Butterflies in our classrooms: Using metaphors in teacher education

Abstract

The Butterfly Project utilizes a metaphor as a valuable tool in a secondary introductory teacher education course to facilitate raising preservice teachers' awareness of student diversity and the teachers' need for sensitivity to it, while demonstrating and fostering a constructivist approach to teaching. Traditionally, use of metaphors in teacher education has focused on challenging assumptions and beliefs about the profession through examining preservice teachers' metaphors of teaching. The use of metaphors can be expanded to provide a transformative, reflective experience in fostering pedagogical knowledge and connecting theory to practice. Themes emerging from student writing in the project provide implications for action research for teacher educators to inform their own practice.