Death of metaphors in life science?

To some extent, all learning means understanding something unknown in terms of something known. Evidently, learning is something much more than a mere cognitive understanding of something put into words. Learning can be a primarily bodily experience as learning to swim or to ride a bicycle, or a combined physical and auditory experience as learning to play the piano. However, in all those cases, new experiences are added to and filtered through prior experiences. You cannot learn to ride a bicycle without using your prior skills in balance and control of your limbs. The idea that prior experiences and knowledge are crucial for the ability to learn from new experiences and new information is a central notion in most theories of learning. Ausubel (1968) states that meaningful learning takes place when new information is coupled to existing knowledge. According to Dewey (1938/1997), we are constantly transformed by our experience, and our present experience is in turn transformed by our prior experience. This constitutes Dewey’s principle of continuity, which states that “every experience both takes up something from those which have gone before and modifies in some way the quality of those which come after” (ibid p. 35). One way of relating something unknown to something known may be the use of metaphor – that is, explaining something in terms of something else. In science we also use our prior knowledge of the world to understand new phenomena or to understand known phenomena more in depth. The importance of metaphors and analogies in science teaching and learning has been extensively discussed in the science education literature (e.g. Aubusson, Harrison, & Ritchie, 2006; Clement, 1998; Clement & Rea-Ramirez 2008; Duit, 1991). However, in molecular life science education, the role of metaphors and analogies is less well studied.

In this investigation, we study how upper secondary and tertiary students make meaning of biomolecular visualizations (see Rundgren, 2008 for a fuller description of the study) related to the function of proteins. Here, we specially look closer at their use of metaphor to interpret the scientific content in a set of visualizations.