On the uses and abuses of the teacher-as-artist metaphor: The responsibilities of educating teachers as artists.

摘要

Uses of the metaphor of teacher-as-artist tend to exalt creativity, intuition, spontaneity, and personal style. The metaphor is associated with constructivist commitments to reflection, cultivation of educational vision, and discovery of the teaching self. The bidirectional nature of metaphor allows these qualities to be reflected back onto artists without having to ground them in the realities of artists' work and training. Thereby, the metaphor serves an ideological agenda which values teacher autonomy, curricular and instructional freedom, creativity, individuality and self-expression. The metaphor of teacher-as-artist is seductive precisely because it offers an intensely humanistic alternative to the modernist vision of pedagogy. However, in its figurative language it fails to provide substantive guidance to teachers. To use the metaphor of teacher-as-artist to support a vision of teacher education which exalts imagination, creativity, spontaneity, intuition, feeling, belief and personal style but fails to equip teachers with the essential skills by which any vision of teaching and learning might be realized is at best ineffective and at worst irresponsible. However, the metaphor, delimited by classical measures of truth, has the potential to reconcile tensions between constructivist models of teacher preparation and those emphasizing the acquisition of objectively defined skills and methods.