Exploring Metaphors and Metaphorically Written Narratives in Student Teachers’ Professional Identity Work

Abstract

Metaphors can help student teachers to express what is essential in teachers’ work and the process of learning to teach. This study reports on two types of metaphors generated and narrated by student teachers as part of their professional identity development during their internships. One type was about teaching their students (inside-classroom metaphor) and the other was about the student teachers’ (broader) work context (out-of-classroom metaphor). In small groups, supervised by five teacher educators in total, they discussed each other’s metaphors and accompanying narratives in order to gain (deeper) insight into their own and others’ underlying beliefs and experiences. Metaphors and accompanying narratives of different cohorts of student teachers (n = 67 in total) were analyzed. The teacher educators were interviewed about their experiences with discussing the metaphors in small student teacher groups. The findings suggest that the student teachers confidently formulated metaphors and wrote accompanying narratives. They formulated quite a few standard metaphors that seemed very similar at first glance, but their underlying experiences and beliefs, conversely, showed many differences in nuance. Interviews with the teacher educators revealed that the discussions about the metaphors certainly led to new insights among the student teachers, such as thinking about their role as teachers, but the depth of the discussions was often limited. It can be concluded that engaging student teachers in using metaphors is certainly one way to become aware of, reflect on, and talk about one’s (developing) professional identity, but it is important that adequate conditions are met, such as specific competencies teacher educators need for guiding this kind of identity work.

1. Introduction

Using metaphors in teacher education helps to express what is essential in (student) teachers’ professional work and lives and the process of learning to teach. Metaphors can also facilitate teachers’ learning or professional growth as they have the potential to shape thoughts as well as the nature and scope of actions. Metaphors can be used to support student teachers in answering professional identity questions, such as ‘who am I as a teacher?’ and ‘what kind of teacher do I want to become?’, i.e., two interrelated questions of being and becoming [1,2].

Metaphors can have an important communicative function in teacher education because they embed knowledge, beliefs, and experiences relevant to developing a professional identity. Usually, metaphors do not need many words [3]. Shaw et al. [4] describe metaphors as means for framing and defining experience in order to make meanings about one’s teaching self. In teacher education, this process of giving meaning is often understood as ‘identity work’ by student teachers themselves with support from their peers, mentors in schools, or educators at their teacher education institute [5,6,7]. In the current study, identity work can be understood as an internal and personal process of validating beliefs and learning experiences in light of who the teacher is and/or wants to become [8]. In line with the work by Connelly and Clandinin [9,10,11], student teachers were requested to come up with an in-classroom metaphor reflecting their work with students in the classroom and an out-of-classroom metaphor regarding teachers’ broader work context. Life in school is very complex and metaphors, such as the professional landscape metaphor introduced by Connelly and Clandinin, help to capture this complexity [12]. In their narrative understandings of teachers’ life in schools, these researchers realized that teachers seemingly live in two fundamentally different kinds of places in schools, the one in the classrooms with students and the one outside classrooms with colleagues, administrators, policy makers, parents, etc. [12,13].

Next to metaphors, writing narratives is also an important means of working on the formation of one’s identity as a teacher [14]. Narrating, either writing or orally, may encourage student teachers to make sense of their experiences [15]. Narratives reveal how they externalize themselves to themselves and others [16]. Constructing metaphors and writing narratives are both mechanisms to make sense of ‘the world’ [17]. An underlying assumption in the current study is that the combination of the formulation of metaphors and narrating about them are useful for identity work in teacher education. By narrating about self-generated metaphors, student teachers learn to make sense of their unique process of developing a professional identity and can communicate this with their teacher educators [18].

One perspective of professional identity research that is still quite unnoticed pertains to how teacher educators’ own professional identity influences the professional identity development of their student teachers [19]. How do teacher educators envision mentoring the unique process of professional identity development of student teachers? Are metaphors helpful in understanding the internal beliefs of their student teachers? In other words, it seems important to (better) understand how teacher educators experience identity work based on metaphors generated by student teachers.

The aim of this study is to explore student-teacher-generated metaphors and the accompanying narratives as an ‘identity’ assignment that teacher educators can use in supporting their student teachers to develop their professional identity. Three research questions were formulated. (1) What kind of inside-classroom and out-of-classroom metaphors do student teachers generate? (2) What nuances in the nature of the student teachers’ narratives can be identified to understand their personal meanings of the metaphors they generated? (3) What are teacher educators’ experiences with these metaphors and accompanying narratives as part of mentoring student teachers’ professional identity development? The answers to these questions lead to more insights into the broad scope of student teachers’ beliefs and experiences regarding the complexity of teachers’ professional work and life. The accompanying narratives support a deeper, personal understanding of their beliefs and experiences. Seemingly similar metaphors may be understood by student teachers in different ways as they can originate from different beliefs and experiences. This study contributes to making sense of metaphor use in identity work both by student teachers and their teacher educators.

