“If you think of the world as a piece of custard…”: gifted children's use of metaphor as a tool for conceptual reasoning

Abstract

This small-scale qualitative study examines the transcript of a group enquiry conducted according to the practice of philosophical enquiry with children (e.g. Lipman, 1993; Cam, 1995; Fisher, 1998). The enquiry was one of several held fortnightly and out of school hours — as an optional extension activity — with a group of verbally able pre-adolescent children aged eight to twelve years. The transcript was subjected to an interpretive structural analysis, and a central metaphor was explored for its usefulness to the children as a tool for reasoning. Two competing repertoires of discourse (Sherrard, 1997) were identified, reflecting the children's tendency either to hold ideas or constructs as being essentially separate (the analysis repertoire) or as being susceptible to reconciliation (the synthesis repertoire). The central metaphor was seen to play the role of a ‘conceptual playground,’ permitting the children to exercise both their imaginations and their reasoning abilities as they struggled to reconcile the competing repertoires.