Metaphor has long played a key role in both exercising and discussing education. Socrates used metaphor to describe teachers as those who help give birth to learning, as opposed to simply imparting knowledge (Plato & Cornford 1945). Metaphors help us to explain complexity through simpler, more vivid, and familiar terms. Whether functioning as a pedagogical tool to support knowledge construction or serving as a resource for education specialists to discuss various aspects of the field, metaphors have enduring potency as “condensed analogies” (Perelman & Olbrechts-Tyteca 2008: 671). Indeed, metaphor both displaces and shapes meanings and thus plays a central role in framing, disseminating, and reproducing perspectives (CharterisBlack 2004). In shedding light on specific directions whilst obscuring others, metaphors can encapsulate and communicate value judgements and beliefs. Metaphors “are always a double bind: they at once allow us to see and stop up our abilities to notice” (Hejnol 2017). They create ways of seeing, acting, and being, thus potentially fuelling imagination and understanding.
Eamon et al. Costello (Tue,) studied this question.