2. Theoretical Background

2.1. Metaphor Use

Metaphors can be seen as cognitive devices that communicate what someone knows or believes about a phenomenon through the lens of another phenomenon, shaping the individual’s practical knowledge and actions, and—through that—contributing to one’s identity [20]. In essence, metaphors embed knowing, doing, and being [5]. In teacher education, storied metaphors help student teachers understand their experience in ongoing sense-making processes and student teachers’ self-understanding [21]. Additionally, the metaphors the student teachers use can also help teacher educators understand the strengths and challenges the student teachers face while developing a professional identity [18]. In other words, metaphors can be used in teacher education as a tool for reflection to understand oneself and to understand one’s role in the classroom [4,5], often in nuanced, unthreatening, and playful ways [22].

The research literature on metaphors in teaching and learning is quite large, and researchers are searching for how to categorize the metaphors using metaphorical analyses [2,5,23,24]. In such analyses, the focus is on the naming of the metaphors (e.g., baker, coach, farmer) and is then based on specific and common elements of the metaphor, compiling them into one category. According to an often-used categorization, metaphors about teaching and learning may pertain to three student teachers’ views: a behaviorist/empiricist view (e.g., teaching as filling an empty bucket), a cognitive/constructivist view (e.g., learning as laying the bricks of a house), and a situative/sociohistoric view (e.g., learning as joint work) [23]. Yet, many other types of metaphors are presented, as Bhang and colleagues [21] pointed out. Most metaphors express beliefs (e.g., conceptual metaphors), whereas other metaphors are modeled by experiences. Another distinction in the type of metaphors concerns ‘being challenged’, whereas other metaphors refer to ‘being ready’ [21]. In all, metaphors may envision teachers’ growth, teaching, or learning. Alger [23] points out that many of the principles of organizing the metaphors overlap. For this reason, she used another organizing principle: teacher-centered metaphors, with the teacher as the expert who directs the student (e.g., teaching as guiding, nurturing, molding), and student-centered metaphors, with the teacher either providing the tools for the student to construct his/her personal knowledge or engaging in a learning community such that students and teachers are constructing knowledge together. Noticeably, the categories by Alger are all related to ‘being a teacher in the classroom’, leaving out the broader context of being a teacher outside the classroom [12,13].

For teacher education purposes, it is also important to consider the distinction between novel or ascribed metaphors. Novel metaphors are of an imaginative, generative nature and express the inexpressible while representing vivid illustrations [5]. These kinds of metaphors may lead to new or unexpected interpretations, whereas standard metaphors (such as gardener, guide) risk overuse and can become so common or trivial that they end up being meaningless. Emergent metaphors are metaphors that naturally appear in teachers’ own language or spontaneously rise out of teaching practices. Conversely, ascribed or preselected metaphors describe a phenomenon that is considered to be a typical way to experience the work of teaching in the eyes of scientists or laymen [5]. Ascribed metaphors or conventional metaphors (e.g., the metaphor of seeing ‘teaching as gardening’) are often used in research or in teacher development courses (identity work) to initiate discussions assuming that pre-service teachers cannot construct their own novel metaphors. However, student teachers already bring with them beliefs (and hence metaphors) when entering teacher education that affect their first teaching experiences [6,23].

Metaphors can also be used to reveal changes in beliefs over a short period of time, such as a teaching practicum or an internship [2]. Zhu and Zhu [25], for example, found three evolving themes in their study using novel metaphors. After their internship, in the metaphors of the pre-service teachers, a more sophisticated view of teachers’ roles appeared. That is, next to viewing the teacher’s role predominantly as teaching (metaphors at the start of their internship), in the metaphors at the end of their internship, the teacher’s role was interpreted to pertain to grading, differentiating, and administrative activities as well. Also, growth in professional skills and knowledge, and the impact of the school’s context, i.e., the micropolitics of the school, was prevalent in the metaphors after the practicum [25].

With the help of metaphors, not only changes in beliefs or views can be detected but expectations about the future can also be identified, which is important for identity work. These expectations or questions like ‘who do I want to become as a teacher?’ affect professional identity development. Cobb [22] found in the narratives explaining metaphoric drawings that student teachers not only reflected upon their past experiences but also were able to think beyond immediate challenges and pressures. For example, by looking through a window in a brick wall, one student teacher explained what he wanted his teaching practice to look like, yet some current obstructions (bricks) were prohibiting him from achieving this practice at this moment. In all, Cobb concluded that metaphors could be used to explain the relationship between professional identity, resilience, and agency.

