Lost in Translation: The Social and Emotional Costs of Conceptual Metaphor in Knowledge Transfer Objectives

• In Event: Bridging the Gap: Opportunities, Challenges, and Lessons From Five Knowledge Translation Initiatives

Abstract

Individual teachers serve as the principal translators of curricular initiatives, filtering their understanding of novel initiatives through deeply embedded, automatic and largely nonconscious mental schema (Lakoff 2014). These implicit conceptual metaphors influence the comprehension of new information, the value judgments and emotional attitude towards it, and the practical application and communication of those concepts to others (Lakoff & Johnson 2003). Frame conflict—the disjunction of conceptual metaphors with experience—results in aversive emotions and negative interpersonal attribution (Reddy 1979.) The field of Mind, Brain Education provides an alternative model of communication to ameliorate these reactions, buffer the negative affect of frame conflict, and assist in knowledge translation. To create this new model of knowledge translation, this study seeks to answer the questions “How and to what extent do teachers’ implicit conceptual metaphors influence their affective response to new curricular initiatives?” and “How and to what extent does an intervention following MBE protocol affect this response over time?”

Theoretical Frameworks
This study is grounded in conceptual metaphor theory of cognitive linguistics (Reddy, 1979; Lakoff 2014), and more specifically, on implicit conceptual metaphors of communication, and their role in common reasoning. Attentional control theory (Eysenck et al. 2007) demonstrates how aversive emotions affect cognitive controls and processing. Social contagion theory (Christakis & Fowler 2013) demonstrates the spread of behavior and affect through social networks, underlining the importance of addressing intra- and interpersonal emotional regulation during the translation process, and the prosocial classroom theoretical model (Jennings & Greenberg 2009) emphasizes the role of the emotionally self-regulating classroom teacher as a key component in knowledge translation.

Inquiry
This participatory action research study will involve teachers (n=79) in a high school setting (grades 9-12) during the initial four months of a curricular initiative.

Evidence
This study will follow an explanatory-sequential mixed methods design (Creswell 2014) using a pre- and post-application format. Teachers will be surveyed before implementation of curriculum to measure preferred conceptual frames of communication. This will be followed by an MBE-based intervention with teachers that explains the bias resulting from frame conflict due to the most common of conceptual metaphors of communication and learning, and that provides an alternate framework for conceptualization of communication. After an ongoing MBE-based intervention, teachers will be surveyed to measure the intervention’s effectiveness in shifting their affective response to the curricular initiative.

Warrants
Teachers’ implicit metaphors of communication and learning can form a “go to” heuristic in the demands of the classroom, and a possible “choke point” in the translation process. An intervention following the MBE protocol can bring unconscious bias to awareness and provide an alternative conceptual frame for communication.

Significance
The impact of teachers’ conceptual metaphors on teaching and learning —though pivotal in the knowledge translation process— is currently sparsely investigated or accounted for as either abetting or confounding the integration of research into praxis. This study seeks to examine the role of implicit conceptual metaphors in the knowledge translation process and investigates the effects on knowledge translation of an MBE-based protocol in addressing bias.

Author

• Chris Rappleye, Mary Institute and Saint Louis Country Day School