Education Practices and Challenges

Metaphor research in education examines how teachers and students use figurative language to make sense of learning, authority, and the act of teaching itself — treating phrases like "the classroom as a journey" not as decoration but as evidence of deeper beliefs about what education is for. When researchers collect and analyze these metaphors through qualitative methods such as interviews and written elicitation tasks, patterns emerge that reveal professional identity, power dynamics, and unspoken assumptions that more direct questioning tends to miss. The Covid-19 pandemic made this work newly urgent, as the sudden shift to distance education forced educators to articulate, and in many cases rebuild, their mental models of what teaching even means when the physical classroom disappears. Open questions include whether metaphors genuinely shape pedagogical practice or merely describe it after the fact, and how the images teachers reach for in crisis moments differ from those they hold in stable conditions.

Works

66,197

Total citations

142,255

Keywords

MetaphorsTeachingLearningEducationCovid-19 PandemicDistance Education