Knowledge acquisition or participation in communities of practice? Academics’ metaphors of teaching and learning at the university

Abstract

Learning has been described by two conceptual metaphors: as individual acquisition of knowledge (acquisition metaphor), and as an enculturation into a subject community (participation metaphor). On the other hand, academics' conceptions of teaching are usually reported to vary between teacher and student orientation. In order to integrate metaphors of learning with research on conceptions of teaching, we analyzed 36 academics' metaphors of teaching by content analysis. We found four different categories of metaphors: transmission and construction (based on the acquisition metaphor), and apprenticeship and community growth (based on the participation metaphor). The metaphors had systematic relations to intentions and approaches in teaching reported by the academics. These results imply that the ‘teacher versus student orientation’ framework can be improved by including the dimension of learning as acquisition versus learning as participation.