Signs, symbols and metaphor: linking self with text in inquiry-based learning Ruth Deakin Crick a * and Kath Grushka b a University of Bristol, Graduate School of Education, 35 Berkeley Square, Bristol BS8 1JA, UK; b University of Newcastle, School of Education, Faculty of Education and Arts, Hunter Building, University Drive, Callaghan 2308, Australia The focus in this article is on the role of symbol and metaphor in the development of student self-awareness and engagement in the process of learning. It draws on a case-study which explored the process of an inquiry-based learning project in an Indigenous learning centre in a school in New South Wales, Australia. The data used for this article were taken from the first stage of the inquiry project – the construction of a shared language for learning. The article argues that developing a rich and local language for learning, that links to the collective consciousness of a community through metaphors and symbols, is a crucial prerequisite for inquiry-based learning. It reveals how the naming of native Australian animals as icons for learning power, the co-construction of a learning story and the creation of a self-portrait as a learner collage provide mechanisms through which the students can performatively re-represent and recall their identities as learners. The processes enable the students to make connections between self and the meanings carried in the pictorial texts to develop self-awareness and responsibility for their own learning. It also provides the learners and their mentors with the necessary symbols and metaphors to scaffold the process of the inquiry in ways that allowed them to use the metaphors associated with the symbols to talk about change and to begin to engage with the formal requirements of the curriculum. Keywords: imaging; inquiry-based learning; learning power; metaphor; symbol Introduction The image-based networked information culture in which young people learn has led to a renewed focus on the role of imaging in communication. Communication in this context is extra-linguistic – drawn from the field of semiotics, the study of signs and their signification, which recognises the interconnectedness of images, imaging acts, metaphors and meaning. Visuality, the skill to use images to communicate in learning, emerges from arts-based ways of knowing in educational research (Emme 2001; Rose 2007) that acknowledge the centrality of image in sociocultural meaning making, and thus in learning. Understanding image and symbols is a part of communicative competence in the twenty-first century (Stafford 1996; Grushka 2007), partly because of how technology has changed the ways in which humans relate to the material world and the increasing work images are doing in triggering *Corresponding author. Email: Ruth.Deakin-Crick@bris.ac.uk The Curriculum Journal Vol. 20, No. 4, December 2009, 447–464 ISSN 0958-5176 print/ISSN 1469-3704 online Ó 2009 British Curriculum Foundation DOI: 10.1080/09585170903425069 http://www.informaworld.com