Prospective teachers' metaphoric perceptions regarding the teacher educator

Abstract

The aim of the present study is to determine the meanings that prospective teachers attribute to the concept of teacher educator through metaphors. The study has been designed with a phenemenological approach. The study group has been composed of 272 prospective teachers studying at the education faculties of three different universities in Turkey. The prospective teachers were asked to complete the following sentence: "A teacher educators is ......... because ......, and the metaphors they used were analyzed with content analysis approach. As a result of the analysis done, the metaphors were categorized under two main themes as positive and negative ones. The themes for the positive aspects of lecturers are "guiding, source of information, open to learn and develop oneself, passionate, hardworking, model, shaping the future, critical thinking, valuing their profession and students" while the themes for the negative metaphors are "not fulfilling the teaching responsibility effectively, not developing oneself/not being open to development, thinking themselves superior to students, authoritarian, not being open-minded, discriminating, not having an effective communication with students, resorting to psychological violence against students, acting for the benefit of themselves, complying with the system/submissive and exploiting the students". That there are negative metaphors for the teacher educators besides the positive ones indicate that the qualities of teacher educators should be questioned for a quality teacher education.