus.He left no stone unturned. I was at home. (OgtG)

Meredith, an English teaching candidate in the study by White and Smith (1994),portrayed her role as giving students basic structural guidance, which comes fromthe Teacher as Sca�older role:

I take my place as choral director-teacher and the chorus members are the stu-dents. We begin by warming up, as every chorus must. We start easy and withthe basics: Do Re Mi Re Do. Just three steps up and right back down. Then webuild on what we have solidly rehearsed, and continue up: Do Re Mi Fa Sol FaMi Re Do.

Now comes the tricky part. In every voice there is a natural break, a placewhere a very conscious e�ort must be made to reach the next note. The choralmember must be very secure with the note below to make this di�cult leap. Thepoint of the metaphor seemed to match up so perfectly, as I compared it to the


jump a student must make to the analytical and evaluative steps of learning.(White and Smith, 1994, pp. 165±166; WgT)

Thus far, the Learner-Centered Growth perspective has shed light on severalmetaphors: Teacher as Nurturer, Lover or Spouse and Sca�older. Another importantmetaphor within this perspective is Teacher as Entertainer. We included this withinthe Learner-Centered Growth perspective because many vibrant language teachersadopt this role as a means of helping students bring forth their innate potential forlinguistic expressiveness. In numerous language classrooms, students do not want to``perform'' (express themselves in the language) unless they ®rst see the teacher per-forming. The Teacher as Entertainer often helps break down a�ective barriers thatprevent communication on the part of the students. The entertaining teacher usesacting and surprise as part of instruction. Katz (1996) employed the metaphor ofTeacher as Entertainer when describing a language teacher named Ron:

Ron used a variety of strategies that demonstrated a ¯air for dramatic action. . . consonant with the popular image of an entertainer. One major componentof this dramatic action is his skill as a successful raconteur. The stories entertainas well as inform his students. As Ron tells these stories, his face is serious ± a``straight'' delivery that seems to underscore the earnestness and the importanceof what he is telling his students. . . . These stories served to present key lessonpoints that might otherwise be addressed with more conventional teacherexpositions. . . . For Ron, his stories . . . often are the main lesson point . . . Someof the drama characteristic of this classroom derived from the impulsive natureof several of Ron's actions [such as totally restructuring the class without per-mission]. (Katz, 1996, pp. 78±79; KtTO.)

The importance of the Teacher as Entertainer role was shown in a quotation fromHamada, a high-school Japanese exchange student:

I like studying something new, but how much . . . practically depends on howinteresting the teacher is. (OsS)

His classmate Gay stated:

I enjoyed every minute of [this class] because of the teacher. He made learningfun and easy with jokes and sayings. (OsS)

Tom, a study participant of Sperling (1994) and an English teaching candidate, enter-tained his class very e�ectively while pulling them into the scene as full participants:

Tom and his students enacted a 50-minute ®ction. He came into the class in theguise of William Golding, author of Lord of the Flies.

I guess we haven't had the pleasure. I'm William Golding. Mr. Burnes askedme to speak about Lord of the Flies, my favorite piece, you know.


The darkened room was brightened by a single candle. The glow radiatedcontinuously onto a rocking chair as the students curiously welcomed the day'svisitor. The ¯oor was softened by a few shabby blankets from which the stu-dents witnessed a small reading lamp trigger as the aged guest pressed his wearythumb upon it. (Sperling, 1994, pp. 152±153; SgT)

In the investigation by Provenzo et al. (1989), some teachers described their peersas entertainers. An English teacher said:

Everyone was a character. Maybe that's what I look for in a teacher. They aregood actors. (Provenzo et al., 1989, p. 554; PtTO)

Norm, an undergraduate student of Spanish, linked the expressiveness and vivacityof his teachers to his own willingness to express himself:

The best Spanish language teachers I have had are fairly ``expressive,'' vivaciousin projecting themselves and the language expressions to the students. (OcC)

Yet studying with an instructor who takes the role of Teacher as Entertainer is notalways comfortable for learners, particularly those from certain cultures where``playing'' is not normally part of education. For such students, the arousal createdby the Teacher as Entertainer is negative. Young, a Korean doctoral candidate pre-paring to become a teacher of English as a foreign language, expressed her misgiv-ings:

The professor . . . liked to act, dance, mime, and move around in the classroom.He rarely wrote down his lecture points on the chalkboard. I have no doubtthat many of the activities that the professor developed were excellent for thecourse. Personally, however, I had di�culties adapting to such activities.(OgtG)

In the same vein, Mickey, an adult student learning Spanish, commented:

I learned very little in the class. It was more of an atmosphere of fun and games.She was the star performer. The students were an audience. We often felt it wastime to get down to work, but it never quite came. (OgtT)

As shown, Hamada's and Gay's teachers, as well as the teacher named Ron, weresuccessful in their role of Teacher as Entertainer, but Young and Mickey dislikedteachers who tried to entertain them. What is entertaining and culturally or per-sonally appropriate to one person might not be so to another.The ®nal metaphor in the Learner-Centered Growth perspective is Teacher as

Delegator. This metaphor suggests that the individual student has an innate poten-tial for guiding his or her own learning ± a potential that merely needs to be unlockedby the teacher. The Teacher as Delegator believes that it is in the students' best


interest to delegate choices about learning to the students themselves. (Such ateacher di�ers from the Teacher as Abdicator, who simply does not care what stu-dents do, gives up most or all active involvement with the students, exerts no dis-cipline, does not discuss material or course requirements, loses students' papers andfails to give grades ± all behaviors that were described by students in their personalnarratives.) The Teacher as Delegator is active in the sense of intentionally trying tocreate self-direction and self-expression in students and providing the neededresources. The Teacher as Delegator turns over signi®cant control to the learner,who is assumed to be mature enough and to have the inner ability to determineobjectives, decide on content, conduct learning activities and evaluate learning out-comes.An example of Teacher as Delegator is found at the University of Nancy 2,

France. At that university, Henri Holec and his colleagues formed a center for lan-guage pedagogy in which one of the options is total learner autonomy. In this cen-ter, the learners are treated as adults who are considered fully responsible for:

. . . de®ning needs, goals, priorities; furnishing or selecting materials; organizinglearning experiences; determining the pace and time of study; diagnosing [their]own learning di�culties; developing adequate learning techniques; self-monitoring; and evaluating progress. The helper consciously avoids the role oftutor or teacher and instead aids the learner in learning how to learn. Thehelper assists learners at any stage of the learning process, acts as an objectiveobserver, is open to discussion, and gives advice when asked. In addition, thehelper provides opportunities for the learner to receive feedback in authenticsituations, helps match the learner with peers and with appropriate tasks, o�ersmaterials when needed, helps the learner use strategies, keeps detailed notes onthe learner, shows sincere caring, and prepares the learner psychologically andenvironmentally for the task of learning. (Oxford, 1990, p. 217)

Thus, the teacher helps with resources, strategies and support but essentially del-egates the decisions and the primary work to the student. This center has receivedextensive European publicity for its innovative approach. Students involved havepraised the center and its work.The Silent Way, a language teaching methodology designed by Gattegno and

described by Stevick (1980), provides a signi®cant amount of autonomy to thelearner. ``The godlike characteristics of the learner are conspicuous in Gattegno'sthinking: the ability to make in®nite use of ®nite resources . . . and the heroicaloneness of a Self at the center of its own universe'' (Stevick, 1980, p. 48). Principlesof this method include the following: language learning is work; the work is done bythe student; most of the work must be conscious, although much of it also occursduring sleep; the work takes place within the student; the work requires the learnerto relate linguistic signs to sensory perceptions of rods, charts and pictures; theteacher provides little feedback, except when the student produces a wrong answer;the work adds new resources to the self and the student must not only learn throughthis process but must also be aware of the process and control it (Stevick, 1980). The


paradox of the Silent Way is that although the teacher maintains ``clear, ®rm, andcontinuous control'', within that control there is an immense amount of ``studentinitiative'' (Stevick, 1980, p. 49) ± the delegating function writ large. Stevick showedthat the Silent Way was e�ective with many language students.However, not everyone enjoys having a teacher who delegates major choices to

learners. For a graduate student and experienced language teacher named Dorothy,her language professor's delegation of authority instigated early pleasure thatquickly turned sour:

