Exploring Greek teachers' beliefs using metaphors

When teachers describe their roles through metaphors, they also construct specific personal meanings about teaching. Despite the frequency with which teachers and teaching are treated metaphorically there has been no previous systematic attempt to explore them in Greece. This paper seeks to fill this void by examining the various metaphors used by teachers to describe the experience of teaching and suggests how and to what extent the understanding of the metaphors can be useful in exploring teachers' beliefs and how they may contribute to teacher education programs. A questionnaire was devised to a sample of 156 in-service teachers which focused on teachers' metaphors and their beliefs about teaching, teacher-student roles, classroom climate and their beliefs about knowledge. The findings of this research illustrate the various metaphors that Greek teachers hold, indicating that they have probably not elicited and elaborated them. [Author abstract]