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Area of Study - The Journey

The Concept of the Journey

This is a slightly modified version of the lecture given at the English Teachers' Association of NSW HSC Area of Study Student Day at Darling Harbour on 3rd November 2003

© Jane Mills

Jane Mills is both at the University of Sydney and at the Australian Film, Television & Radio School where, until recently, she was Head of Screen Studies. She has made documentary films and is the author of books on feminism, human rights, linguistics and an award-winning book on sex education. Her last book was The Money Shot: Cinema, Sin and Censorship (Pluto Press, Australia) and her next will be called Subverting Hollywood: the circulation of ideas between global & local cinemas (Allen & Unwin). She is currently enjoying a scholarship at the University of Western Sydney and also training teachers in cineliteracy at Priority Schools within the NSW DET.

By my reckoning, you have all just embarked upon a journey that, whatever speed you go, will take exactly 11 months, 1 week, 6 days, 23 hours and 44 minutes. Your destination, of course, is that great big landmark in your lives: your HSC English exam. And the arduous path that you're on? It's certainly one on which you'll encounter many metaphors and clichés. They're hard to avoid.

Some of you will have got off to a good start and you'll stay on the fast track and race ahead. It'll be full steam ahead and plain sailing. But now and then you'll find yourselves at a crossroads and, not knowing which way to turn; it might feel that you've lost all sense of direction. From then on, it could be downhill all the way. And, on a one-way ticket to nowhere, you'll come to a dead end or get bogged. Will you lose your way, stumble and fall behind or perhaps completely fall by the wayside? And, when you've ground to a halt, will you know if it's the light you see at the end of the tunnel - or simply the lights of the train speeding towards you from the other direction? You'll have to cross that bridge when you come to it. Meanwhile, your teachers will be running round in circles and definitely beginning to feel that they're all over the hill.

Is Year 12 a rat race? Are you up a creek without a paddle? Does it feel like you can't jam on the brakes? Does any one take any notice when you ask despairingly: "Are we nearly there?" Have you ever felt you want to stop not just the bus, but stop the world and get off? Or, after such an odyssey through cliché and metaphor, perhaps you want to stop the world and ask me to get off! But the metaphor of learning as a journey is so powerful that I can't leave it alone. And, whether you're studying physical, imaginative or inner journeys, you shouldn't leave it alone either.

'Learning Is A Journey' And 'Knowledge Is Landscape'.

The metaphor of learning as a journey is so pervasive that we often don't notice it - unless you pile them all up like a multi car crash in a road movie as I've just done. As several teachers have themselves concluded, we frequently hear this metaphor expressed in 'teacher-speak':

"We covered poetry last week."

"We have so much material to cover before the test."

'Cover' in this context means covering groundómoving across a terrain of some kind. And in this metaphor, knowledge is a landscape through which the learning journey travels. We see this reflected in the metaphors we use in everyday language such as:

"I just went ahead..."

"Some of the students fell behind."

"If he's lost, he's just going to get further behind..."

"We didn't get to that."

In this metaphor, the ideas and concepts that you need to make sense of what you're learning tend to get turned into objects and treated as if they were tangible, things that you can see, touch and grasp. And these 'things' are strewn among the landscape of knowledge: perhaps a bit of form at an all-night café; some context at a cockroach motel; a sliver of structure at a picnic ground; a simile or two at the motorway toll booth.

Teachers in this metaphor are simply drivers or tour operators whose job it is merely to move you quickly through the landscape, urging you to pick up these 'things' at all the milestones and pit stops until you've covered all the ground, and arrived at your final destination - that scary terminus the exam room where you take your English HSC exam. In this interpretation, the journey becomes not a road movie but a disaster movie, with the teacher driving a busload full of students at full speed along a road that has been decided in advance not by you, the travellers, but by the Board of Studies. It becomes a road that's full of roadblocks dead ends. It becomes a race between you and that clock ticking away.

More often than not the only way to win the race is to sail right past the bus stops. The racecourse with its hurdles, to really mix my metaphors, becomes one that you have little power to navigate yourselves if you're going to reach your destination before it's too late.

