TEACHING LITERACY IS A STAIRCASE: METAPHORS
DISCUSSING BELIEFS OF TEACHING
Donita Massengill Shaw, Richard Oldrieve, & William L. Edwards Jr.
The purpose of this investigation was to examine preservice elementary teachers’ metaphors of
teaching and literacy at the beginning and conclusion of a semester-long reading course. The preservice
teachers from three universities participated in two pilot studies. Data were analyzed through grounded
theory and metaphor analysis. Results showed 13 categories emerged with continuums. Differences among
programs also were noted. Three educational implications for teacher educators are included.
Teaching literacy is a staircase:
Metaphors discussing beliefs about teaching
Teaching literacy is like a sunrise. ~Student from University A
Teaching is like a box of crayons. ~Student from University B
Teaching reading is a marathon. ~Student from University C
Although several studies have been published on preservice teacher beliefs, few of these specifically
provide insight about the relationship between metaphors and philosophies of teaching and literacy.
Expanding on the existing research can be important because metaphors act as powerful mental models
through which people understand their world by relating
Donita Massengill Shaw, Ph.D., is an associate
complex phenomena to something previously experienced
professor at the University of Kansas. Her
and concrete. Furthermore, metaphors are the larger
constructs under which people organize their thinking and
research interests are adult education,
from which they plan their actions on the multiple
orthography and teacher education.
environments in which they participate including, to some
extent, how they teach and work with students (Lakoff &
Richard Oldrieve, Ph.D., is an assistant
Johnson, 1980; Hardcastle, Yamamoto, Parkay & Chan,
professor at Bowling Green State University.
1985). It is through the process of building a link between
His research interests are speech, language,
two dissimilar ideas (the known and unknown) or
phonemic awareness, reading spelling and
projecting one schema (the source) onto another schema
writing.
(the target) that makes a metaphor an effective cognitive
device (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980).
William Edwards, Ed.D., is an associate
professor at Missouri Southern State
University. His research areas are language
arts and pre-service teachers.
Among the largest study of educational metaphors,
Inbar (1996) collected over 7,000 metaphorical images of
teacher, learner, principal and school provided by students
and educators. The findings showed that most of the
educators in the study perceived themselves in a caring role while the majority of students focused on the
evaluative and controlling aspects of teaching. From a research perspective, this raises the interesting
possibility that metaphors may provide teacher educators a window to observe preservice teachers as they
transition from student to teaching role. During this process novice teachers revise their views to
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