Professional Knowledge Landscapes in Online Pre-service Teacher Education: An Exploration through Metaphor

Abstract

This paper explores metaphors as a process of professional learning, and as a research method to interrogate professional knowledge landscapes (PKLs) within the flexible space and time of online pre-service teacher education. The methodology comprised five pre-service teacher educators with different disciplinary areas of responsibility engaging in metaphorical analysis of our teaching work. We found that the metaphors that frame our e-pedagogy are multiple, reflecting a range of theoretical positions and objects of our teaching work, sometimes internally contradictory notions of education and e-learning, and the complexities of our individual and collective PKLs. We argue that it is crucial in the context of pre-service teacher education to explicitly examine our own metaphors and reflect on the ways that our metaphors might influence pre-service teachers' subsequent teaching practice. In addition, teacher educators can exploit the spatio/temporal freedom afforded by the porous border between the inside of our online environments and their outside worlds to consciously and deliberately consider the metaphors that they adopt to inform their pedagogical choices, and avoid uncritically perpetuating problematic metaphors of teaching practice.