3. Decide how you will establish and extend metaphorical thinking during the lesson. Most Metaphorical Expression lessons begin with a direct analogy between your topic and something else to compare against your topic. Unlike Compare and Contrast, the two items for comparison should not be similar in any obvious ways. Therefore, instead of comparing capitalism with socialism (as they might in a Compare and Contrast lesson), students might compare capitalism with a baseball Part Four: Self-Expressive Strategies 139 game or a locomotive or a bee hive. Students may be provided with both items for comparison (e.g., How is a colony like a child? How is human circulation like a transit system?), or you may wish to challenge students to create and develop their own item for metaphorical comparison. (Developing an interpretation is like __________ because __________.)
Once students have explored the central analogy of the lesson, you may wish to extend metaphorical activity to enrich student thinking. Below are some basic guidelines for extending metaphorical thinking:
∘ You can have students imagine they are the topic and describe themselves and how they feel (personal analogy). Personal analogies give students the chance to identify with the topic in the first person.
∘ You can introduce compressed conflicts (two terms that describe the topic but seem to contradict one another: e.g., powerful and dependent for capitalism) to help students explore the paradoxes and “conceptual pressure points” inherent in the topic.
∘ You can ask students to create new direct analogies to focus thinking and build new connections between ideas. (What else can we compare to capitalism?)
For more on how to extend students’ thinking using personal analogies and compressed conflicts, see the Variations and Extensions section on page 140.