My question at issue is relevant to other educators as well. The practices of teaching and ideas for instruction in my findings are relevant to today’s educators. This research is geared toward English educators, but the practices of teaching writing could pertain to educators in other subject areas as well since writing happens, or should happen, across disciplines.
My sources offer a plethora of knowledge about metaphor and how and when they should be used. Some sources offer explanation of what metaphor is, while others explain metaphor and provide teaching ideas to be used in the classroom. Teachers need to know and understand the writing process and understand metaphor beyond a scratched surface; these sources dig deeper into the world of metaphor and metaphorical language and the writing process.
To answer my question at issue, metaphors are useful in helping to teach writing to secondary and college freshmen in several ways. One way to encourage the imaginative travel of the writing process is through role-playing; “writers enact what they wish to communicate in a genre appropriate to their audience” (269). Another useful avenue to facilitate the imaginative travel is with images. Alexander references C. S. Lewis’s essay on metaphor when she notes that Lewis wrote, “imagination is the organ of meaning” (272). Lewis also “argues that we grasp ideas clearly if they are associated with images” (272). Having students draw the paths and bridges from metaphor to meaning or meaning to metaphor can aide in their understanding the writing process and how metaphors are used. Jun Zhao’s article discusses the use of verbal metaphors as a tool in an educational setting in conjunction with gestures. To help educators teach the importance of the thesis statement, Zhao analyzes one instructor’s metaphorical gestures in explaining the function of a thesis. When teaching the thesis statement to writing students, drawing an imaginary curved line above one’s head helps illustrate and “indicate that the thesis statement is not merely a sentence but an encompassing coverage of forthcoming ideas” (129). Zhao discusses the importance of the hierarchy metaphor in conjunction with theses and supporting details.
In an answer to the second half of my question at issue, teaching metaphor and with metaphor is important because metaphor can prompt educational change as suggested by Graham Low in his article. Lakoff and Johnson’s research also offers understanding into why teaching with metaphors is important when they discuss the ARGUMENT IS WAR metaphor in relation to writing. In his article, Philip Eubanks discusses how four concrete expressions are reveled through the Conduit Metaphor, and how the four expressions chart a definable logic in learning how to write and teaching how to write.