Metaphors in the tacit dimension of student teachers’ subjective theories
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| Year of publication | 2015 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | The paper aims to present the results of a qualitative empirical study that focuses on tacit knowledge and subjective educational theories of student teachers. It tries to describe how a student teacher reflects on the tacit dimension of their subjective theory. A single case study research design was used. Five in-depth interviews with one student teacher were conducted. These were guided by the method of “clean language” that draws on linguistic-experiential phenomenology and originated in cognitive linguistics. The method gives minimal space to conscious content presuppositions of the researcher and provides the interviewee with an opportunity to express their experience from the “I” perspective. The presented paper will demonstrate with concrete examples how tacit dimension of subjective theory can be grasped through metaphors that a student teacher uses in reflection. Selected criteria which help us identify manifestation of tacit knowledge were used to analyse the data (e.g. gestures, displays of surprise or metacomments that were connected to the core metaphor). The analysis revealed how a student teacher organizes all the key categories of their subjective theory through a core metaphor. It appears that some parts of their subjective theory as expressed through the core metaphor were tacit and the metaphor enabled the student to approach this tacit dimension without making it directly explicit. The paper will further investigate how metaphors can be used for facilitating the formation of the tacit dimension of student teachers’ subjective theories in pre-service teacher education. |
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