Metaphors in Rain

The ninth RaAM-conference “Researching and Applying Metaphors” took place in Lancaster 4-7 July 2012. Apart from a number of interesting lectures that addressed metaphors in different ways, I had a chance to experience the beauties of contrasts in English summer weather; It was exactly the pouring rain that made the sun rays appear so powerful, the grass so green and the air so clean.

Many of the presentations I attended dealt with multimodal metaphors, including sounds and voice qualities, gestures, motions and visual metaphors in films, advertisements and conversations. My colleague from Vestfold University College, Professor Norunn Askeland, presented metaphors that her master degree students used to describe their writing processes; Prof. Alan Cienki presented his research on gestures in students’ conversations, and Prof. Raymond Gibbs addressed the issue of creativity and metaphors in his analysis of Charlie Sheen’s ways to address his audience on TV and Youtube-videos.

When Prof. Masako K. Higara, in the last plenary session, spoke about frogs and cicadas in the haiku texts by Bashõ Matsuo, I was thinking how actions and sounds of these creatures has to be experienced in real life if we were to understand the metaphorical meanings of the haiku poems.

My own presentation addressed young children’s “embodied metaphors”, which certainly are not identical to “real” metaphors from adult’s world (as some from my audience commented after the presentation). But if we start talking about real and not real, many things from childhood would not even qualify to be compared with adult’s things; one would not know what to compare them with since adult’s world is divided and structured in different areas and fields, while everything fuses in children’s holistic world. However, that we find children’s reasoning, experiencing and interacting difficult to understand, should not make them less important. And we should not view children as some kind of aliens that are not able to explain what they think; We have all been children and our childhood experiences, however unarticulated, will keep influencing our later ways of reasoning.

Through my paper “Creation of metaphors: Young children’s embodied metaphors and imaginative cognition” I tried to exemplify the processes of young children’s connections of past and present experiences. By doing that they become to understand that some things in the world are similar, but always dependent on the uniqueness of the contexts; Through imaginative connections of experiences, they seem to negotiate personal meanings as well as explore possibilities to communicate in understandable ways. As for instance, when the Spanish boy (see http://sculpturingwords.blogspot.co.uk/2011/01/our-mobile-bodies-move-though-world.html ) created his first multimodal expression for a horse, he later had to nuance and recreate the expression if he wanted to be understood by those who were not present in the context of his first horse-experience; To communicate we have to constrain our personal holistic experiences and make them shareable with others, but if we supress our individual experiences too much, some personal meanings might get lost.

Verbal language provides possibilities for sharing of common experiences, thoughts etc., but each of us has a unique combination of experiences and individual pre-dispositions to feel, perceive, imagine, create… Verbal language provides structures for organizing common understanding, but can also delimit individual experiences (Stern, 2003). Metaphors seem to make it possible to preserve at least some part of the holistic experiences. Children’s embodied metaphors are dynamic features that are supporting constant modifying of the existing version of their present understanding (Snodgrass and Coyne, 1992), and supporting their search for appropriate ways to communicate with others.

References:
Snodgrass, A., & Coyne, R. (1992). Models, metaphors and the hermeneutics of designing. Design Issues, 9(1), 56-74.
Stern, D. N. (1998). The interpersonal world of the infant: a view from psychoanalysis and developmental psychology. London: Karnac.

Oh… It’s alive!

My little friend (three years old) got a hand puppet – a soft, white kitten. I put it on my hand and showed him. “Oh… It’s alive!”, he said. He was talking to the cat and cuddeling it kindly. Did he think it was a real kitten?

When the kitten stopped moving, pretending it was asleep, he said: “You have to move your fingers!” – He obviously knew the kitten was not moving by itself. But he absolutely did not want to put his own hand inside it and handle it himself… as if this would spoil his ability to imagine that the kitten was real. As long as someone else was handling it, the textile puppet and the real kitten could co-exist in the same time. In children’s play, there are no contradictions between reality and fantasy (Vygotsky, 2004), but rather synergy: The hand inside was activating the puppet’s movements, and the boy's experience of the movements was supporting his imagination.



Vygotsky, L. S. (2004). Imagination and Creativity in Childhood. Journal of Russian and East European Psychology 42(1), 7-97. Retrieved from http://mesharpe.metapress.com/link.asp?id=265tnearjknc0220

Mercedes in pajamas

Sorry for not writing sooner – I have been busy with writing articles, and that’s what I should be doing most the last year of my phd-study. But I also have to find some time for small observations. Besides my “properly conducted” data collection, my little friend, soon three years old, has constantly been supplying me with fresh puzzles to keep my mind busy. As my co-researcher, he has been reminding me that young children are complexity experts, capable of combining feelings, memories, experiences and imagination into poetic metaphors.

I have earlier on this blog written about children’s metaphors. This metaphor is brand new: In South Europe, where summers are hotter and longer, plants and houses are different than in Norway. The cars are much the same, but they are driven and parked differently. One hot day my little friend told me there was a car wearing pajamas. It was a Mercedes (we could see the symbol on the wheel). Why dress a Mercedes in pajamas? I would say to protect it from the sun.

