Educational Metaphor: Learning as a Journey and Curriculum as a Mollusc

The New Zealand Curriculum 2007 continues our wobbly isles tradition of using a soft, wet and slimy mollusc as a metaphor for intellectual and spiritual growth

The curriculum nautilus - Since it first appeared on the cover of The New Zealand Curriculum Framework in 1993, the nautilus has become a familiar symbol for the New Zealand Curriculum. Itreappears in this curriculum with a new look.It is as a metaphor for growth that the nautilus is used as a symbol for the New Zealand Curriculum. The New Zealand Curriculum P2

The New Zealand Curriculum document itself encourages us to think of "learning as a journey ..."

As students journey from early childhood through secondary school and, in many cases, on to tertiary training or tertiary education in one of its various forms,they should find that each stage of the journey prepares them for and connects well with the next. P43

By learning te reo and becoming increasingly familiar with tikanga, Maori students strengthen their identities, while non-Maori journey towards shared cultural understandings. P16

In New Zealand our predilection for constructivist pedagogies and inquiry learning means we tend to interpret the learning as a journey metaphor as when

the teacher and students travel more or less together, along a somewhat defined route, making frequent stops along the way as students notice something of interest that they wish to explore. There are occasional interesting side trips to unexpected places. At times, groups pursue different paths and, after returning to the main road, report to the class about what they have found.  Judy Yero Teachers Mind Resources

I continue to acknowledge and thank cj for making me alert to metaphor ... for introducing me to Lakoff and how metaphors both obscure and reveal ...

“Metaphors may create realities for us, especially social realities. A metaphor may thus be a guide for future action. Such actions will, of course, fit the metaphor. This will, in turn, reinforce the power of the metaphor to make experience coherent. In this sense metaphors can be self-fulfilling prophecies.” P146  Metaphors we live by - Lakoff and Johnson

Cj is why I laughed darkly when I stumbled upon Alan Watt’s interrogation of the “Journey” metaphor today ...

Is a must watch for all those educators still anguishing over their inability to make any practical change in response to that educationally virulent call to action - Sir Ken Robinson’s TED talk on Do schools kill creativity?

I believe that creating an education system that nurtures creativity, rather than undermining it ... needs more than rhetoric and humour it needs lots of the sort of analysis I read today on General Praxis Blog on Arts teachers learning and pedagogy

When we talk about needing to build creativity in 21st Century Learners in New Zealand – we too often blur the individuals with the process, and the process with the product – we never get to interrogating identified “irreconcilable tensions”

"The positives in art education work are evident and well documented, and I value the work I do in schools highly. However there are aspects of working as an artist in secondary schools which do not sit right...

• The constant call for collaboration in an area which is often about a fairly solitary, highly personal exploration
• The emphasis of verbal communication in a subject which is often about an individual language that has nothing to do with words
• The focus on Artists as some sort of uniquely, innately skilled creative problem solvers who will be able to redress an inherent lack in the system
• The desire to promote equal partnerships in a system where artists and teachers can never be equal
• A blurring of expectation between the definitions: ‘artist’ and ‘art educator’
• An over-simplification of what an artist is, packaging them to fulfil a ‘required’ service
• Time, as a contributing factor to all above is not valued enough" Tapp participant

The General Praxis blog analysis is a great position piece for New Zealand educators - I have pinged it off to the artists and teachers I work with in the day job in the hope that it might catalyse a similar analysis here .. I want to explore the implications further

The complexity of analysis in the post clearly identifies why if we persist with describing learning as a journey we we will continue to be “Lost in the Sahel” when it comes to creativity. 

Note to anyone reading this post: The poetic writing and photography in this National Geographic Lost in the Sahel piece - is much better than the Artichoke post ... abandon the post and sink yourself in the article by Paul Salopek with photography by Pascal Maitre

Along Africa’s harsh frontier between desert and forest, crossing some lines can be fatal.
After I was arrested and imprisoned in Darfur, an American soldier told me, shaking his head in disgust, “You fly over this place and all you see is miles and miles of nothing.” But that was an outsider’s delusion. Every outcrop and plain was parsed by unseen tangents, lines, ghostly demarcations. They portioned off the claims of tribes, individuals, clans. They bulged and recoiled according to war and season. No-go zones encircled water holes. Certain unseen lines, masars, dictated the migration routes of nomads. There was nothing haphazard about any of this. To cross one line or to venture too far from another might invite retribution, even death. And that was the ultimate line of them all in the Sahel: the one between knowing and ignorance.

The Sahel itself is a line.

So is "Learning is a journey ..."

 

Comments

[ailsa]

'the outsiders delusion' I love this. A truly enjoyable and provoking post; highs, lows, and a brooding sense of mood.

[Artichoke]

I loved it too, is complex and I have felt compelled to go back and reread Paul Salopek's writing again and again - each time it catalyses new thinking and exposes nuance that I missed first time through

I am currently thinking about the women sowing their autobiographies bit (pasted below)and wondering when do we do the equivalent of "growing food" in the city and just how do we sow our autobiographies -

The closest thing I can think of at the moment is that perhaps the answer lies in the huge data trails we leave at the supermarket checkout counters or online as our barcoded choices are passed through the scanner collated and profiled against our Foodtown Card membership number -

a "planting profile" created through frequency and diversity of product choices, consumerism and purchasing -

what would the data look like over time? - could we tell our stories from the purchasing profiles collected through our lives?

• They were planting sorghum in a dry wadi.

  The women’s work appeared rudderless. They planted their seeds in lines that wriggled across the field, nudged here and there by whims of conversation. The older woman swerved whenever she told jokes, and her seed rows lurched like cardiograms. She giggled into her hands often, and I decided she must be mad. The younger one was more solemn. She toiled briskly, with a sense of purpose, as if engaged in a race, and her planting was much straighter. A tiny child crawled at her side, trying to eat the seed grain. The women labored like this all day. Then, late in the afternoon, they quarreled, and their plantings veered apart in rancor.

  It occurred to me that the women were doing more than growing food. They were sowing their autobiographies.

  Sex jokes, village gossip, little wisps of song, rebukes to children—all of it lay scribbled in the eccentric lines of their crops.

  Women have been singled out for maximum violence in Darfur. Mass rapes by the janjaweed are systematic and well documented. As part of a Sudanese campaign of ethnic cleansing, women have been burned alive, shot, bayoneted, and dumped down wells. These stories, too, would be recorded in their fields. Lying in the hut, I imagined flying low over the savannas of Darfur and reading the women’s lives inscribed in plots of millet, peanuts, and sorghum. (See that row of melons ending abruptly at midfield? A Fur grandmother dropped her seed bucket and ran at the sound of approaching hoofbeats.)