Teaching Metaphore

          A metaphor won't yield a certainty of meaning. This makes a story an anomaly among more common approaches to text. Egan argues that facility with metaphor is a "key tool in aiding flexible, productive learning" (56). It is exercised in such story activities as jokes, riddles, hearsay, poetry, and storytelling, which are part of a thinking ability vital to learning life (43-70). Metaphors juxtapose images for meaning in language constructions that demand the listener's creating understanding outside its text. Without the provision of an explanation or designation, the listener jumps to connect her own experiences and knowledge with the story-words and make sense of it. In fact, an explanation of a metaphor, like explanations of jokes, punctures its power. Additionally, the personal and imaginative act jumping is part of "reading" metaphor.
A story engagement depends on the listener's ability to leave the text, to read non-literally. Perhaps educators' persistent emphasis on print literacy has contributed to Gardner's assessment of students' engagement with literature:
          Beyond question students ought to be literate... but the essential emptiness of this goal is dramatized by the fact that young children in the United States are becoming literate in a literal sense; that is, they are mastering the rules of reading and writing, even as they are learning their addition and multiplication tables. What is missing are not the decoding skills, but two other facets: the capacity to read for understanding and the desire to read at all (1991: 186).
           I do not mean to say word choices don't matter. They deeply affect the story's power to invite listeners into its world. Chosen and crafted vocabularies shape human experience into shareable existence and to varying degrees of aesthetics. These determine the power of the story to invite reader-listeners in and affect them. However, the words and letters are not a story's key semantic grid. Highly text-attentive strategies risk diverting attention from a language of meaning making that includes image, event, and metaphor.
A story is a bridge connecting shores
           I've briefly described a story as an imaginative experience and particular language that trusts listeners to orchestrate images and jump to make connections for meaning. Now I consider the story as I notice it in life between listeners and tellers. A "story" suddenly becomes even more difficult to define. Scholars like Paul Ricoeur and Northrop Frye puzzled over its definition nearly all of their lives. No wonder. As I listen in the classroom, I recognize stories in a dizzying range of forms and functions. It might be a sentence, a rumour, an anecdote, or a lie; a fable, life story, myth or fantasy; or it might be a reference to a book, movie, tape or video game. But, as I consider the third aspect of a story engagement, it becomes clear that in another instance a story directs the listener's attention from the page. This engagement is best described with a metaphor: The listener involved with a story is on a heavily trafficked bridge between the shores of two full worlds. I go back to the Grade 4-5 classroom to begin an explanation of the story as a bridge.
We're near the end of our reading Pullman's I Was a Rat. The class, a jostling convergence of worlds and persons is, again and for now, one listening ear. Roger and the princess are talking. She says,
"Well... it just goes to show. Maybe she only comes once and grants you a wish, and then you're stuck with the consequences. I suppose we'll have to make the best of it."
          "Well, I could go on being a boy," said Roger, "if only they'd let me. I can do it quite well most of the time, except when they make out I'm something else underneath." (Pullman, 2000:160)
Beside me Alt gives a big sigh and takes off his shoes while his eyes stay on Linda, his teacher. We are all drinking in the story. I experience this thick silence as solidarity of shared interest softened by our privacy of thoughts. It's restful, companionable and provoking at once. I am listening, inside the story, and thinking at the same time. I mull the unexpected and troubling consequences of getting a wish. Another part of my mind notices Alt beside me. Previous conversations make me suspect Alt of having his own struggle about being himself named in the last sentence Linda read.
          As a bridge, a story carries traffic between personally felt human experience, one's inner life, and a shared social life. That "inner life" is the place in which imagination operates. It's the place in which listener-readers connect metaphors to meanings. It is part of what is meant when we refer to the mind or heart. It is the listener's private "world of beliefs, desires and hopes" (Bruner, 1990: 52). One way of thinking about it is the "psychological reality" (Tartar, 1987: 82) of the teller or listener.. The "inner life" is made up of all the experiences, knowledges, intentions, and present circumstance. It is the self with which a readerlistener meets the story. Only a very small part of that "inner life" is visible or apprehendable to the social group.