In fact, students on this journey will probably feel like one of the passengers in Jan de Bont's film, Speed (1994), starring Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock. The plot is this: there is a bomb on a bus full of passengers that will explode if the speed drops below 50 miles per hour or if any of the passengers try to get off. Reeves is a cop who heroically climbs on board and who tells the passengers what to do. Bullock is on the bus because she's had her driving license taken away - for speeding, no less. But when the bus driver is shot, she has to take the wheel. She, like all the passengers, has to do what she's told - or everyone will die.

In a journey like this, there's no time to look at the view, no time to enjoy the ride, and no time to do anything other than feel scared, close your eyes, hang on tight, and keep going at a pre-determined speed in the direction decided by someone person who may or may not be in control until you reach your destination. The knowledge and ideas that you need to make sense of the relationship between the real world and your selves is treated simply as ballast. The knowledge and experience that you bring with you is unwanted baggage. It's the first thing that gets thrown overboard when you hit a rock or get bogged.

But ideas aren't objects that can be 'picked up' at predetermined stopping points. Knowledge isn't a landscape that's somewhere 'out there' forming no more than a backdrop that you race through. And learning isn't - or shouldn't be - a race. The ideas and concepts that you need to make sense of your journey are complex and non-tangible. Knowledge isn't external to you; it is also a part of your inner self and reflects your own experiences. It takes time to understand the new ideas and concepts that you encounter in order to make sense of them and, importantly, relate to your own knowledge, experience and ideas.

The problem is, of course, that your teacher has turned into a Keanu Reeves character who is constantly yelling at you not to stop - or you'll be reduced to a bit of bloody road kill. And you've become passive passengers on a journey through hell.

The point I'm making is a serious one. And we can see how serious when we discover that the very word 'curriculum' originated in the Greek word for 'course', as in 'race course'. There is, however, a different journey that you can all take. And the way forward is to look more closely at the role metaphors play in our lives. Because metaphors are much more than just literary devices with meanings that are determined by authors and interpreted by teachers. They can show us how understanding the links between the physical world and the realm of ideas can affect how we learn and this affects what we learn. Whether you're studying physical, imaginative or inner journeys, you'll need to understand these links.

Metaphor

A metaphor is a figure of speech, a literary or visual image, that's used to compare two different items based on resemblance or similarity.4 The word originates in the Greek word meaning to "carry across" or "transfer" and so implicitly draws upon a notion of a motion - an essential element of any journey.

Metaphors are an essential part of our everyday language. They are one of the ways in which we make sense of the links between the physical, imaginative and inner or spiritual worlds. We use them constantly to give physical qualities - which are understood from daily experience - to non-physical things such as ideas.

Metaphors are used by novelists, poets, artists and filmmakers in ways that relate to their specific medium. So, when we read about two roads diverging in Robert Frost's poem, "The Road Not Taken" we understand that he's transferring the notion of a physical journey to that of an inner journey in which humankind has to learn to take decisions.6 Similarly, when we see a panning shot in a film - one in which the camera moves from the left or right so that we see one object in frame at the start of the shot and another object framed at the end of the shot - we realise that the cinematographer is using film language to convey the notion of travel in order to tell us that a character is learning to see a world in which two separate and unconnected objects are linked.

To explore this further, let's look at an extract from a very different movie, one from a totally different age (and one in which, incidentally, there is no panning shot as this was not yet a part of film language). The film I want to tell you about is The Impossible Voyage by the early French filmmaker, Georges Méli's in 1904.7 It is one of the earliest science fiction films ever made.8 Like most science fiction it uses the author's or filmmaker's imagination to draw upon reality, knowledge and ideas about the physical world and, in doing so, it allows us to interpret what is being said about an inner journey of the spirit and the mind.

The film is obviously fiction and, in fact, is partly based on a fantasy stage play adapted from a Jules Verne story. Like much science fiction, it shares many characteristics with the realm of physical science which is a realm of knowledge that explores the relationship between the strange and the familiar, what it is to be human or artificial, and the boundaries between the external body and the inner mind or soul.