The metaphors that this study focuses on were part of identity work used for supporting student teachers to become aware of and especially explicate their own beliefs and experiences. As was written in the introduction, they were requested to come up with two novel metaphors: one inside-classroom metaphor and one out-of-classroom metaphor, which will be further explained in the Method Section. The inside-classroom metaphor might help them to define the classroom environments they strive to create, the ways they enact teaching and learning, and the space they give their pupils to learn in those classrooms. The out-of-classroom metaphor was expected to help the student teachers relate to the working context of the teacher, i.e., the school and/or the teaching profession in general. It was assumed that their narrative explanation of the metaphors, in particular in a metaphorical manner in this study, could lead to important insights relevant to how they see or wish to see themselves as teachers. Metaphors may enable student teachers to act following their understanding of their metaphors [20].

2.2. Narrating Metaphorically

Student teachers in higher education are familiar with academic writing. Building on fixed text structures and/or other academic agreements, academic writing pertains to underpinning generic conceptual knowledge the writer has acquired mainly using academic or literal language. Gibbs [26] points out that figurative language, including the use of metaphors, is presumed to be deviant from literal writing since figurative writing is relatively rare and mostly found in specific poetic or literary contexts. Yet, cognitive linguistics studies show that both everyday speech and many forms of writing, including academic discourse, are full of figuration. Creative writing or writing with the help of literary methods, such as poetry or fiction, can help the writer change perspectives within a narrative, taking distance from or zooming into certain experiences or emotions and finding new ways to express and process those experiences and emotions [27]. The use of metaphors enables writers to express difficult things through literary imagery (see also Section 2.1). Narrating metaphorically allows writers to become free of barriers often felt in academic writing and seek new ways of explicating their thoughts. The more precise the imagery words describe a situation or the persons or things within the situation (or metaphor), the more vivid the description will be interpreted by the reader, such as other student teachers and their teacher educator in this study.

In this study, we perceive the metaphor as a plot that functions as a narrative structure that helps the student teacher to connect events, experiences, and beliefs, whether or not accompanied by emotions. As said, we assume that metaphoric writing helps student teachers organize and structure their narratives by explicating and shaping their thoughts. Writing helps them [28], probably because of taking more time to think, to relate thoughts with each other and to the metaphor, whereas speech might result in a continuous flow (waterfall) of verbalizing (separate) thoughts.

2.3. Identity Work through Making Sense of Metaphors

Professional identity is central to the process of becoming an effective teacher [29]. Namely, one’s professional identity functions as a lens through which one views the teacher’s work and what makes it important. It is this identity that fuels one’s own development and actions in practice [30]. Teachers’ professional identity is a dynamic and ongoing process characterized by the complex interaction between personal beliefs, ideals, background, and one’s learning history, including norms and values held, and the requirements from the school contexts they work in, including the practical situations they face and the widely accepted standards for the teaching profession in general [1]. Student teachers have already developed a provisional professional identity when they enter teacher education—however rudimentary, imperfect, or even incorrect this identity may be for the time being [31]. In general, identity work helps student teachers develop a realistic and more sophisticated professional identity that results from an internal process of framing and reframing experiences and beliefs, often with the support of reflective discussions with others [32].

More specifically, student teachers’ metaphors (and, in this study, their accompanying metaphorical narratives as well) invite peers and their teacher educators to ask all kinds of questions that reveal underlying beliefs and experiences, including accompanying emotions, that stimulate sense making, which may open up possibilities or ways for new thoughts and actions [33]. However, metaphors need to be managed with caution [21] since component parts of one metaphor can have multiple meanings, or interpreters may assign different meanings to one metaphor. For example, Alger [23] noted that the metaphor ‘plant a seed’ can represent putting a burgeoning idea into the students’ minds but also nurture students’ growth. So, in identity work, the student teachers and teacher educators should communicate clearly about the metaphors’ meaning, for example, by asking ‘meaning-elucidating’ questions. To demonstrate this kind of question, we take the metaphor by Thomas and Beauchamp [2], ‘captain of a boat’, and its description, ‘The captain of a boat; I have to take these people (students) somewhere and there are storms and high waves (p. 765)’. This metaphor gives rise to questions like is it the responsibility of the captain to reach the shore, or is it a shared responsibility of the captain and crew (=students)? How does the shore to which the boat is cruising look like? Is the shore standing for knowledge and skills to be learned or is the shore standing for students’ identity building? The questions asked depend on the reader’s interpretation of the metaphor. Nevertheless, discussing questions like these may help to reflect on one’s own beliefs about ‘good’ teaching as an important aspect of professional identity. The same applies to discussing professional identity issues that student teachers experience and express in their metaphors, e.g., ‘the storms and high waves’ in the above example. Questions for this student teacher could be the following: What is causing the high waves? Are you challenged by your students, or is the feedback of your mentor steering you back into the waves? Or, to be more concrete, do you have unrealistic expectations of your students, or do you need adaptive support from your mentor? In this example, addressing this issue might be finding a balance between the personal and professional aspects of becoming a teacher. Issues like these often remain below the surface and may cause frustration, anger, or sadness among student teachers [34,35]. As written previously, metaphors can help express and discuss such emotion-laden issues that have a strong impact on the teacher someone is or wants to become.