The con¯ict centered upon methodology ± no textbook, no syllabus, no expec-tations explained, no grading procedures detailed, no structure whatsoever,very, very laissez-faire and open. I am myself quite open but this was too mucheven for me. At ®rst it seemed good: we choose the topics to discuss and wecreate the ``book'' or ``text'' as we go along. I was at the beginning of thesemester excited by this freedom, but then it seemed to get harder and harder tocontinue talking like this. I did not ultimately feel ``open'' enough to disclosemyself to the teacher. . . . I clammed up and wilted emotionally. The time inclass seemed interminable to me ± time and space were transformed to an end-less eternity. (OgtC)

3.3.1. Summary of the Learner-Centered Growth perspectiveIn this perspective we have found a variety of teacher-role metaphors, all of which

focus on the individual learner and which encourage personal development andexpression in one way or another: Teacher as Nurturer, Lover or Spouse, Sca�older,Entertainer and Delegator. In all of these metaphors, there was obvious concern forthe welfare of every student, along with devoted sharing and facilitation. Studentsresponded in di�erent ways to the roles embodied in these metaphors. No single rolegained complete support, according to the evidence of this study, although thisperspective in general showed a greater number of adherents than the previous twoperspectives (Social Order and Cultural Transmission).

3.4. Metaphors in the Social Reform perspective

If, as Dewey (1933) claimed, the teacher's role is to facilitate the creation of amore democratic society in which future citizens will work together in a commu-nity of learners ± prizing diversity, fostering di�erent interests and enriching lifethrough the communication of rich and rewarding experiences ± then studentsmust develop a very di�erent set of skills to those identi®ed in the previous threeperspectives. Like the Social Order theorists, Dewey believed that learners shouldlearn to work for the social good, but this, he reasoned, could not be reduced toacquiring a corpus of ready-made skills and values. Similar to the advocates of theCultural Transmission perspective, he recognized that students must come toappreciate and understand the intellectual and artistic achievements of history, butthis, he maintained, was not to be an end in itself. He believed, like the Learner-Centered Growth proponents, that the purpose of education was the full and


complete development of each person's powers, but this, he argued, could not beunderstood independently of the social context of life. Dualisms such as the indi-vidual and society, nature and nurture, means and ends, and the learner and cur-riculum had to be overcome with a philosophy grounded in the underlying unity ofthe educational process. Dewey found this unity in the process of organic adapta-tion, the interactive adaptations of an organism to its environment. Extending thismodel to the nature of thought and society, Dewey reconceptualized the educa-tional process as a preparation for life within a democratic, scienti®cally informed,problem-solving community. The goal of learning was not some ®xed end, whetherthis be social e�ciency, cultural literacy or the ful®llment of a inner plan, butinstead the development within each individual of the intelligence and social dis-position to create new knowledge in response to the open-ended situations peoplewill inevitably face in the real life. In short, Dewey's aim was the development ofdemocratic planners. To this end, Dewey replaced the memorization of logicallyordered information within textbooks with activities designed to show howknowledge had been invented and used through history in response to socialproblems. By recapitulating this constructive process within miniature democraticcommunities, learners would gain the intellectual and social skills to engage in thekind of future cooperative work Dewey envisioned. The teacher's goal in this per-spective is to facilitate the creation of a more democratic, egalitarian, tolerant andmulticulturally accepting world.The following metaphors arose within this perspective: Teacher as Acceptor and

Teacher as Learning Partner. The Teacher as Acceptor invites, encourages andaccepts many di�erent ideas in the classroom. The reader's particular views are notthe only ``correct'' ones. The contributions of learners are important, and diversity iswelcomed. Like Dewey (1933) himself, the Teacher as Acceptor actively fostersdemocratic participation. Reba, now a language teacher, described her high-schoolteacher, who encouraged expression of diverse opinions and ideas:

