Control, Empowerment, and the Fake World: Converging Metaphors :: Metaphors Education Educational Papers

Control, Empowerment, and the false World Converging MetaphorsMetaphors not only structure the way we approximate about enlighten, they also help create the world of the tame (Cunningham, Metaphors of creative thinker handout).This quote speaks the truth Metaphors are the tools we use both to structure intellection about our last and to create culture at the same time. An gauzy example of this dual and interconnected role of metaphor is Marshalls belief that the dominan t metaphor in many schools is SCHOOL IS WORK (Cunningham, MOM handout). wave Danesi would say that this metaphor underlies a way to conceptualize the world of school (Danesi 107). By thinking about school in this way, the world of school is crea ted to be a draw-filled experience. Students need to do homework and work harder at their lessons and teachers must manage their classrooms (Cunningham, MOM handout). It is in this way that the metaphor is the cognitive phenomenon that converts fact ual feeling state s into artifactual conceptual structures (Danesi 107). Together, people create nonliteral ideas that turn into real artifacts, the representative structures of culture. The metaphorical idea of school is work produces the artifac tual world that fosters homework, working harder, earning grades, and managing classrooms (Danesi 108). These artifactual signs in turn perpetuate the imperative metaphor.Metaphors, then, are at the heart of understanding the way we keep an eye on aspects of our culture while we simultaneously build that culture. Umberto Eco stresses that culture is a collective experience. In his view, there is no such thing as a virtuoso mind, un connected to other minds or to their (collective) social ethnical constructions (Cunningham, MOM handout). If this is interpreted as fact, the social, cultural, historical, and institutional contexts humans find themselves in contribute to creating their metaphors and in turn, their artifactual worlds. Therefore, the situatio nal context and the metaphors found there are intertwined and must be examined together.For example, I work in a juvenile prison. Prison is an kindle cultural context to investigate from its various perspectives. Many metaphors may be made about the same system depending on a persons spry cultural group, or what Eco better terme d as humans local cultural organizations (Cunningham, MOM handout). The sign of school and its object, the prison school program, has at least(prenominal) three distinguishable interpretants in the facility in which I work. These interpretants substructure be viewed as metaphors and are different depending on whose point of view and local cultural organization one is investigating.