Seeing through the metaphor: The OECD quality toolbox for early childhood
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Abstract
This paper explores the idea of metaphor as a persuasive device, using as an example a recent OECD publication purporting to be a quality toolbox for early childhood education and care. Leaving aside the problematic notion of quality, we argue that there is a serious problem with the idea of education as something that can be done with a toolbox, particularly in the formative stages of young children’s education. We suggest that the OECD selection of the toolbox as a metaphor is a way of inserting international economic imperatives into local government education policy, in ways that the citizenry is not aware of. As with any metaphor for education, the selection highlights some aspects while hiding others, a concealment that can’t be exposed by intensifying one’s gaze without a change in perspective. To examine the extent of what remains hidden by the toolbox, we engage in creative play with some different metaphors for education, arguing that particular metaphors may serve to obfuscate rather than clarify, an artifice that is not acceptable from a body as influential and far-reaching as the OECD.
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©2016 by De Gruyter Mouton
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Editorial
- Contemporary approaches to a pedagogy of process
- Signs as functions: Edusemiotic and ontological foundations for a semiotic concept of a sign
- Edusemiotics as process semiotics: Towards a new model of semiosis for teaching and learning
- The implications for education of Peirce’s agapist principle
- Writing and Différance
- Seeing through the metaphor: The OECD quality toolbox for early childhood
- Values, edusemiotics, and intercultural dialogue: From Russia with questions
- Usage de l’objet, signification et émergence de la conscience à l’étape préverbale du développement: Une perspective édusémiotique
- Les intuitions édusémiotiques des grands pédagogues : Engagement sémiotique, théorie de l’enquête et narrativité
- Edusemiotics and Karl-Otto Apel’s transcendental semiotics
- Edusemiotics of meaningful learning experience: Revisiting Kant’s pedagogical paradox and Greimas’ semiotic square
- Can design inquiry advance edusemiotics? Rethinking factual information and imaginative interpretation
- Monstrous hermeneutics: Learning from diagrams
- Learning to take play seriously: Peirce, Bateson, and Huizinga on the sacrality of play
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Editorial
- Contemporary approaches to a pedagogy of process
- Signs as functions: Edusemiotic and ontological foundations for a semiotic concept of a sign
- Edusemiotics as process semiotics: Towards a new model of semiosis for teaching and learning
- The implications for education of Peirce’s agapist principle
- Writing and Différance
- Seeing through the metaphor: The OECD quality toolbox for early childhood
- Values, edusemiotics, and intercultural dialogue: From Russia with questions
- Usage de l’objet, signification et émergence de la conscience à l’étape préverbale du développement: Une perspective édusémiotique
- Les intuitions édusémiotiques des grands pédagogues : Engagement sémiotique, théorie de l’enquête et narrativité
- Edusemiotics and Karl-Otto Apel’s transcendental semiotics
- Edusemiotics of meaningful learning experience: Revisiting Kant’s pedagogical paradox and Greimas’ semiotic square
- Can design inquiry advance edusemiotics? Rethinking factual information and imaginative interpretation
- Monstrous hermeneutics: Learning from diagrams
- Learning to take play seriously: Peirce, Bateson, and Huizinga on the sacrality of play
