Do behave!

That's the mnemonic I used many years ago for the three core auxiliary verbs in English: do, be & have. Now I've met them again in learning theory. We've been looking at the two prevailing metaphors for learning - the acquisition model (having) & the participation model (doing) & the argument for adding a third category: personal change/identity (being).

The first two are summed up in Anna Sfard's 1989 paper 'On Two Metaphors for Learning and the Dangers of Choosing Just One'. Sfard is a lecturer in maths education based at Haifa University.

[https://www.msu.edu/~sfard/]

The acquisition metaphor treats knowledge as goods which can be accumulated, combined, used to construct meanings, transferred from one place to another, shared. There may be debate about the most efficient way to acquire such commodities, but the underlying metaphor has been happily accepted by instructivists & constructivists alike.

The participation metaphor is less interested in knowledge than in knowing: the ongoing process rather than the end product. Learners are integrated into a community by learning to speak its language and to behave in accordance with its norms. They are no longer individual entrepreneurs, but parts of a greater whole. Such learning cannot be detached from its context.

Sfard is at pains to stress that this distinction is not the one frequently made between individual & social methods of learning (both of which use the acquisition metaphor & more recently the participation metaphor too) but one that captures an ontological point about what learning is.

She concludes with an appeal for 'metaphorical pluralism': both metaphors have a valuable contribution to make to research & practice alike, one which should not be sacrificed to 'theoretical exclusivity and didactic single-mindedness'. Metaphorical hegemony risks distorting our sense of what is normal and desirable, with potentially damaging effects on educators and, more importantly, learners.

'Being' is for tomorrow!