Research on the use of metaphors is not new. Yet, the present study explores the combined use of student teachers’ written metaphors and narratives as an ‘identity’ assignment that is discussed by their peers and teacher educators in small groups. The student teachers’ beliefs and practical experiences are considered in a broad context: inside and outside classrooms. This study further explores the extent to which similar metaphors may have different meanings for student teachers and whether the discussions about the metaphors and narratives may help them to understand themselves as teachers from teacher educators’ perspective by interviewing teacher educators.

3. Method

3.1. Participants

In total, 67 student teachers from four cohorts participated in this study: cohort 2019–2020 (n = 4), cohort 2020–2021 (n = 26), cohort 2021–2022 (n = 18), and cohort 2022–2023 (n = 19). They followed their undergraduate teacher education program at a technical university in the south of the Netherlands. This two-year master’s program prepares student teachers for teaching science and mathematics education, particularly in upper secondary education. Their preparation consists of theoretical courses (at the teacher education institute) and internships at different secondary schools.

The teacher educators (n = 5) who participated in this study were assigned as the student teachers’ mentors, each with different backgrounds in their fields (pedagogical content knowledge, educational sciences, supervising internships) and different experiences in coaching internships and guiding identity work. Two of the three authors of this study worked at the same institute as the teacher educators involved but had sufficient distance from these teacher educators’ work, enabling them to maintain a professional and neutral inquiry stance.

Under the guarantee of anonymity, all participants consented to the use of their materials (completed assignments by the student teachers) or to participate in the interview (the teacher educators). Neither student teachers nor their teacher educators were selected, and the assignment was obligatory within the mentor meeting.

3.2. Data Collection

3.2.1. Metaphors and Narratives

Because of their internships, the 67 student teachers were mentored by a university-based teacher educator at the teacher education institute in small group meetings (4–10 student teachers per group). These mentor meetings guided by one teacher educator especially focused on student teachers’ reflection on their experiences gained during their internships and how they came to understand their functioning in relation to their personal beliefs. After at least two months of workplace learning, the metaphor assignment was applied in the small group meetings.

The student teachers were asked to generate and present an inside-classroom metaphor (i.e., being a teacher in the classroom) and an out-of-classroom metaphor (i.e., the teacher’s work in the broader context of the school and society in general) [9,13,36]. To introduce the metaphoric assignment, it was explained to the student teachers that a teacher’s professional landscape can be metaphorically understood as a ‘storied landscape’ [9]. Since reflection with the help of metaphors or narrating metaphorically is not simple for everyone [2], the introduction of the assignment was further accompanied by examples of metaphors found in prior research [37]. The written instruction (what was expected, examples of metaphors and writing metaphorically, word limit) that accompanied the assignment remained the same for all four cohorts. The student teachers were asked to submit written narratives because writing helps to structure and organize the story a narrative is about [28].

The metaphor assignment was introduced by a video to the student teachers. In the video, some examples of metaphors and their narratives were shown and explained. In a designated meeting, the teacher educators received guidelines on how to discuss the narratives with their students. These guidelines pertained to the explanation and (re-)interpretation of the essence of each metaphor and what this meant for the student teacher as a person and a professional. The teacher educators were autonomous in choosing a suitable method for discussing the metaphors and accompanying narratives. Each year, the group of teacher educators consulted each other about ways and possibilities of how to discuss the metaphors within their own group.

3.2.2. Interview with the Teacher Educators

In order to learn how teacher educators experience metaphor use in mentoring student teachers’ professional development, the teacher educators were individually interviewed in an open-ended fashion. The following questions were asked to understand their personal experiences in applying and discussing the metaphor assignment:

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How the metaphors were discussed in the small mentor group meetings;

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What the metaphors in terms of beliefs and experiences meant for the student teachers both as a person and a teacher;

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How the students discussed the metaphors and narrative explanations with each other;

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What kind of effect the metaphor assignment had on the student teachers’ insights into themselves as teachers, the teacher’s work, or the teaching profession in general;

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The effect of working with the metaphor assignment on the teacher educators themselves and possible suggestions for improvement, change, or alternative use of metaphor assignments.

The duration of the interviews varied from 20 to 35 min. Interviews were audio recorded and transcribed verbatim.

3.3. Analysis of the Data

All data (metaphor assignment and interview data) were inductively analyzed according to a grounded theory approach [38]. A data-driven method was used for the metaphor assignment because the student teachers came up with the metaphors themselves, and the metaphorical narratives were unique. One author took the lead in the analysis of the data and was checked by a second author, as explained below in more detail. In the Results Section, (translated), quotes from the student teachers (coded as ‘ST-identifier’) are used to demonstrate both the labeling of the fragments and the nuances that could be identified in the narratives. These narratives are rather elaborately presented in the text to illustrate the nuances.

