Visual Metaphors and Pedagogical Practices in the New Century

In the chapter, by brawing on Lakoff and Johnson’s Conceptual Metaphor Theory, the concept of enactive metaphor is discussed in order to reinterpret early childhood symbolic play as a process of enactment based on children’s capacity to perceive new affordances in objects. This concept builds on the idea that seeing an object as something else demands a decentering process in representational terms, hence a participatory process generating new domains of social sense-making. In the chapter it is claimed that this process can be facilitated by designing learning activities in contexts where preschoolers are offered the possibility to augment their metaphorical imageries by exploring non-structured materials and are offered access to digital technologies for the purpose of creating narrative structures including visual components.