The institutional model and student metaphors of teaching: Making connections

Abstract

The use of metaphors to illustrate the conceptual frameworks of schools, colleges, and departments of education has become commonplace since the implementation of the 1987 knowledge base standards of the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education. Concurrently, a number of researchers have explored the metaphors that both practicing and preservice teachers use to describe their conceptualization of teaching and have found that metaphor development is important in the construction of the identity of a professional teacher. This paper describes an assignment given in a social foundations course in which students are asked to integrate their own personal metaphor of teaching with the metaphor employed by the institution in its conceptual framework. Examples of student responses to this assignment are given. © 1995 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.