The IB’s house style in its official documents tends towards… shall we say ‘grandiloquence’. To a large extent, this is understandable: the IB wishes to convey the seriousness of its commitment to the vital issues of creating excellent education. Fair enough, but at times, this can go over the top - especially when educational and technical jargon creeps in. For example, take these items from a list of a “shared set of design values” for professional development, in a recent IB document ** :

“Inclusive environments that leverage the power of differences in the context of shared learning”

"Spirals of inquiry via higher-level questioning and nonlinear feedback loops"

Ringingly impressive phrases – but what do they actually mean?

To illustrate: what, in practice, actually happens when you “leverage the power of differences”? Now, we can all make an effort and try to work out what notion or concept is intended, largely by recalling standard meanings of each word, and then seeing how they might refer, when combined, to the given context of professional development for teachers. The specific problem for me in this phrase is the word ‘leverage’. My general background vocabulary knowledge tells me that it is something to do with economics, specifically with gaining some kind of advantage in business… based on using a ‘lever’ to apply force better. But this is ‘leverage’ used as a verb…?

The Cambridge Dictionary online provides some help:

• to use borrowed money for investments, esp. in order to buy a large enough part of a business so that you can control it:

They can leverage a very small investment into millions of dollars.

But what has that got to do with “the power of differences”? The Cambridge Dictionary helps again, further down the screen:

• to use something that you already have, such as a resource, in order to achieve something new or better:

This new strategy is about leveraging the relationships we have with our customers.

OK, so now we can say something like ‘make good use of’ or ‘profit from’ or simply ‘use’ – but we may still be unclear about “the power of differences”. What sort of ‘power’ do ‘differences’ have? We can work out an answer in the context of professional development (‘it’s useful to consider different approaches to teaching’) – but are we really clear what the author intended?

The second description quoted provides examples of metaphor and analogy being deployed rather shakily. The phrase “spirals of inquiry”, in my interpretation, refers to the notion of upward or downward spirals of causation, where a repeated series of actions influence each other to move a situation in a positive or negative way. How might a ‘spiral of inquiry’ work? Well, yes, we can imagine setting out a series of provocative questions, which are considered in turn as if round a circle, and by the time you have returned to the first question, the answers to the other questions have changed the way that you answer the first question. The word ‘spiral’ expresses this idea of a progression of inquiry through imagining how a circle can turn into a three-dimensional spiral – i.e metaphorically.

The other phrase in the description is even more enigmatic – “nonlinear feedback loops”. I understand every single word in this phrase, but sadly only as single words.  The phrase, from the context, seems to use a term from software design as an analogy to express some form of discussion related to the ‘inquiry-which-spirals’. But what sort of discussion, about what sort of ideas? And anyway, how can you have a ‘nonlinear loop’, since loops are by their nature linear? I can imagine some form of feedback that is unpredictable or surprising – but what? I don’t learn anything useful from this way of phrasing the idea.

The problem of both of these phrases is that metaphors and analogies work effectively if they sum up, compress, and express vividly concepts with which the reader is already familiar – but if the underlying concepts are unknown, unclear or nebulous, the ‘vivid’ phrases become mere obstructions. For instance: "Life is just a bougou-bougou tree" ... how true, how very true (but only if you are familiar with bougou-bougou trees).

The two examples analysed above were quite probably perfectly clear to the author (or authors) of the IB document – they honestly thought they were using sophisticated language to express complex ideas in concise ways. The use of ‘leverage’ as a verb is ‘(US)’, according to the Cambridge Dictionary, so it may be clear to educated readers in the United States – but most of the people who will read this document are not from the United States, and may not even use English as their first language. Wouldn’t it be better to stick to plainer, more standard vocabulary, in order to accommodate the needs of the whole intended audience?

And finally, doesn’t this all indicate the importance of the Conceptual Understandings in the Language B Guide? Think how you would apply the concepts of Audience, Context, Purpose and Meaning to these examples ... and isn't Jargon a recognisable Variation of the language?

** ‘Transformative professional development for a changing world’ - a perfectly sensible and interesting document, but with an attack of Purple Jargon in the middle of it!