Accounting for pre-service teachers’ use of visual metaphors in narratives
Abstract
Much has already been written about the need for teacher educators to assistteachers to document and understand reflections about professional practice. Many have chosen to do so through metaphor. Mostly reflections are documented in written genres, particularly journals, and insights into teachers' thinking are gained from collaborative peer discussion or formal systems of analyses. This article provides an alternative means of documenting aspects of professional practice and it offers teachers further assistance in accounting critically for the work they do. A corpus of 17 teacher-generated visual narratives (picture books) and accompanying transcribed interviews is examined. In the early sections of the article, various conservative metaphors about becoming a teacher are located from the teachers' images and grouped into four classifications. Subsequently, several extracts of teacher talk about the picture books are examined to determine what and how specific metaphors are produced in the visual mode. The latter section of the article demonstrates how the location of metaphors in images and talk about professional practice can help establish teachers' membership categories that, in turn, indicate moral orders and consequently appropriate and inappropriate practice (Sacks, 1992). Finally, the implications for the future directions of teacher education and professional development, using a more radical deconstructive/reconstructive model of reflective practice are considered.
Reference
Johnson, G. (2001). Accounting for pre-service teachers' use of visual metaphors in narratives. Teacher Development: An International Journal of Teachers' Professional Development, 5(1), 119-140.
Journal
Teacher development
Analysis
Is this article part of a larger project or series of studies?
no
Does this study draw on a large, preexisting data set?
no
Research Approach
- Document Analysis
- Qualitiative
Geographic Setting
Institutional Context
Certification Level
Programatic Focus
Research Location Context
Preservice Participants
- Undergraduates (university based program)
Preservice Sample Size
17
Duration of Data Collection
Data Sources
- Interviews
- pre-service teachers picture books
Data Analysis Tools
- Discourse analysis (conversational analysis)
- Document analysis
- Forceville (1996) heuristic (metaphors)
- Membership Categorisation Analysis (Sacks, 1992)
Researcher Positionality
- inside (staying their own students)
Research Questions
How do preservice teachers document and reflect on initial teaching practices in a manner that was not familiar to them?
Is this research question explicit from the manuscript? No
How do pre-service teachers use visual metaphor in self-generated picture books and account for the use of metaphor in a one-on-one interview contexts?
Is this research question explicit from the manuscript? Combination