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 ..."