The film opens with a crowded assembly of men (and some women) to whom a scientist is showing a drawing of fantastical vehicles. The crowd nod approvingly and we then see a factory where the vehicle - a cross between a space rocket, an airship and a submarine - is being constructed. The next scene shows a group of travellers getting on a train which travels across a mountain range and eventually stops in a village where the passengers all pile into a tram. After crashing, the passengers take another train which climbs a mountain and, suddenly in animation, takes off into the sky. They journey past shooting stars, planets and meteors until they land in the mouth of the sun which promptly belches smoke and sparks and vomits out bits of the train. Because it's so hot the travellers climb into an ice wagon that has thoughtfully been provided at which point they all freeze into a solid ice block. Once thawed, they climb into the airship which launches off a cliff and parachutes into the ocean where two real fish swim past. Some more adventures involving an octopus and some explosions follow before the film ends with everyone back on dry land where the travellers are welcomed as heroes. The film ends with the suggestion that another similar journey is about to begin.

The plot itself doesn't tell the whole tale. We need to know the context in order to learn more about how it explores the links between physical, imaginative and inner worlds:

Imperialism and the colonization of overseas nations had been going on for centuries. So, although the medium and the techniques of cinematic metaphor were new and creative, many of the ideas contained within these filmic metaphors weren't. This sense of new, creative ideas and old, dead ones also exists in the concept of the metaphor.

Traditionally, metaphors were seen to be a feature of language rather than as part of our thought or cognitive processes. They were divided into two groups: 'creative' or 'dead'. Creative metaphors were thought of as having the power to make the ordinary strange and the strange ordinary, making an idea more layered in meaning and so more interesting. Dead metaphors, on the other hand, were those that had lost the ability to make us stop and think about layered meanings or gain greater insight and understanding abut the world the words are describing.

To give an example of a dead metaphor, the metaphor in the sentence "My goal is to get a good HSC result" was once creative but after years of use it had simply become a new sense of the word 'goal' which now appears unrelated to the notion of the destination. To give another, the very term 'dead metaphor' is itself a dead metaphor: not many of us stop and think about an inanimate figure of speech in terms of it being born and having a life that ends in death.

In recent years, however, the work of linguists such as George Lakoff and Michael Johnson changed our understanding of the metaphor.14 They showed how metaphors are grounded in the human experience of space, time, and physical objects. They argued that dead metaphors are much more than just tired figures of speech which no longer add meaning. They suggested that so-called 'dead metaphors' are better understood as 'conceptual metaphors' that link the physical world and the world of ideas. They provide the cognitive framework that enable us to process the sensory information to perceive, become aware of, make sense of, and make judgments about what we see, touch, feel, smell and hear. In short, conceptual metaphors pervade our thought, dictate our language and inform the way we make sense of ourselves and the world we live in.15

Conceptual metaphors

The 'learning is a journey' metaphor flows out of the 'life is a journey' metaphor which is a good example of a conceptual metaphor:

Within this model, as I've already discussed, all too often the purpose of learning gets diverted and an emphasis gets placed on the teacher's role as the route-planner, timetabler and driver. It also leads to notions of all learning being teacher-led and of all learning taking place in the classroom.

What gets ignored is the students' own insight, knowledge and experience that they have gained outside the classroom in their home and community environments. The 'learning is a journey' metaphor seems to mean that learning becomes a dead end and leads to a concept of students not as travellers but as road kill. If this is what happens on the journey of learning, what we need is a big sign saying: WRONG WAY - GO BACK.

The popular evolutionary scientist, Stephen Jay Gould, suggests a way out:

When we are caught in conceptual traps, the best exit is often a change in metaphor - not because the new guideline will be truer to nature (for neither the old nor the new metaphor lies "out there" in the woods,) but because we need a shift to more fruitful perspectives, and metaphor is often the best agent of conceptual transition.16 Perhaps we can see what he means in the sequel to Speed. In Speed ll: Cruise Control (1997), director Jan de Bont offers us another journey disaster movie, this time aboard an ocean liner. In the first film, if the bus does stop, everyone will get killed. In this one, however, if the ocean liner doesn't stop, everyone will get killed. It's a small about turn - but one we can learn from.17

In Speed ll: Cruise Control the liner comes to a stop only by crashing into a Mediterranean seaside town. I acknowledge that this might not be the best metaphor for students on their HSC English journey but there is something we can learn from this movie: admittedly some of the villagers come to a sticky end but at least all the passengers survive!

