“Teacher” from the Children’s Perspective: A Study by Metaphors

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to determine the perception of teachers by 10 year-old primary school childrens by the metaphors they developed. The sample covers totally 441 children [224 females (50.8%) and 217 males (49.2%)] living in Izmir, Turkey. Participants were asked to complete the prompt "Teacher is like…, because…''. In identifying their perceptions, the qualitative research model (Holloway & Wheeler, 2002) was utilized, which contributes to the investigation of the individual's perceptions, feelings, and experiences within the framework of Phenomenological design. At the end of the research female students produced 52 metaphors, and males did 44 for teacher images. However, 7 metaphors were commonly created by both genders. They were categorized in 8 conceptual themes. The children's perceptions of "teacher" were clustered especially in the conceptual theme of Family Member (25%) and Warm-hearted Person (8%), with emotional and relational feelings which can be explained by the children's attachment relations (Sabol & Pianta, 2012), that are similar for their families and their teachers. Gender was found to be significantly related with the images of teachers.

Metaphoric Perception of Gifted Students about Physical Education Course and Physical Education Teachers

“…Before preparing the data collection tool, some studies related to subject (Saban, 2008;Cerit, 2008;Aydın & Ünaldı, 2010;Gömleksiz, Kan, & Öner, 2012;Soysal & Afacan, 2012;Ungar, 2016;Yalcın & Erginer, 2012;Tortop, 2013;Özbas & Aktekin, 2013;Demirtas & Coban, 2014;Özsoy, 2014;Emerson & Mansvelt, 2014;Wan, 2014;Yılmaz & Güven, 2015;Cansever & Aslan, 2016) were researched to figure out what kind of data collection tool individual use on determining the metaphoric perceptions towards any concepts, and it was determined that generally as a data collection tool "specific metaphor" approach including open ended question form was used. It was decided to use the "food metaphor" approach for the purpose of determining the gifted students' perceptions towards the concepts of "physical education course" and "physical education teacher".…”