Metaphors of AI in Education: Discourses, Histories and Practices

Metaphor has long played a key role in both exercising and discussing education.Socrates used metaphor to describe teachers as those who help give birth to learning, as opposed to simply imparting knowledge (Plato & Cornford 1945).Metaphors help us to explain complexity through simpler, more vivid, and familiar terms.Whether functioning as a pedagogical tool to support knowledge construction or serving as a resource for education specialists to discuss various aspects of the field, metaphors have enduring potency as "condensed analogies" (Perelman & Olbrechts-Tyteca 2008: 671).Indeed, metaphor both displaces and shapes meanings and thus plays a central role in framing, disseminating, and reproducing perspectives (Charteris-Black 2004).In shedding light on specific directions whilst obscuring others, metaphors can encapsulate and communicate value judgements and beliefs.Metaphors "are always a double bind: they at once allow us to see and stop up our abilities to notice" (Hejnol 2017).They create ways of seeing, acting, and being, thus potentially fuelling imagination and understanding.