What I'm suggesting is that a change of pace, the occasional U-turn, and the time to bring one's own knowledge, experience and understanding of the real world is what makes a journey interesting and valuable. It's also what makes both learning and teaching worthwhile. It allows us to reflect on and make sense of the texts we've read, viewed, listened to or looked at. Importantly, it also makes it possible to build upon our own knowledge and experiences - everything we bring with us before we reach the classroom - and apply these to the new ideas and areas of knowledge we encounter. As a group of teachers has commented:

If we believe that learning requires us to interact with our environment, the trip becomes a journey of discovery instead of a flat-out race across the landscape of a discipline.

In this interpretation of the metaphor, the teacher and students travel more or less together, along a somewhat defined route, making frequent stops along the way as students notice something of interest that they wish to explore. There are occasional interesting side trips to unexpected places. At times, groups pursue different paths and, after returning to the main road, report to the class about what they have found.18

Just a small shift in our understanding of the metaphor, one that can lead to an interpretation of the 'learning as a journey' metaphor, helps to put the students in the driving seat at least some of the time.

Linking knowledge and ideas

At the start of this lecture I said that making links between areas of knowledge and ideas was important. I want to return to this:

A physical journey
involves the imagination in order to make sense of it and prevent us from being passive passengers; it also often involves an inner journey as we learn to make the links between what we're physically seeing, hearing and feeling and how it makes us think about the outside world;
An imaginative journey
perhaps one we read about or see or even simply think about or relive, is often the result of an actual physical journey. The imagination helps us make sense of how such a journey relates to both the mind and body.
An inner journey
inevitably involves the imagination as we read about, view or experience a physical journey and learn to express our ideas about mental and spiritual journeys by making sense of the relationship between ourselves and the world we live in.

There's another film I want to discuss to show how a filmmaker uses the metaphor of the journey to make the links between separate areas of knowledge and, in doing so, help us understand more about the connections between the body (physical realm), mind (realm of the imagination) and the heart (inner, spiritual realm).

Confessions of a Head Hunter is made by the Indigenous Australian filmmaker, Sally Riley. The plot involves two young Indigenous men who travel from city to city around Australia on a special mission. The police are after them but at first we're not sure why. Does the title mean that they're murderers? Whose heads are they hunting? And what is their purpose? We gradually find out that they are sawing off the heads of the statues of Australia's white colonisers and invaders. We see a hilarious scene in which some amazed shoppers gawp at the statue of a headless English Queen outside the Queen Victoria Building (QVB) shopping mall in Sydney. And another in which one of the young men climbs up a statue of James Cook and sternly tells him that he didn't discover Australia; it had been lived in by Aboriginal people long before Cook arrived on the scene. But what, asks a police officer, do they do with all these heads? The film cuts to a closeup inside a furnace and we see red-hot metal being melted down. The final scene shows us what they've done with all the heads. We see some lovely statues of Aboriginal people, not in a museum or gallery but in a public park where all Australians - Indigenous and non-Indigenous - can see, admire and play round them.

The film makes us think about the physical journeys made by Australia's white colonisers and explorers, the imaginative journey of the film itself which is provided by its structure as it imaginatively interprets the codes and conventions of the road movie, and the inner journey of these young men as they explore their own spiritual and creative selves. The journey that we go on when we watch or read about this film links these different types of journeys as it helps us broaden our understanding of the world and of ourselves and shows us how understanding the past can help forge a future in which all Australians can live, work and play together.

