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TEACHER IN SEARCH OF A METAPHOR
by Ana Robles, HLT secondary consultant
"I think that imagination is stronger than science, that myth is more convincing than history; that dreams are more powerful than facts; that hope has always triumphed over experience; that life is the only remedy for worry. And I believe that love is stronger than death".
Fulghum

Have you ever seen any of those fantastic Hollywood films where a superteacher takes a group of students, sometimes the whole school, or even the entire town, by storm and, single-handedly,  transforms the lives of platoons of students in just 3 months?
Each of the superteachers in those films has her own recipe for success, sometimes they use karate to teach English and others disguise themselves as motherly figures and invite students out to dinner and visit them at their houses, but they all have something in common, they are able to solve all their students’ problems, they are in control, they act and do things to change their students and it is their actions which determine the results. The change that happens is a direct result of the power the teacher has.
As a film theme there is nothing new in this approach. Superteachers are to teachers what Rambo is to the run-of-the-mill soldier. 
Naturally, all this is only  Hollywood films, just stories for children. But where do those stories come from? Why is the plot repeated and repeated once and again in films and books?
What if both superteachers and Rambo were not just stories, but ways of expressing the hero myth, which is one of the most pervading metaphors in our culture? According to the hero myth there is a select, small group of very special people who make great things happen. They are heroes because they are special, and, naturally, if you are not one of them, if you are not special, you cannot make things happen and you are bound to fail.
Joseph Campbell calls myths “influential images” because myths “talk straight to our emotional system and elicit instant answers.” A story linked to a myth is much more than just a story because myths impact our emotions and direct our behaviour in a given direction. 
And certainly the hero myth is influential, first of all because it is tempting, oh, to be able to be Rambo and change the world so that it becomes what I want it to be! 
The hero myth is as tempting as it is false. It doesn’t work and we all know it. It is not that my students refuse to be transformed by me, it is that students all over the world are refusing to be changed. And not only teachers, in an era of constant transformation big multinational companies are spending millions (of dollars) on training programs to foster change and transformation and they are complaining that their employees resist change.
Or maybe, as the CEO of a famous company recently said, it is not that they resist change, it is that they resist being changed.
The hero myth is false and it is also dangerous, soul-dangerous, both for teachers and students alike.
For teachers because it puts us (and Rambo soldiers alike) in an impossible position. A hero is a hero because he/she is in control. But there is no way that I can be in control, because what should I be in control of: the sort of students in my lessons, their family environment,the values they receive at home and through TV, their previous experiences with other teachers that will affect their reactions towards the subject and me, the curriculum set by the educational authorities? Or any of the thousands factors we all know that have an impact in our lessons.
There is no way teachers can be in control, so we cannot became special, we cannot become heroes.
On the other hand, the hero myth is a yes/no myth. You are either a hero or you are not a hero. If you are not a hero you are a failure. If you are not superteacher saving your students from themselves you are the other sort of teacher those films depict, sometimes cynical, sometimes disillusioned and lost, sometimes self-centred,  always unworthy and lacking in some way. There is no grey zone, no way of improvement, no path for learning how to be a hero.
And being unworthy is a heavy load. If  the hero myth is acting somewhere, deep in my unconscious assumptions about what a teacher should be, then not being able to perform at that level, not being in control, not being able to transform my students would make me guilty, and not being able to improve would foster hopelessness and stress.
And nowadays there are lots of teachers suffering from guilt and stress. What in our mental frame  fosters that guilt?. Could the hero-myth be one of the causes of this poisonous guilt?
The hero-myth is soul dangerous for the students, too,  because it dehumanises them. They become objects to be transformed, clay to be shaped, vessels to be filled (not uncommon metaphors in education either).
And last but not least, the hero myth is ineffective. It is ineffective for the same reasons that make it dangerous. No change is possible if all the tools you have are dis-empowered teachers and dehumanised students.
And it is the pursuit of change that superteachers have  in common with real teachers. Learning means changing and teaching is about  helping the other to change. Change is at the very core of our work. Whatever the techniques we use, whatever the educational or linguistic theory we espouse, what we are all seeking is change. Teachers are primarily agents of change.
And if so, which is the best way to foster change? The hero myth is very clear about that, change is forced by the hero on the other. But is that a good mental map for a teacher? Is it a good assumption to work from? If not, what else is there? 
A myth is powerful for two reasons, first, because it represents, as Campbell says, a part of our mental model. Mental  models are all the tacit, unexamined, assumptions which define what we see and how we react, all the images and ideas that allow us to make sense of the world. 
So, a myth is powerful because it acts out of our conscious awareness. Bringing it to conscious awareness would be the first step towards switching it off. But bringing it to conscious awareness is not as easy as it first seems. Very often we support one point of view consciously while we react unconsciously to something very different.
The second step would be finding a better mental map, a better metaphor. 
Both steps involve analysing our mental models. And having a look at the murky waters of all those ideas we take for granted means asking questions. I don’t know what questions should be asked, let alone the answers to the questions, but here are some that come to my mind.