My little friend, not unlike other boys, is found of cars: he likes playing with them, watching them and parking them on his pillow against his ear when he goes to sleep. He could reel of a number of reasons why the car was dressed in a light, soft, cotton garment:

• The car was parked, was asleep – of course it was wearing pajamas!
• He (the car) was put to sleep in the middle of the day - of course it had to cover his head and eyes not to get disturbed by other cars, people and the sun.

But why didn’t my friend suggest that the car was wearing a jacket or a hat? I think it was because he recognized the white, cotton flannel with specific soft texture someone had used to tailor a dress – sorry: pajamas for the car.

As someone who appreciates tailoring, dress-design and textiles, I was glad to hear how much embodied knowledge my little friend (my little poet) had about textile qualities!

Seeing and saying – matter of communication context?

Kieran Egan wrote “we all begin as poets” (Egan, 2002) using imagination in making sense of our world. Young children often amaze us with their “poetic” expressions where their metaphors “sprawl” in different directions, connecting apparently unrelated things. These metaphors might not “carry the day” (Kress & Van Leeuwen, 2006, p.8), but they might still reflect the world as it has been experienced by each of them. On the other side, what they see or say is probably also influenced by the contexts of communication: expectation to others, and what they might expect from one. For instance, by saying something unexpected you might get attention, show yourself off, make someone laugh – or “test” him/her!



Researching with three-year-olds, I have observed how the tiniest new-experienced details can remind them of their earlier experiences; I observed how a rhythmic sound of hammering reminded a girl of her embodied experience: “That’s my heartbeat”, she said. But each communication context is unique and it’s not possible to state just one reason why somebody says something – it’s much more complicated than that (I have learned from Robert Stake (2010) that one should be cautious addressing causality – we can never know for sure why something happens). Here is an event that made me think about a boy’s choices of what to draw, what to see and what to say.

I was a visitor in an early childhood centre. The children did not know me and I tried to observe from distance. When the joint activity ended, a 3,5 years old boy found a seat at the table close to corner I was sitting, found a piece of paper and started to draw. While he was drawing he was frequently looking at me and talking loud about the dramatic actions taking place on the drawing: There was a bad guy and a good goy. The lines over the paper, together with the energetic hand movements and the sounds he made, were indicating the good guy’s shooting on the bad guy. Somehow in the middle of the action the boy said “I” and it came out that the good guy (a super-hero) was actually himself.


The boy explained that the god guy killed the bad guy. I felt sorry for the bad guy (Or may be I simply got intrigued by the boy’s invitation to interact with him? …Or I (pedagogically-thinking) wanted to make him reflect about the act of violence he had just performed?). So I started to talk to the boy: “Oh, poor bad guy! What will his parents say when they find out that he is dead?” And he replied: “They won’t care – they are in jail!”

While the boy was verbally and visually making his story, I sometimes looked around the room to see what was going on outside our narrow conversation context. Even though the boy beside me seemed to be deeply engaged with his drawing, each time I raised my head, he immediately looked at me saying: “Don’t go!” or “Please stay!”


“May be some doctors can help him to get back to life?”- I tried again, and the boy drew an ambulance (not recognizable symbol), but he concluded: “None can help him now. He is dead! Not even a million doctors can help him!” And the good guy kept shooting, which resulted in large amount of crossing lines on the paper, until the shooting-lines had covered (almost) all evidence that any guys ever were drawn on the sheet of paper. He realized that the drawing started to look like something else. “Look, there is a spider web!”, he said. “Yes”, I said, and I noticed a little circle between the web-lines: “And here is a spider!”- I said pointing at the circle.

The boy straightened his back and looked at me seriously – almost angry: “No! That’s not a spider! That’s my penis” he said and kept looking me strait in my eyes for a long moment – as if he was testing my reaction. I tried not to look surprised and to continue the conversation: “Oh, it’s not a spider…” – but I was shocked. The boy got back to his drawing and started to draw a large, round spider with many legs, while I was trying to understand what had just happened.

The circle (the penis) could have been there all the time as a part of the drawing beneath. But the boy’s drawing of humans did not have any details, and I don’t believe that the circle was ever drawn as a symbol for a penis. Did the boy said that just to get my attention? He did not want me to go and he seemed to know which words had shocking influence on people (He might have for example experienced that if his older brother used the same word to shock their parents?)

This event can of course be interpreted in many ways – some people would, may be, get concerned about the violence, or about the boy’s vocabulary. And I, I am amazed by the boy’s communication competence – he really managed to impress me, engage my attention for more than 15 minutes, and motivate me to reflect in order to increase my understanding.


About the drawings: The boy did not want me to take picture of the drawing: “Only our teachers are allowed to take pictures!”, he said. So, the drawings presented on this blog are my son's, when he was 4 years old.

Egan, K. (2002). We begin as poets. In L. Bresler & C. M. Thompson (Eds.), The arts in children's lives: context, culture, and curriculum (pp. 93-104). Boston: Kluwer Academic.
Kress, G., & Van Leeuwen, T. (2006). Reading images: the grammar of visual design. London: Routledge.
Stake, R. E. (2010). Qualitative research: studying how things work. New York: Guilford Press.