Learning to move, moving to learn: Metaphorical expressions in teacher education

Somataphorical inquiry constructs meaning through the exploration of conceptual movement language which is taken up as metaphors that connect to the teaching and learning process. Through the enactment of movement elements, opportunities are created to evoke an awareness of, and awaken reflection on, the bodily lived, living and to-be-lived feelings, sensations, and ways of being one’s self and relating to others, namely students in the classroom. Somataphors, as I have called them, function in this study as overarching symbolic yet visceral devices that give shape to the expressivity of teacher education. I articulate this particular form of inquiry in teacher education as bodily awakenings of a formative past, reflexive contemplation of present moments, and projective intimations of becoming a teacher. I propose a thematic, somatic, metaphoric approach (TSM) to teacher education. The structural framework serves as a bridge between the critical, contemplative and theoretical ambitions of teacher education and the kinaesthetic, aesthetic practices that comprise the daily work of learning to teach. The themes arrived at are suggestive of somatic engagement and give rise to metaphoric intra/inter-pretation of the teaching process, the actions of a teacher, the learning process, the heuristic nature of subject matter, and mediate understanding of the educational institution. The TSM approach provides a passageway for internationally trained, re-certifying teachers’ vast educational experiences and embodied learning contexts to be navigated, reflected upon, and articulated through artistic, and poetic means. That to which these teachers have been contextually and culturally-habituated is made known and becomes communicated through a shared conceptual, metaphorical dialect (movement language), which those of varied languages speak in common. What results is a re-member-ing of bodied consciousness, a sensorial awareness, a corporeal capacity to attend to the synergistic qualities of feeling and form as the basis of a personal, professional and pedagogical praxis. Bringing the body back into the educational environment as a mode of knowing for teachers and those who are taught, along with the thematic somatic, metaphoric rendition of how educational experience is uncovered, how curriculum is discovered, and how teaching practice is constituted, are the intended achievements of this thesis.