Mr. Meister was an incredibly self-assured teacher. Somehow it is not surprisingthat his name was Meister (meaning ``master'' in German), and that now, some35 years later, some of his students jokingly send e-mails to each other identi-fying themselves as the ``Meistersingers.'' Mr. Meister had once been a warcorrespondent in Paris and had an exciting journalistic background. He did notneed to control us; he wanted us to learn to direct our own learning and becomescholars. He looked like an ancient sage, with white curly hair and a wrinkledface. It was an honors class, two hours per day, which integrated literature,philosophy, psychology, and history. We had a textbook and we more or lessread it, but the real events in the classroom were what we brought to the class:our poems, stories, philosophical discussions, and so on. For two years westayed in the same group in special classes ± with this amazing freedom and thisstrange, fabulous teacher who let us do what we wanted and always expected usto say what we thought, even if it disagreed with something he might believe.Student expression was very important to him. Maybe that is why he alsosponsored the high school newspaper ± so students could speak up. (OtS)


Beverly, a graduate student preparing to be a teacher of English as a foreign lan-guage, was unhappy because her linguistics professors did not allow multiple pointsof view:

When a teacher asked what the class thought, I said `Ì totally disagree.'' Irealized that he, the professor, could pin me to the wall, but I'd looked upreferences and was prepared to make an argument, thinking that was the thingto do. The professor responded by saying, `Ì see,'' and moving on in hisdiscussion. My reaction was surprise, wondering what the other studentsthought, wondering what the professor thought of me, and frustration becauseI had tried to be a good student but had probably generated negativereactions. . . . [Another time I tried to express myself], a di�erent professorhad a look of annoyance cross her face, as if this were a bothersome detail.(OgG)

Faye, a doctoral candidate in English education, expressed similar disappoint-ment with her poetry professor who, she believed, did not want to hear di�eringopinions:

The professor had what appeared to be an excellent encouraging manner withstudents. The ®rst day of class I was ecstatic. That ended, though, at the verynext class. The professor told students, `Ì want you to participate, voice youropinions and reactions, ask questions.'' However, I and the other class mem-bers soon learned that what he wanted was for us to regurgitate his thoughts,ideas, words. After the second, third, or fourth time he told me I was wrong andkept asking the same thing until someone repeated his words back to him, Istopped responding. (OgtG)

A di�erent side of the Social Reform perspective is shown by Paulo Freire (1970),who suggested that education is a partnership between the learner and the teacher.This brings forth the metaphor of Teacher as Learning Partner, expressed well byRichard-Amato (1988), who summarized Freire's concepts:

The teacher and students are partners. Meaning is inherent in the communica-tion. Through it students are involved in acts of cognition and are not simplyempty heads waiting to be ®lled with information. The process is a dialecticalone. Sometimes the teacher is a student and the students are teachers in a dia-logue through which all individuals can bene®t. . . . Meaningful interactionseems to be the key. (Richard-Amato, 1988, p. 33)

Similarly, a Japanese high-school exchange student named Hamada describedteachers as learning partners of students:

I do believe that the teacher is also one of the students. There is no end in learn-ing. And if the teacher . . . stopped listening to students' ideas and opinions, and


ignored what students want to learn, there would be no interest in the class.(OsS)

A powerful example of the learning partnership was found in an article by LarryBratt (1997) called `When Student Teaches Teacher'. Larry described his prisonexperience as a convict teaching a fellow convict to read. Kevin, the intendedlearner, started out with resentment, but ended up with pride and pleasure, whichwere shared by Larry, the teacher and learning partner:

One day we began a new mystery story when magic occurred. Kevin read anentire three pages of the story before he asked me to help him . . . Before I couldrespond, that beautiful lightning bolt struck. His face illuminated with joy.Then just as suddenly he was wiping his eyes, but he couldn't stop the ¯ood. . . .I embraced this titan in the spirit of brotherhood. For we were two men, losersin life, who had ®nally achieved something noble and beautiful together ± free-dom. And I realized to my amazement the ability to recover our individualhumanity that we once lost in crime. (Bratt, 1997, p. B5; BtT)

Maury depicted one of his graduate school communication professors as a learningpartner. Invoking Socrates, who famously described himself as the midwife of ideas,Maury claimed:

Jay was a good example of Socratic teaching. He asked lots of questions andgave no lectures. He seemed like he was learning along with us, even though heknew where he wanted to go with his questions. (OnG)

3.4.1. Summary of the Social Reform perspectiveParticipants did not tend to discuss this perspective as frequently as the other

three perspectives. Democratic, open expression was perhaps taken for granted bymany of the study's participants. However, those who did mention it were stronglyin favor of the accepting teacher and the teacher who acted as a learning partner.Both of these types of teachers were tolerant of diverse opinions and viewpoints andtreated students with dignity and respect. The re¯ections related to the SocialReform perspective were not directly informed by a knowledge of Dewey's philosophyof education, but nevertheless they expressed ideas parallel to those of Dewey (1933).

