RECONSTRUCTING PERSONAL TEACHING METAPHORS IN A BRAZILIAN TEACHER INITIATION PROJECT

This paper explores the (re)construction of pre-service English teachers’ personal teaching metaphors as they designed and implemented language teaching materials for the first time. The research participants and I lived alongside each other during the first year of a teacher education project, forming part of a Brazilian government programme called PIBID (Teaching Initiation Scholarship Programme), in which I collaborated as a teacher educator. The programme awards grants to teacher educators, and to pre-service and in-service teachers participating in teacher initiation projects developed by universities in partnership with state schools. The PIBID project, in which the participants of this study were engaged, involved in-service English teachers from two state schools and pre-service teachers designing and implementing language teaching materials with the help of digital resources. To explore the development of student teachers’ metaphors, I adopt a narrative inquiry methodology, which considers narrative as both method and way of understanding experience. Considerations about the role of metaphors in teacher education and storied perspectives on identity, knowledge and context also inform this study. The field texts include pre-service teachers’ written, spoken and visual narratives of experience gathered over the course of an academic year. The personal teaching metaphors articulated and rearticulated by materials design and implementation experiences encapsulate the pre-service teachers’ desire to have a significant impact on pupils’ language learning and welfare. They also encapsulate the feelings and challenges concerning the implementation of their images of teaching, and the effect of teaching experiences on their professional identities. Overall, they help the pre-service teachers not only communicate, but also make sense of important stages within their professional identity (re)construction, namely, the imagining, living out and re-imagining of language teaching.