There is one more scene I want to talk about. It's from the very first film we saw, Speed. So, we're back on that bus, speeding towards our doom, not daring to slow down let alone stop. In this scene the cop (Keanu Reeves) informs the passengers that there's a gap in the freeway ahead. It's a very wide gap. As we know, if the bus slows down below 50 it will blow up and we'll all be dead. What I like about this scene is that even though it appears to be the cop who decides they're going to leap over the gap, it's actually the driver, the former passenger played by Sandra Bullock, who does it. She puts her foot down and the bus speeds towards the gap. And she succeeds! The bus lands safely and no one is hurt. In fact, they've all learned something: to put their faith in one of their fellow passengers. Just a small shift shows us that passengers don't need to be passive. You can climb into the driving seat and, at least some of the time; make your own contribution to the journey of learning. There needs to be a small shift in how we all understand this metaphor. And what I hope I've convinced you is that, with this small shift the teacher no longer has to play the thankless role of cop or tour operator. And it can be recognised that not all learning is teacher-led and can only take place in the classroom. After all, if the Sandra Bullock character hadn't had some experience of speeding, she might not have been able to save the day!

If we treat the learning journey as one of discovery then the following can happen:

After spending the time to read this, perhaps some of will be worrying that your journey towards your destination - the exam room - has been shortened by forty or fifty minutes. I'd like to think that you can see it not as some red lights that held you up but more as a sort of five star roadside hotel.

I once read on a T-shirt "Life is a journey, not a guided tour". Perhaps this should be amended slightly and all year 12 students - and their teachers - should be made to wear a T-shirt that reads: "Learning is a journey, not a speeding bus."

Endnotes
  1. The Odyssey is the ancient Greek epic poem in 24 books, probably written before 700 BC, attributed to Homer. It describes the 10-year journey taken by the hero Odysseus after the fall of Troy while his wife, Penelope, waits patiently for him at home, fending off suitors. During his adventurous voyage Odysseus encounters ogres and magic monsters such as the Cyclops, Circe, Scylla and Charybdis, and the Sirens who try to prevent him from reaching home. It has given us many metaphors that we use today: the phrase "between a rock and a hard place", for instance, is a reference to Scylla and Charybdis. Back
  2. www.teachersmind.com/metaphors1.htm Back
  3. For a thorough study guide for teachers and students see Physical Journeys by Jane Curran, Lyndall Hough & Gillian Lovell (2003) Sydney: The Learning Curve. This includes an introductory chapter on the concept of journey and a helpful analysis of the Board of Studies Stimulus Booklet. Two more books (Imaginative Journeys and Inner Journeys) are forthcoming. Back
  4. A useful dictionary definition is: "The use of a word or phrase literally denoting one kind of object or idea in place of another by way of suggesting a likeness or analogy between them." Webster's New International Dictionary (2nd Edition). Back
  5. John Haynes, Metaphors and Mediation, http://www.mediate.com/articles/metaphor.cfm Back
  6. This poem is included in the Stimulus Booklet, an essential text for the HSC English Examination Paper 1, Section lll. Back
  7. There are many excellent websites that provided information and images of Méliés's films, including: www.holonet.khm.de/visual_alchemy/voyage.php; www.filmsite.org/voya.php; www.gairspace.org.uk/gagarin/htm/melies.htm. Back
  8. An earlier Méli's film, A Trip to the Moon (1902), is probably the very first science fiction film. Back
  9. Jules Verne (1828-1905), a French author of adventure tales that anticipated science fiction. His novels include Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1864), Around the World in Eighty Days (1873). Back
  10. For a full synopsis and analysis see the book by Elizabeth Ezra (2000), Georges Méliés (Manchester & New York: Manchester University Press) p 126-129 Back
  11. Colonialism is the practice by which a powerful nation directly controls less powerful nations. Back
  12. One of the very first films ever made showed a train arriving at a station Arrival of a train at La Ciotat Station (Lumi're Brothers, 1895). Many film critics see this as a metaphor for the arrival of cinema. But passengers are also seen getting on: if cinema was a train, then it was clearly not going to come to a complete standstill. Back
  13. Strictly speaking 'early cinema' refers to the period 1895 - 1905 but it's often used to describe the first ten or fifteen years of silent cinema. Back
  14. George Lakoff & Michael Johnson (1980) Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Back
  15. http://cogsci.berkeley.edu/MetaphorHome.php Back
  16. Stephen Jay Gould (1992) Bully For Brontosaurus, London: Penguin Books. p.264 Back
  17. See the review of Speed ll: Cruise Control by Roger Ebert at http://www.suntimes.com/ebert/ebert_reviews/1997/06/062701.php Back
  18. www.teachersmind.com/metaphors1.htm Back