4. Discussion

By organizing re¯ections on teachers and teaching around the four perspectives ofSocial Order, Cultural Transmission, Learner-Centered Growth and Social Reform,we have attempted to focus the many fascinating metaphors generated aboutteachers into a thematic order. In what follows, we explore how these conceptualtools can be employed to generate a more precise and critical understanding of thelanguage teaching and learning situation.


4.1. Language teaching methodologies

Beliefs underlying the four perspectives seem to be the cause of the everswingingpendulum of language teaching methodologies (see Omaggio Hadley, 1993;Richard-Amato, 1988; Stevick, 1980). For example, the Audiolingual Method andSuggestopedia ®t well within the Social Order perspective, with its emphasis on fol-lowing prescribed patterns and shaping the learner to ®t a certain set of criteria. TheAudiolingual Method involves mimicry, memorization and intensive drilling, andSuggestopedia follows a prescribed format in which learners are molded intorelaxed, childlike receivers of suggestion. The Cultural Transmission perspective isthe home of the Grammar-Translation Method, emphasizing the exercise of thebrain in the pursuit of cultural and linguistic knowledge, rather than communicativelanguage use. CLL, the Silent Way and the general Communicative Approachemerge in the Learner-Centered Growth perspective. Any form of language learningin which students are encouraged to engage in a community of learners could ®t intothe Social Reform perspective.As long as language teachers do not learn to examine the foundational beliefs

underlying education, we can expect that the pendulum of methodological reformwill keep swinging from one interest group to another, without ever coming to abalance-point. Some of the anti-methodology theorists in the language instruction®eld have decried these continuous, seemingly willy-nilly vacillations, but theythemselves have failed to analyze fully the philosophical perspectives underlyingcurricular change in language teaching. Before arriving at sensible and sensitivedecisions about the best aims and methods of language teaching, we must begin toexplore the reasons why language educators are attracted to one method or anotherin terms of their beliefs about human nature and society.

4.2. From metaphorical to scienti®c thought

As the French anthropologist Claude LeÂ vi-Strauss (1966) has observed, analogicalthought, unlike scienti®c reason, is not troubled by contradictions. A single meta-phor can contain tautologies, inconsistencies and juxtapositions of contrasting facts.Likewise, individuals may employ contradictory images in a single explanation.Across the participants, we found many di�erent forces and pressures at work. Nosingle viewpoint or metaphor garnered unanimous approval or disapproval fromteachers, students and educational theorists.Style con¯icts (teacher±student, student±student, teacher±administrator and so

forth) are often spawned by unrecognized di�erences in belief systems, not merely bydi�erences in personality type or cognitive tendencies (Oxford, 1990; Oxford et al.,1991; Reid, 1995, Sternberg and Grigorenko, 1997; Wallace and Oxford, 1992).``Style wars'' between teachers and students might be at least partially explainedthrough a close analysis of the cultural belief systems or perspectives underlyingindividuals' metaphors about language teaching and learning.The point of metaphor, as we argued earlier, is to use a familiar image as an

instrument with which to explore more complex ®elds of meaning. The fact that our


participants created so many distinct metaphors about teachers only serves todemonstrate the multidimensionality of the learning process ± the complex of socialphilosophies and psychological theories that underlie the aims and methods ofteaching. No single orientation captures this matrix. Clearly teachers (along withtheir students) feel the force of each of the perspectives we have discussed. Like aball pulled by four di�erent springs, teachers are constantly pressured to meet theneeds of society, initiate learners into the achievements of the culture, foster theinnate potentials of the learners and democratically address multicultural perspec-tives while attempting to construct a better world. Often these competing demandsgenerate fundamental con¯icts: responding to social anxiety over falling standardsleads to calls for accountability and increased amounts of standardized testing, whilethe teacher's own common sense (as well as pedagogical theory) suggests thatlearners' interests are more fully served by exploring their individual interests andneeds. Indeed, as Gardner (1991) observes, the teacher's role in the use of stand-ardized tests typically con¯icts with an intuitive understanding of the rich anddiverse abilities of the learners' minds.