•	Is the hero myth active in me? Do I think that I, the teacher, am the person responsible for the students’ transformation? Or do I believe students are real people, capable of making decisions and choosing whether to study or not? Or do I espouse the one while I react to the other?
Do I feel I have failed somehow when a student challenges me? Do I feel a good teacher should be able not to have conflicts or to solve them on her own? Do I feel guilty about the conflict in my groups? How often do I tell myself “I would like to be able to motivate (motivate, move, change, transform) my students?
Because all these are sure indications of the hero myth acting deep down, whether I consciously espouse it or not.

•	What is learning? Is learning something that happens to you? Can I, as the expression in galego says “be learned by the teacher”? Or is learning a commitment, a decision? Can I really be made to learn?
If learning is something that happens to you then the idea of the students passively receiving data and being filled with it makes sense, but if learning is an active process, then a prior commitment on the student’s part is a basic requirement for the learning to be possible. And the student is the only one who can make the commitment.

•	How do we define learning? Do my students learn when they acquire information? Or do my students learn when they acquire knowledge? and I am using here John R. Searle’s definition of knowledge as the capacity for effective action. What do I consciously defend? And is my behaviour consistent with my 'official' opinions?
Do I only feel satisfied when I have given them long lists of things to learn? Do I feel guilty when I don’t feed them lots of information? Do I feel I am not doing my work when the students are working on their own? Do I need to speak, act, make myself present to feel I am teaching?
These are also typical reactions prompted by the hero myth. The traditional view in which the teacher feeds passive student with pre-cooked pills of information is thoroughly consistent with the hero myth. The hero-teacher acts and changes the student and  the more information the teacher teaches the more the student changes. 
Am I consciously defending one posture while I am reacting to and living in the other? 
Because if learning is about acquiring the capacity to act, and about learning  to use information in a way that is relevant then I can relax and feel satisfied when my students work, while I just monitor and watch. And any contradictions become useful feedback on my own mental map.
•	Who is responsible for what in the learning-teaching process? What is the teacher’s responsibility? What is the student responsibility?
Under the hero myth everything is crystal clear. The hero is responsible for everything. When things go well, they go well because of the hero’s efforts. Inversely, when things go wrong the only explanation is that the hero has failed,  the hero is guilty. 
But if learning is an active process, if my students are real people developing their capacity to act  and not mere vessels waiting to be filled with information, then learning cannot be the consequence of  the teacher’s actions alone, but the consequence of the interaction between the students and the teacher.
And that interaction can only be based on both the teacher’s and  the students’ commitment to the learning process. The change, the learning itself,  is the student’s responsibility, because learning as an active process can be nothing less than a choice, and this choice can only be made by the student.  
As the Chinese proverb says “Teachers open the door but you must enter for yourself”
It is not the teacher’s role to choose for the student whether to enter or not, but to help the student to realise the door is there, which means creating the atmosphere where change is feasible, to make the choice possible. Because any change implies taking risks and enduring confusion and if the risks are too big and the confusion too great the student won’t choose learning. 

•	How do we define success in the teaching profession? What has to happen in my lessons for me to know that I have done well? Does my success depend on my student’s success or does it depend on me?
According to the hero myth I, the hero-teacher, take the student and lead him or push him or drag him towards a goal set by me, the teacher and, therefore, I am successful when my students learn what I teach them, when I motivate them, when I take them where I want them to go.
But in a more complex process, where both teacher and students are responsible and where both are accountable for different parts of the process,  the teacher’s success cannot be measured by the students’ success and viceversa.
If the role of the teacher is to create an environment where change is possible, at the end of any teaching period a teacher would measure her success according to how effective she had been at offering tools, diagnosing, choosing accurate  procedures, setting adequate challenges, and letting the student act from freedom., while the student would measure success according to his own choice.
And that, inevitably, leads to the next question,

•	Are we feeling guilty for the wrong reasons? 
No, not in so far as we have responsibilities that we sometimes shirk, but very often we are doing more than our share and we still feel guilty because our students didn’t go where we wanted them to go. But is that really our responsibility?  Are our students just clay to be shaped? Are hero teachers really the answer? And if not, what sort of teachers are the answer? What sort of students? What other metaphor can guide us? 

And no, I don’t have answers for that last question either; do you? Because I would really appreciate any help and comments you can offer. Are my questions shared by other teachers or is this all just a senseless rambling? Can you help me to find a better metaphor? I look forward to hearing from you . 

Please, send any comments to  my e-mail: anarobl@teleline.es

This article was first published in IDEAS, the magazine of the Galician EFL teachers association and is used here by APIGA's kind permission.