Of the 67 student teachers, 64 completed inside-classroom combinations of metaphors and narratives (3 were missing) and 49 out-of-classroom combinations (12 were missing and 6 narratives were not written in a metaphorical way and could, therefore, not be included for analysis).

The analysis of the metaphor data consisted of the following steps:

• Reading all inside-classroom and out-of-classroom metaphors and accompanying narratives in order to get familiar with what they were about.
• Subsequently displaying the metaphors, followed by both determining their focus and a brief explanation derived from the narratives. For example, for the inside-classroom metaphor ‘being tour guide during a trip in a foreign country’ (ST-14), the focus was on all the students having different interests in the country and could be explained as the ability to find a good middle ground to accommodate everyone.
• Labeling the metaphors. The inside-classroom metaphors all turned out to relate to the positioning of the student teachers towards the students and teaching in the classroom. Following the work by Alger [23], written about in Section 2.1, the metaphors could be labeled as being teacher-centered (metaphors representing perceptions of students in the classroom and teaching students) and student-centered (metaphors representing perceptions of students’ learning and development of students). Additionally, metaphors that represented neither purely teacher-centered nor purely student-centered perceptions were labeled task-centered (see Section 4.1.1 for the results). The vast majority of the out-of-classroom metaphors represented perceptions of the school; relatively few metaphors appeared to represent perceptions of aspects of the more general, wider educational landscape (see Section 4.1.2 for the results).
• One of the authors performed the above analysis steps. For reliability checking, one of the other authors checked whether this was performed correctly by randomly displaying and categorizing 10 inside-classroom and 10 out-of-classroom metaphors in the same way. The two authors agreed on most decisions. The labeling process as described in step 3 remained the same; for some metaphors, there were slight differences in the wording of the focus and accompanying explanation.

The analysis of the interviews with the teacher educators took place as follows. First, as was stated above, the interviews were transcribed verbatim. Second, in view of data reduction, a summary was made of each interview per interview question by one of the authors [39]. One of the other authors checked the summaries for completeness and accuracy, which led to some additions and corrections of wording in some summaries. Third, the description of the findings derived from the summaries, including the selection of quotes to illustrate the findings, was characterized as a process of going back and forth from summaries to result descriptions based on agreement among the authors. The (translated) quotes of the teacher educators (coded as ‘TE-identifier’) are presented in the text.

4. Results

4.1. Metaphors Generated and Their Focus

If we compare the inside-classroom metaphors with the outside-classroom metaphors, including the narratives that describe both types of metaphors, it is striking that the former are about perceptions that represent student teachers’ beliefs/views related to or arising from experiences gained during internships, while the latter metaphors are more perceptions representing impressions fueled by events at the internship school or in society. The explanation for this might be that the student teachers who participated in this study were mainly concerned with learning to teach and, at least most of them, not yet involved in the broader context of their schools or the educational landscape in general.

Table 1. Overview of metaphors generated by the student teachers.

Inside-Classroom Metaphors
Label	Description	n	Examples
Teacher-centered	The student teacher perception of 1. how to direct students in the classroom or 2. how to learn to teach	29	How to direct: guide, gardener, captain, forester, orchestra conductor, shepherd How to learn to teach: climbing a mountain, a hilly landscape
Student-centered	The student teacher perception of how (individual) students learn or what they need to grow	19	Building walls, natural landscapes with different plants, parking place from where to depart
Task-centered	The student teacher perception of the explicit task/role of a teacher	16	Spaceship between planets, construction site, garden, safari park
Outside-Classroom Metaphors
Label	Description	n	Examples
School-focussed	The student teacher perception of school as a place with something to offer to students	8	The school being a shop, a store, a market with stalls
	The student teacher perception of school as an organization with isolated departments	7	Departments in a bubble, islands in the sea
	The student teacher perception of school as an ecosystem	5	Sea, ocean
	The student teacher perception of school as a care provider for student teachers’ learning	5	Aid when climbing a mountain, crossing a mountain landscape, wandering in the desert
	The student teacher perception of school as a political arena	4	House of Representatives, political debate
	Remaining idiosyncratic student teacher perceptions	8	The school as a jigsaw puzzle, the school as a large garden complex, the school as a small world
Focus on aspects of the more general, wider educational landscape	Only idiosyncratic student teacher perceptions regarding teachers’ positions, the political attention given to education, the relationship between school and society, and the complex educational organization; life is not easy for students	10	Teaching profession in dire straits, education as a long-abandoned sugar factory on neglected land, school and society as two separate worlds, education as a housing project in which all kinds of agencies are involved, students are like clay figures who are modeled by many, education is a wild waterfall

presents the labels of the metaphors (first column), descriptions of what the metaphors entail (second column), the number of student teachers that mentioned that type of metaphor, and examples of the metaphors. The accompanying narratives are presented in the text beneath Table 1.

4.1.1. Inside-Classroom Metaphors

As was written above, the data analysis revealed three main categories of inside-classroom metaphors. Below, we briefly describe the metaphors listed under each category and illustrate each metaphor with a narrative from student teachers representing that metaphor.

