Learning Learning

Volume 24 Issue 3
Winter 2017

REVIEWS ŚǨBook Review
Ellen Head Miyazaki International College
From Contempt to Curiosity:
Creating the Conditions forGroups to Collaborate Using
Clean Language and SystematicModelling.
CaitlinWalker
Published by Clean Publishing,
Portchester, England, 2014, 216 pages. ISBN:
978-0-9574866-1-4

I

was attracted to this book after watching
Caitlin Walker’s TEDX talk, Clean Questions
and Metaphor Models. Walker has worked asa consultant in contexts from schools touniversities, business, and local government andis an expert in training people to understandmetaphor, to be sensitive to metaphors ineveryday communication, and to work moreskillfully in situations where misunderstanding iscaused by conflicting metaphors. Her workbuilds on that of psychotherapist, David Grove.
Her book has much to offer to teachers anduniversity professors, both in terms ofprocedures, which I believe could be liftedstraight from the pages of this book and done ina classroom, and for anyone engaged incollaboration, management of a department,
training or curriculum renewal project.
This book is an autobiographical account ofeight projects Walker has led, with a chapter
devoted to each, plus an introduction and achapter for “taking stock” near the end. The
explanations are very clear and the index enables
one to go back over particular areas. The
anecdotal nature of the book makes it easy toread and ensures that the reader sees the process

FROM CONTEMPT TO CURIOSITY

in a real context in which it was developed orused.
A recurring theme is the development ofcollaborative autonomy in groups. The goal isto hand over procedures to a group that they
can use on their own. “... and I knew my workwas done” is Walker's signature line when thegroup starts to function well, establish its own
leadership, and have balanced interaction
patterns. In other words, these processes are allabout the development of intra-group
autonomy.
In an interesting example, Caitlin Walker shares
her experiences supporting a curriculum
enrichment project for sports majors at theUniversity of Liverpool. By teaching peer
coaching processes to the students, thedepartment was able to improve the program tosuch an extent that there were major gains in thenumber of students getting firsts or upper
seconds, and a reduction of the drop-out rate tonear zero. Though Walker mentions thisphenomenal result in her TED talk, the limited
time didn’t allow for deeper discussion. “Fromcontempt to curiosity” fills in some of the gaps
allowing educators to go away and set up such a
project.
Chapter 7, entitled “Inspiring Capability”,
focuses on the Liverpool project and has usefulrecipes such as Rough Guide to Me at My Best. In therough guide, lecturers were asked to think of a
metaphor for themselves teaching at their best;what an observer will see and hear when theyare teaching at their best, what supports orhinders them, what three areas they could
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Learning Learning
improve and three things colleagues could do tosupport them. Staff created an orientation video
for students with interviews investigating what
had enabled successful final year students to get
the most out of university. The areas they
focused on were: learning at your best, time
management, making good decisions, dealing
with setbacks and how to get motivated.
Students were given a handbook which wasused in group tutorials. Could developing
metaphors make a real difference? It seems so.
One example given is a student who was lazy
but brilliant, always had trouble with deadlines
but still passed the course. This student saidlearning was like being a cheetah: “I lie aroundall day in a tree sleeping, then something catches
my eye or I get hungry, I'm really fast, kill it, eat
it and then I'm back in my tree again.” For him,
time was like a cloud, and decisions were likefloating in a river. After working with thetutorial group, he found the metaphor of beingout in a theme park and making deliberate
decisions about where he wanted to go. The
workbook included a space where the group
could set developmental tasks for each other, andhis task was to use his cell phone timer for
activities during the day.
Some of the most telling passages relate tooccasions when Walker met resistance. “I don’t
do metaphors” announces one head of IT withwhom she has to work. Walker tells him her
metaphor of the project as white-water rafting,to which he says, “I can see I wouldn't want towork with you, I’d hate this.” To which shereplies, “If you know you’d hate this and we've
still got four minutes, what would an ideal
project be like for you?” “It be more likedesigning the blueprints for a building.” sheadopts his metaphor, asking if the blueprints canbe in pencil to allow for alterations, and heagrees. Throughout the book, relationships are
created with what she calls “exquisite attention”
to language, gesture and interaction. Such

FROM CONTEMPT TO CURIOSITY

Volume 24 Issue 3
Winter 2017attention can bring clarity and respect insituations which seem to be deadlocked.
Chapter 6 “Getting too big for my boots”
describes how her team was invited to work in asecondary school by a board of education. By
training teachers and students to move awayfrom victim / rescuer roles and to use a cycle ofgiving feedback, focusing on outcomes andactions (a model she calls “the drama triangle”)
the behavioural norms were improved. But she
comments that the project was less effective andslower because the school management team
had not been consulted from the start: “Thechange processes should be led by the mostinfluential points in the system” and “Themotivation for change must come from within
the system” are two of the principles of her
approach.
Readers might need to be cautious about
applying these techniques in their own settings
but at the same time, I think many of themodels would work well in EFL classes andteachers' workshops and could be lifted more orless straight from the book.
Some members of the Learner development
SIG may remember that in 2010 the Learner
Development SIG forum focused on metaphorsfor language learning and using metaphors in
relation to autonomy. More recently Darren
Elliott (2015) has presented his fascinating,ongoing research in this area. Back in 2013,
after reading an excellent article in Learning
Learning (Sykes, 2011), I asked one of my classes
to discuss their metaphors for learning. Whatwas interesting was that students’ metaphorsrevealed defensiveness/aggression about theirlanguage learning, as six or seven people saidlearning a language was like having a weapon.
One of the more fluent members said language
learning was like being a sponge and absorbing
words, while another said it was like going on ajourney, meeting people on the way and getting

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Volume 24 Issue 3
Winter 2017

Learning Learning
various different views. Several students decided
to take up the journey metaphor instead of theweapon.
One question readers may have is “Aren'tstudents going to be having difficulty using
metaphor if they are not familiar with English?”
Having used this kind of approach with students
in Japan in 2014 and some European and Arabic
students in the autumn of 2014, I would say it
can help students to develop English whichreally belongs to them. Caitlin Walker’s bookwill be invaluable for anyone who wants to workwith this approach.

References
Elliott, D. (2016). I don’t like bad weather but I
still like camping: Learners’ metaphors andlearner autonomy, Learning Learning, 22(3),21-29. Retrieved from http://ld-sig.org/wpcontent/uploads/2014/11/FeaturedArticle.pdf
Sykes, J. (2011). Promoting self-awareness inlearners through metaphor elicitation.
Learning Learning, 18(1), 11-19. Retrieved
from http://ld-sig.org/LL/18one/Sykes.pdf

Ellen Head taught EFL/EAP at university in Kansai from 2000 to 2014. After a period as an
EFL assessment consultant and researcher for the British Council in China, she returned to Japan in2017 and is currently teaching at Miyazaki International College. Ellen’s recent research interests
focus on perceived fluency.

Whose Autonomy?
Voices and Agency in Language Learning

Independent Learning Association Conference 2018,Konan Women’s University, Kobe, 5-8 September
The Call for Proposals closes 14 January 2018!
For more information <ila2018.org>

FROM CONTEMPT TO CURIOSITY

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