On the many metaphors of learning … and their associated educational frames.

Current landscapes of curriculum discourse and educational practice are examined by focusing on co-evolutions of metaphors for knowledge, learning and teaching across four prominent ‘frames’—namely, Standardized Education, Authentic Education, Democratic Citizenship Education and Systemic Sustainability Education. It is argued that these frames become compelling and resilient (or repulsive and nonsensical)—not because of what they explicitly assert, but because of the coherence of their implicit webs of vocabulary, metaphor, image and ideological association. While some of these frames/webs may be embraced as complementary, more often they are treated as conflicting or incoherent—in part, it would seem, because of tensions among their mainly implicit substrates of figurative association. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]