Teacher-Centered Metaphors: Perceptions of Students in the Classroom, Teaching Students, and Learning to Teach 

Most inside-classroom metaphors pertain to this category (n = 29). The metaphors in this category predominantly regard student teachers’ perceptions of their own role and how they experience this role. In these metaphors, the role of the teacher is paramount, mainly in two ways. The first way emphasizes student teachers’ own place in the classroom when teaching; for this, student teachers used metaphors like being a ‘guide’, ‘gardener’, ‘captain’, ‘forester’, ‘orchestra conductor’, and ‘shepherd’. For one such metaphor, the metaphor ‘captain’ is illustrated by a student teacher’s narrative as follows:

The lessons I provide for students in the upper grades can be compared to a group of young people and a captain sailing across the sea on a sailing ship making a long voyage. I provide clear guidance and determine the course of the route to be taken, but ultimately the efforts of the students (crew) determine how the ship makes its sailing route. I usually feel like the captain, but every now and then I’m below deck and have fun with the crew. I feel comfortable on the ship (…). Every day is different, sometimes the sea is rough and sometimes the sea is calm. There are many unpredictable circumstances that affect the crew. I always have the feeling that I too can sail the rough seas and that we will figure it out together. This makes me confident and calm. I am an observant captain who always tries to keep an eye on what is going on with his crew. (…) If I notice that rough weather is coming and that this is causing unrest among the crew, I tighten the reins and give them a boost. That boost sometimes makes them work hard, but sometimes there is also a crew member not doing his best. Every now and then I have to pick someone up and I don’t really like that. Then a clear signal must be sent; (…) I will do whatever it takes to stay on course. That I, as my role, bring my crew safely from A to B. (ST-32)

The second way student teachers perceive their teacher centeredness is by emphasizing their learning of the profession itself, expressed by metaphors like ‘climbing a mountain’, a ‘hilly landscape with winding roads’, and a ‘difficult bridge to cross’. The following narrative illustrates the metaphor of ‘climbing a mountain’:

(…), but I would like to write about climbing a mountain. Not very creative, but appropriate. Mountaineering is a very beautiful sport with beautiful environments and great views, but it is quite tough, even when you do well. What characterizes mountain climbing is that it is not necessary a path up, sometimes there is snow and the path cannot be seen, sometimes there are fallen trees, and sometimes you have to climb straight up a wall. I have the feeling that I just climbed out of a big valley after days of searching for the path under the snow. I experienced difficulties in organizing lessons and found this quite hard. I wanted to go up the mountain, but it wasn’t clear to me where I was wrong. At some point, some of the snow melted and |I discovered that I wasn’t just standing at the foot of the mountain; I was standing in a valley: I had (an still have) a lot more to learn than I initially expected. I thought that I had already climbed the first part of the mountain, but I noticed it was different: a lot of difficulty with things that I thought I had already climbed over. The basics: making and keeping good contact, organizing lessons, asking for help in time if I don’t know what to do. If I can’t do that, I won’t get further. I first had to know the valley I was in before I could climb the mountain of becoming a good teacher. (ST-3)

Student-Centered Metaphors: Perceptions of Student Learning and Development of Students 

This category of metaphors (n = 19) is about ways in which student teachers want their students to grow and develop, each in his or her own way. The teacher serves this purpose by, for example, offering students freedom and space though within limits (creating appropriate learning environments for realizing this). To express this, student teachers used metaphors like ‘building walls’ by students doing this in their own way, a ‘natural landscape with different plants that all are equally beautiful’, and a ‘parking place’ from where to depart. The following narrative illustrates this latter metaphor:

It is a bright sunny day and we find ourselves in a small parking lot. Together we start our route on the short, straight main road. At the end of this main road there is an intersection from which several roads go in different directions. There are straight asphalted roads, hilly forest paths, winding sandy paths, etc. The students can choose which direction they want to go and whether they want to do this alone or in a group. All roads ultimately lead to the same end point; a rock formation. The routes they can choose from are very diverse in terms of distance, direction and environment. Because the students all go in their own directions, they receive my mobile number. If something happens along the way, they can always contact me with their questions or findings during their trip. Photos are of course also welcome (…). The end point, the rock formation, contains several caves and caverns where students can investigate further, literally go into the depths. (ST-20)

Task-Centered Metaphors: Neither Purely Teacher-Centered nor Purely Student-Centered Perceptions 

This category pertains to metaphors (n = 16) that are neither purely teacher-centered nor purely student-centered. This category is mainly about the teacher being there for the students but where the teacher has an explicit task or role, for example, by trying to perform justice for all students by differentiating or by feeling the need to organize and control the work with students. Metaphors used by student teachers to express such tasks pertain to aspects of classroom management, for example, by metaphorically perceiving classrooms with students as a ‘universe with planets that have different properties’ and where the teacher passes as a spaceship and the classroom as a large ‘construction site’ and a ‘garden in which different flowers bloom’ or a ‘safari park’ with different animals that live there. The next narrative illustrates the metaphor ‘construction site’.