4.3. Resolving the con¯icts among perspectives

How, then, should language teachers understand and deal with multiple, con-trasting perspectives and with clashing metaphors? Fundamentally, this is a questionabout the relationship between theory and practice in education. To get at thisproblem more clearly it will be helpful to distinguish three di�erent approaches toeducational knowledge: the common sense approach, the science-of-educationapproach and the re¯ective-practitioner approach. The common sense approachholds that teachers, unlike engineers, doctors, lawyers and the majority of otherprofessionals, cannot draw readily upon either a clear set of theoretical principles oran accepted corpus of scienti®c research with which to solve the concrete problemsof their vocation; teachers need only a sound knowledge of their chosen subject andpractical experience in the classroom. In contrast, the science-of-education orienta-tion maintains that practice cannot exist independently of theory, for a teacher'sjudgments are inevitably colored by assumptions about human nature and the socialpurpose of schooling. According to advocates of a science of education, such ``folk''theories of the child's mind and uncritical ideas about the social role of educationmust be replaced by scienti®c knowledge derived from the work of expertauthorities. For Dewey (1933), these two approaches fragmented the true relation-ship between knowledge and action. Teachers, he argued, should be re¯ective-practitioners, questioning beliefs and methods in their own experimental approachto schooling ± psychology and sociology being tools or resources for the construc-tion of new educational hypotheses to be tested against experience. Here we returnto the role of metaphor. For as an imaginative construction aimed at understandingthe role of the teacher, exploring the nature of the learner and questioning the goalsof schooling, metaphor is an important instrument of analysis. On its own, how-ever, metaphor lacks the power of scienti®c thought. As Dewey (1933) explained,problem-solving has to channel the creative impulses of the imagination into precise


ideas which can be tested in practice. That is, while metaphor provides insight, sci-ence must check illusion.Of these three approaches, we believe the most useful one to modern-day language

teachers is the re¯ective-practitioner model. For Dewey (1933), re¯ective thought isa component of all problem-solving activity. The key to raising inquiry beyondmetaphor is not to invoke a di�erent kind of reason, but to submit thought to cog-nitive virtues such as objectivity, openness and impartiality±a process that Piaget(1971) identi®ed as the removal of egocentrism and that Hanvey (cited in Miller etal., 1994) described as movement toward a state of perspective-consciousness.Inquiry is thus a social process in which all involved consider relevant theories andexplore the perspectives of others. Re¯ection is both an attitude and a practice(Dewey, 1933). During re¯ection, the language teacher can perceive and de®neproblems in the classroom setting; think about his or her usual behaviors, attitudes,metaphors and subjective educational theories in that setting; consider relevanttheories of others; experiment with di�erent ways to solve classroom problems; testfor mistaken assumptions; re®ne hypotheses; and decide upon actions that improveeducational practices for all concerned (see steps in re¯ection according to Brook-®eld, 1995; Copeland et al., 1993; SchoÈ n, 1983, 1987). In the language teachingarena, re¯ection is embodied in the work of Bailey and Nunan (1996), Brown(1994a,b), Reid (1995), Scarcella and Oxford (1992) and Spolsky (1988), and is evenmore directly highlighted by Richards and Lockhart (1994).Individual and group re¯ection about teaching and learning processes should be

part of the ongoing life of each language teacher, researcher and student. Con-sidering carefully various metaphors and underlying beliefs can be of particularassistance in widening perspective-consciousness about classroom events, stylecon¯icts and instructional methods. The metaphors generated by our participantsand found in texts concerning methods and theory can be used for several pur-poses: ®rst, to challenge individuals to consider their own deep assumptions aboutthe aims and methods of language teaching and, second, consequent to theseimplicit theories, to initiate the kind of careful, informed inquiry into the funda-mental questions of education suggested by Dewey (1933). These processes lead toa more realistic, more inclusive understanding of how teachers can help meet theneeds of all parties in the educational equation ± especially those in the languageclassroom.

Acknowledgements

The authors want to thank Sondra Yarbrough for her excellent philosophical andeditorial comments and David Thomas for reviewing the manuscript.

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