From Psychology to Art: Beyond Psychologized Metaphors in Education

• In Event: 61.033 - Metaphors of Learning in the Professions: Psychologists, Teachers, Policy Makers, and Artists Compared

Abstract

Lakoff and Johnson (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980; Lakoff & Johnson, 1999) suggest that metaphors stand at the basis of the ways in which we conform, encounter and perform that which we call reality. Scholars have examined a variety of metaphors in education (Martı́nez, Sauleda, & Huber, 2001; Paavola, Lipponen, & Hakkarainen, 2004; Sfard, 1998). These efforts have for the most part focused on trying to conceptualize the learner and the learning within either the cognitive, situated or the sociocultural theoretical positions (Hodkinson, Biesta, & James, 2008).
We argue that psychologized discourses serve as hegemonic technologies of normalization in education. However, this critique is not new, nor is it the most important contribution of this paper. Our more important contribution is the analysis and sorting through of the effects of psychologized discourses to figure out how those discourses operate to fabricate particular (dualistic) meanings—for the student, the teacher, and the process of learning and teaching—as those are circulated through educational research and practice.
Our prime concern in this paper, then, is to argue that our efforts to overcome dualistic metaphors and meanings we need new theoretical tools: tools that not only recognize dualisms but also suggest ways of addressing them effectively. We will do this by pointing at relational materialist and non-representational perspectives (Barad, 2007; DeLanda, 2006; Deleuze, 1990; Deleuze & Guattari, 1988) and biological concepts developed by Maturana and Varella (Maturana & Varela, 1973, 1987). Relational materialist and non-representational perspectives have built on the linguistic turn which focused exclusively on discursive practices at the expense of the material world, developing a material-discursive philosophy of difference and being in the world. These perspectives have expanded ideas on situated knowledges and practices, critiquing universalist disembodied and representational 'God's eye' views of the world, paving the way for accountability of materiality and interrelationality.
Furthermore, Maturana and Varella developed the concept of autopoiesis (self-producing organization) which suggests structural coupling as an answer to the question of how systems adjust to the environment. We also engage Manzotti’s (2006) radical externalism to support our arguments for he suggests ways by which cognitive process can be seen as that which is shared in interactional processes not that which is in people’s minds.
The result is the suggestion of a new paradigm which invites us to transform our present educational metaphors from psychologized and dualistic to unitary and based on art, performance and doing— locating learning in social communicative ways as the actual patterning of given interactive processes themselves as performances we enact, art we create or work we do in concert. Art, performance and doing are neither “out” nor “in,” but in-between -- managed and constructed continuously in social concert.

Authors

• Zvi Bekerman, Hebrew University of Jerusalem

• Michalinos Zembylas, The Open University of Cyprus