ETHOS • FALL 2020
fessionals including education consultants and practitioners, social workers, psychopathologists, corporate leaders, human-computer interaction engineers, software designers etc., and are typically employed to scaffold understanding, foster and support cognitive growth and change. The value of metaphors in education has been long recognized (Avgerinou, 2011; Botha, 2009; Postman, 1996) not just because of their ornamental or aesthetic function, but also and even more so, for the cognitive claims they make (Hesse, 1983), and for being integral components of most education theories. To illustrate this, let’s point out that of all 70 volumes of psychologist Jean Piaget’s work, just one included the term “construction” as part of the title. Yet, education practitioners know him mostly because of the construction metaphor (“constructivism”). Despite the complex nature of educational phenomena which makes it impossible for any metaphor to capture them in their entirety, it is important to acknowledge that “Metaphor carries epistemic and ideological freight, functions as a vehicle of a world view and provides access to a discipline’s assumptions about the way the world and humankind are structured” (Botha, 2009, p. 431).
Beam Me Up, Scotty! How Visual Metaphors Scaffolded Understanding Of Emergency Remote Teaching And Learning In The Elementary School by Dr. Maria D. Avgerinou, Director of eLearning
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n his Poetics Aristotle advised us that “The greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor” (Aristotle, trans. 1975). Metaphors, from the Greek word “metapherein” meaning transfer, are powerful verbal and visual tools in that they can elicit growth and change through their ability to provide frames of reference familiar to the learner, make complex concepts simple, and evoke past emotions. Being such remarkable, expansive cognitive mechanisms (Seitz, 1998), metaphors are common practice among various pro-
Captain Kirk in Star Trek used the popular command “Beam me up, Scotty” when he needed to be transported back to Starship Enterprise. Since then this catchphrase has been used in a metaphorical sense to indicate transportation into a different, more positive state: in my capacity as the eLearning expert that was assigned overnight to tend to the Elementary School’s needs, my goal was to facilitate the transportation (metapherein) of the community not only through sharing research on educational technology and K12 online teaching, but also through the use of visual metaphors that could potentially provide a less stressful, more humanistic lens to that unprecedented, science fiction-like crisis we were experiencing together. Indeed, visual metaphors were utilized at various ES teacher, administrator, and parent sessions: making explicit and articulating one’s implicit mind’s eye, using imagery to tap first into the affective and then the rational side of the brain, I drew on my past experience as an academic who employed metaphors
