Öğretmenlerin Covid-19 Salgınına İlişkin Zihinsel Çağrışımları: Bir Metafor Çalışması Örneği / Teachers' Mental Associations about the Covid-19: An Example of Metaphor Study

Abstract

The Covid-19, which emerged in Wuhan, China in the last days of December 2019 and affected the whole world, has adversely affected the lives of many people and continues to affect them. Undoubtedly, one of the areas most affected by the pandemic, which negatively affects the functioning of many areas, especially health, is education. In this study, the teacher side of this negative effect was examined. For this purpose, a questionnaire was applied to determine the mental effects of the pandemic on teachers, in Turkey. The relevant questionnaire included demographic questions (age, gender, branch, and province of employment) and 2 open-ended questions regarding the participants. The open-ended questions were "What Covid-19 like?" and "Why did you use this metaphor or representation?” The various pre-processing steps were employed on the data set. After the pre-processing steps, the data set consisted of 236 participating teachers (83 male, 153 female). In the research, a total of 102 metaphor sub-categories were produced by the participants. These metaphors were then grouped into 10 different main metaphor categories. According to the results, "fear" was the most used metaphor by the participants. After grouping the metaphors, it was observed that the category with the highest frequency was "metaphorical perceptions about emotions".