Talent hits a target that no one else can hit. Genius hits a target no one else can see. But it’s all too easy to think of any creative genius as resulting from humanity touched by divine lightning. All too easy, and not really that helpful to any of us as educators or learners. Our interest tends to be far more pragmatic...

This article will explore the nature of metaphor and how it encapsulates the heart of the imaginative process. It will also show how we can make the cognitive leap ourselves and suggest how metaphors can be best used to initiate breakthroughs in our own thinking. How do we come up with innovative ideas? The creative act does not create something out of nothing like in the Old Testament; it uncovers, selects, reshuffles, combines, synthesises already existing facts and ideas. Souriau believed that, ’To invent you must think aside.’ When the situation is blocked, straight thinking must be superseded by the search for flashes of adjacent possibilities which will unblock it. Metaphors offer a number of insights into how we can all think slightly more ‘askew'.

We need educational experiences that offer new perspectives, which are punctuated by shocks of awareness, that serve to engage our attention. To break up our familiarities. To wash away from our soul, in Picasso’s words, ‘the dust of everyday life.’

The underlying purpose of drama is to be disruptive – to question, to unsettle. In classroom terms this simply means that the techniques of drama and dramatic texts are a powerful way to encourage learners to ask questions, challenge assumptions and, challenge complacent thinking. Drama does this through emotional and cognitive empathy, offering the possibility of catharsis, and through engaging with real and hypothetical situations and concepts that might underpin or inform texts and performance. Alan Bennett has said that there are moments in our collective pasts when ‘history rattles over the points’. Drama enables us all to hear that noise.