Social acts and social systems: Community as metaphor

Abstract

The community metaphor currently dominates much of the thinking in educational theory and pedagogy, especially in the field of composition and rhetoric. This study critiques the community metaphor through a tripartite analysis of student- sand teacher-generated metaphors. Two textual levels of metaphors-in-use are considered: grammatical--semantic metaphors and lexical metaphors. A functional linguistic analysis demonstrates the thoroughly heteroglossic nature of language in classroom talk and text. This article contends it would be more useful for teachers to proceed from a collectivity metaphor as a way to capture the dynamic nature of language-in-use. Subsequently, both students and teachers can be more attentive to the ways in which they define themselves, through metaphor, as a group-in-process.