New paper: Metaphors beyond words

Photo by Tara Winstead from Pexels,: https://www.pexels.com/photo/an-illustration-of-stick-people-8378752/

Metaphors don't just live in language – they are also enacted with the whole body. Our new open-access paper in Science Education explores how science teachers use speech, gesture, and material objects to bring abstract concepts to life.

Together with my former master’s student, Priscila Kohler, and Marianne Ødegaard from the University of Oslo, I analysed video data from five science teachers across 16 lessons as part of the LISSI project. What we found challenges a common assumption, namely that metaphors are primarily verbal phenomena. In practice, teachers routinely expressed metaphorical meaning without words – through hand gestures or full-body enactments that scaled scientific processes to human size and made them tangible 🙌

We identified five distinct patterns in how teachers orchestrated these multimodal metaphorical performances, and we traced the specific functions that different modes (speech, gesture, material objects) play in making and communicating the meaning of abstract science concepts to students. Together, these findings show that metaphors in science teaching function as both figures of thought and figures of action. Very cool!