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.