Introduction

Abstract

Few activities are more riddled with metaphor than education. Learning is a gift, a search, a path, an adventure, a blossoming, and a light bulb turning on. To teach is to conduct, to garden, to act as tour guide and custodian of the future, and, of course, to love. Students training to be teachers are often asked to identify metaphors that represent their philosophy of education. Some examples from students in a recent Masters course I teach include teaching as farming, dancing, storytelling, rain, metamorphosis, and reproduction. While there are many who may find it hard not to roll their eyes at the sometimes cutesy and oversimplified representations of education, these metaphors, indeed the most stereotypical of them all (learning as a journey, teaching as inspiration) reflect specific understandings of education that are embodied in twentieth- and twenty-first-century schools.