Facilitating The Development Of Generative Metaphors: Re-emphasizing participants’ guiding images

Autor: Johan Hovelynck
Rok vydání: 1998
Předmět:
Zdroj: Journal of Outdoor and Environmental Education. 4:12-24
ISSN: 2522-879X
2206-3110
DOI: 10.1007/bf03400705
Popis: This article presents experiential learning as a process of metaphor change. It explores the development of generative metaphors as it occurs in outdoor programs as well as elsewhere, and discusses some implications for the facilitation of experiential learning in adventure education. I will suggest that the related literature has overemphasized facilitators' metaphoric introductions to adventure activities at the expense of interventions at the moment learners' metaphors manifest themselves during the experience. After an introduction to cycles of metaphor development, this paper focuses on facilitating the initial stages of such cycles. It examines connections with several theoretical frameworks underpinning this approach and with the prevailing perspective on metaphors in adventure programming. Perspectives on metaphors in adventure education In an earlier presentation (Hovelynck, 1995) I described how the metaphoric model as it is known in adventure education (Bacon, 1983 & 1987; Gass, 1991 & 1995; Gass, Goldman & Priest, 1992) holds a perspective on metaphors that emphasizes the facilitator's introduction to an adventure activity. Little attention has been given explicitly to metaphors as learners' or clients' guiding images during their actions, however. The latter perspective differs from the former in two respects: the first one concerns the Ownership' of the metaphor (Delay, 1996; Mack, 1996), the second one whether metaphors are primarily looked at as 'figures of speech' or 'figures of thought' (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980). Several authors have drawn attention to participants' metaphors (Hovelynck, 1998; Mack, 1996; Nadler, 1995; Nadler & Luckner, 1992), thereby - more or less explicitly - questioning the focus on facilitator-defined metaphors in the literature on adventure programming. Participants' realities have been included in models of metaphoric framing mainly by specifying that a thorough needs assessment and a statement of program objectives are preliminary steps to the facilitator's elaboration of metaphoric activities and introductions. These steps have received little further attention, however. While the literature hasn't been oblivious to possible drawbacks of this approach (Gass, 1993 & 1995) work in the broader field of process experiential therapy and research on the psychotherapy process seems to support re-emphasizing participants' metaphors (Greenberg, Rice & Elliott, 1993; Lietaer, Dierick & Neirinck, 1985; McMullen, 1985 & 1989; Pollio & Barlow, 1975; Toukmanian, 1992). The attention to learners' metaphors coincides with a view that emphasizes metaphors as 'figures of thought' rather than 'figures of speech' (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980). Whereas the metaphoric model's emphasis on 'dressing metaphors' suggests that metaphors are stories, learners' metaphors are seen as mindsets which capture participants' experience and as such inform their 'here and now' actions. Metaphors in this view are guiding images, reflected in language as well as in other behavior (Nadler & Luckner, 1992; Schon, 1993). Understanding metaphors as mindsets that underlie participants' actions presents experiential learning as a process of metaphor change. In this view the task of experiential trainers and adventure therapists consists primarily of facilitating the development of images that generate new potential, which I will further refer to as 'generative metaphors' (Schon, 1993). I will first focus on processes of metaphor change as they occur within adventure programs as well as elsewhere, and subsequently on some principles of facilitating experiential learning as they follow from my understanding of this process. Toward the end of this text I will explore some implications of this perspective for a number of current practices in adventure education. The process of metaphor change My description of the development of generative metaphors amply benefits from the structure Donald Schon (1982 & 1993) discerned in this process as he described it in contexts as varied as industrial task groups, urban planning and the management of development aid. …
Databáze: OpenAIRE
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