Becoming a Teacher as a Hero's Journey: Using Metaphor in Preservice Teacher Education

Teacher Education Quarterly, Winter 2005 by Goldstein, Lisa S

Becoming a teacher is hard work. A sizable body of research indicates that student teaching internships or other field-based practica are a particularly difficult part of this process. Many preservice teachers have misconceptions about the work of teachers and teaching (Cole & Knowles, 1993); when they begin their field placements they often feel disillusioned by the contrast between their idealized images and the realities of the profession. As they experience the myriad challenges of classroom life, preservice teachers often call into question the ideas and skills they were taught in their university coursework (Zeichner & Tabachnick, 1981). Further, the numerous Stressors linked with student teaching - expectations, role clarification, conformity, time, evaluation, assignments, peer discussions, feedback (MacDonald, 1993) - contribute to making field experiences arduous and overwhelming.

One of our tasks as teacher educators is to create educational contexts and opportunities that support and sustain our students as they navigate these difficult times. One successful strategy toward this end is the use of metaphor (Bullough, 1991 ; Bullough & Stokes, 1994; Carter, 1990; Connelly & Clandinin, 1988; Dickmeyer, 1989; Marshall, 1990; Provenzo, McCloskey, Kottkamp & Cohn, 1989; Stofflett, 1996; among others). In this article, I share the results of a recent study that explored the ways in which the hero's journey metaphor offered support to a cohort of preservice elementary school teachers during their first field placement experience. Because "the hero is a universal ideal that helps people think about their lives in a more profound and creative way" (Noble, 1994, p. 30) and because the hero's journey's emphasizes transformation and growth, the hero's journey is an appropriate and potentially powerful metaphor for nascent teachers.

This study revealed that the hero's journey metaphor was helpful to the students in a range of ways. However, I also found that many participants who enj oyed thinking of their experience as a hero's journey were resistant to the image of the hero. I will describe the benefits my students experienced as a result of using the hero's journey metaphor as a way to view their field placement experience, examine the contradictions in the students' responses to this metaphor, and conclude by discussing implications of these findings for teacher education program development.

Using Metaphor in Preservice Teacher Education

For several years I taught an elementary classroom organization and management course at a large research university in the Southwestern United States. In conjunction with this practicum course, which met weekly and covered topics such as classroom environments, discipline, lesson and unit planning, professionalism, and so on, my students would spend 20 hours per week as interns in elementary school classrooms (grades 1-5) in a socio-culturally diverse urban school district for a period of 10 weeks. Concurrent with this practicum and internship, the students were enrolled in four other methods courses.

This was always a demanding and difficult semester for my students: they faced the daunting task of transforming themselves from college students into professionals as they simultaneously learned teaching strategies and dealt with the practical and logistical challenges of field placements. In an attempt to support my preservice teachers during their challenging internship semester, in the Spring of 19991 elected to modify my classroom organization and management class to take advantage of the power of metaphor. Because metaphor allows preservice teachers to "create meaning in ambiguous, complex situations" such as those commonly found in classrooms (Provenzo, McCloskey, Kottkamp & Cohn 1989, p. 52), I expected that metaphor would offer my students a powerful way to understand their field experiences and to explore their roles in those experiences.

The body of scholarship on the role of metaphor in teacher education indicates that metaphor can be a useful tool for supporting novice teachers (Bullough, 1991 ; Bullough & Stokes, 1994; Carter, 1990; Connelly & Clandinin, 1988; Dickmeyer, 1989; Marshall, 1990; Provenzo, McCloskey, Kottkamp & Cohn, 1989; Stofflett, 1996). Metaphor is seen as "a means for assisting beginners to articulate who they think they are as teachers" (Bullough & Stokes, 1994, p. 220) and as a way to help preservice teachers to "grasp intellectually systems that operate in ways quite mysterious to [them]" (Dickmeyer, 1989, p. 152). Because metaphor impacts the way we perceive situations and events, it can be used to redescribe reality (Provenzo, McCloskey, Kottkamp & Cohn, 1989) and "to encourage reconceptualization of problem situations" (Marshall, 1990, p. 129) such as those encountered by preservice teachers in their field placements.

Although the literature clearly highlights the contribution metaphor can make to preservice teacher education, the research also indicates that the challenge of finding their own working metaphors can be very difficult for some students (Bullough, 1991; Bullough & Stokes, 1994). Further, Grimmett and MacKinnon ( 1992) suggest that the process of developing metaphors "might... appeal only to the more linguistically inclined student teacher" (p. 434). These limitations might compromise the potential impact metaphor offers.