Figuratively I see my lessons at the Technasium as a large construction site (…), for example, such as the renovation of Atlas. A large project underpinned by wonderful values and standards, (…). Where people work hard towards clear, but always small adjustments and where delays are actually the norm. Where an end result is delivered that everyone can be proud of, but which never matches how it is conceived on paper. Where there is room for consultation and guidance, but where it is never completely quiet. Where the project manager/supervisor is essential (my role as a teacher) but where the real work is done by all workers/specialists (the role of the students). Where the electrician, carpenter, bricklayer and plasterer each have their own responsibility and expertise. But where the whole project would collapse if they don’t communicate well with each other, follow a clear plan and coordinate the work. Where, despite one’s own task, there is also a common interest and where ideally the entire team occasionally joins forces to lift all materials to the fifth floor, when the crane is out of work (…). The project manager is also willing to lift some material if the need arises, provided that nothing goes wrong. This executive task no longer allows for an overview and the situation does not always allow this. A place where (if all goes well) people work hard to convert creative ideas into tangible results. (ST-13)

4.1.2. Outside-Classroom Metaphors

The outside-classroom metaphors mentioned and narratively described by the student teachers consisted of two main categories: either metaphorical perceptions of the school or aspects of the more general, wider educational landscape.

Metaphorical Perceptions of the School 

This category deals with five types of metaphors that represent student teachers’ perceptions of the school. In order of the number of times mentioned, these types are shortly described and illustrated below.

• The school as a place with something to offer to students (n = 8). For this, student teachers used metaphors like the school being a ‘shop’ or ‘store’ and a ‘market with stalls’. The following narrative illustrates the school as a shop:

There are many departments where you can get something different. These are the different subjects that a student takes. The people who work in the store all have a specialty and know the most about their own department. The baker is about the bread, the butcher about the meat, etc. (…). I am also one of the people who work in the store with a specialization, my profession, in which I know the most and do the most. But I know where the bread or meat can be found. I will also try to help customers find their way around the store as best as possible by taking them to the relevant department. In this department, customers receive the service that I cannot offer them. As colleagues from different departments we will also have to work together to properly maintain the store. Together we will have to ensure that the service in the store remains good and that the store remains tidy. The customers come to the store and shop in the different departments. (…) I support the customer in finding the answer they are looking for. At the end of the day, these students pay again and go home as satisfied customers. The next day new customers arrive and are treated with equally good service. (ST-8)

• The school as a group of islands (n = 7). This is a school where the subject departments—metaphorically speaking—live in their own ‘bubble’ or are quite autonomous ‘islands’ in the sea, and it is illustrated as follows:

(…) leaving the jungle we notice that we are on an island in a blue ocean. There are many more of these islands on the horizon. Some islands have already built quite a few houses and jetties, others still look quite unspoilt and inaccessible from a distance. Each island has its own specialty (producing food, making tools, training construction experts, recording knowledge, etc.) Boats occasionally sail between the islands to exchange goods or move people from one to another island. There is some exchange and cross-pollination between the different islands. The people who often travel into the jungle do not always experience much of this, as contact mainly takes place between islanders who have a boat or can often be found on the beach. (ST-35)

• The school as an ecosystem (n = 5). The school is perceived as one whole (e.g., ocean) in which separate elements (e.g., fish, coral reef) within the system continuously interact and are dependent on each other. In such a school, it is important for the student teachers to find their place and see possibilities for learning and support, as illustrated by the following narrative:

My currently short career as a teacher has taught me that I must look for an ecosystem where I feel comfortable. You could compare this with a sea dweller, like a kind of turtle. I need the right waters to feel comfortable and to eat. The food is a metaphor for learning, if I am not in a food rich area I become unhappy. An environment in which there is plenty to learn is crucial for a novice teacher. During the 2nd month of my internship I noticed that I was given a lot of responsibility but little support, it felt like I was swimming around and almost drowning. Until I ended up in an area where I found support in the area and where I felt more at home. I think that as teachers (sea dwellers) we must continue to look for an optimal environment in which everyone has their place. Symbiosis. (ST-11)

• The school as a care provider (n = 5). This metaphor refers to perceptions of the school as being an aid when climbing a mountain, crossing a mountain landscape, or wandering in the desert. The student teachers experience that the school-based teacher educators or other teacher colleagues support them in learning how to become a teacher. An illustration of this is the following narrative:

When you first arrive at your secondary school as a first grader, the path you are about to take seems, in my opinion, like a mountain. You start at the bottom and over the years you slowly work your way to the top. At first you think that you have reached this top when you have your diploma in hand. However, every student will realize halfway through that the road to the top is a lot longer than they initially thought. (…) the road to the top is not without difficulties. The students encounter ravines, fallen trees and perhaps even bears that make it not a pleasant walk (…), all being difficulties you may encounter as a growing teenager. These can be personal problems such as heartbreak or hormones, but also uncertainty, setbacks and delays during their school career. These setbacks can make the students no longer want to continue their path. (…) and this is where I come in again as a teacher. I see myself as a kind of checkpoint where the students can go to get ready for the rest of their journey. These checkpoints are then spread over different heights so that they do not have to go all the way back down each time. I compare this a bit with the checkpoints I encountered on the Great Wall of China (see photo). Here you could refill your food and drinks (by purchasing them) after which you were ready for the next 10 km. This gave a feeling of security, because you knew that, after a while, you could always come across a new one. As a teacher, I also want my students to know that it is always possible to take a break at this checkpoint. (ST-58)

• The school as a political arena (n = 4). Particularly, this metaphor can be differently interpreted by the writer and reader. For some persons, a political arena stands for making joint deliberate decisions based on the ideas of the political parties, yet for other persons, a political arena stands for a political dispute, in which each individual party strives for its own stance. The following example of a narrative represents the first interpretation of this metaphorical expression:

(…) I compare the school with the House of Representatives of the States General [in Dutch: Tweede Kamer der Staten-Generaal]. I see all teachers and other employees of the school as members of the House of Representatives, the school anagement as a cabinet. The House of Representatives contains members of different parties with different opinions and views. That’s how I saw it in the staff room at my internship school. There is often discussion about how policy should be made at school and how certain lessons should be taught. There is often a majority of teachers who agree with each other on certain points. This can be compared to the coalition of parties trying to gain a majority. (…). There are many views on learning theories and teaching methods and also many differences in age and experience. (…) The Cabinet stands opposite the House of Representatives (the teachers and other employees). The teachers and staff do have some say, but the final say rests with the school’s management. (…). At school I wanted to have a class do an assignment on erasable white sheets on the wall. While many teachers thought this was a good way to complete assignments (students are more motivated while standing than sitting), the vice-principal saw problems (pencil on the walls) and urged me not to use this learning method. Ultimately, with him in class, I applied a hybrid form. This shows that, like in politics, there are differences in views and responsibilities within the school and that good compromise must be found for these. (ST-62)

Metaphorical perceptions of the school that were only mentioned once (n = 8 in total), for example, were expressed in terms of the ‘school as a jigsaw puzzle’ where each teacher is a piece, the school as a ‘large garden’ or ‘garden complex’ with small gardens attuned to each other, and the school as a ‘small world with lots of diversity’.

Metaphorical Perceptions of Aspects of the More General, Wider Educational Landscape 

This category concerns individual or once-mentioned metaphorical perceptions (n = 10 in total) accompanied by narratives that sometimes have a critical undertone, including those regarding the position of the teacher (‘education is like a storm with the teaching profession in dire straits’), the political attention given to education (‘education as a long-abandoned sugar factory on neglected land’), and the relationship between school and society (‘two separate worlds’). Other metaphorical perceptions and accompanying narratives, for example, include education being a complex system (‘a housing project in which all kinds of agencies are involved’), the fact that life is not easy for students in and outside education (‘students are like clay figures who are modeled by many’), and the home situation being difficult for many children (‘education is a wild waterfall’).

4.2. Nuances in the Nature of the Metaphors

This section provides a more in-depth description of the nuances in the nature of the student teachers’ metaphors that, at first glance, seem quite similar by delving deeper into the accompanying narratives. This helps understand the different meanings that similar metaphors have for the student teachers themselves. The examples of student teachers (STs) in Section 4.1 are referred to when describing the nuances.

4.2.1. Nuances in Inside-Classroom Metaphors

When looking at the inside-classroom metaphors across the categories, it appears that the vast majority of the metaphors pertain to the ways in which the student teachers position themselves in different ways towards students. More precisely, they are about differences in the relationship between teachers and students and about their teaching preferences.

Within the categories, differences can be distinguished as well. For example, within the category of teacher-centered metaphors, it matters whether one sees oneself as a captain on a ship (e.g., ST-32) or as a shepherd, guide, or gardener. The captain metaphor relates more than the other metaphors to being the teacher from a classroom management perspective, while the other metaphors relate more to being a teacher from a caring perspective, that is, the teacher ensuring a feeling of belonging among students in the sense that everyone in the class matters and is part of the whole at the same time.

Within this same category, a number of teacher-centered metaphors are about student teachers’ own learning and development process. Some student teachers expressed the problems or issues they encountered (e.g., ST-3) and explained these in terms of concerns, while other student teachers explained that they still have to learn much and see this as a challenge or an opportunity to discover a lot. The narratives of these student teachers show that they have different attitudes towards the learning process of becoming a teacher.

Almost all student-centered metaphors are about ensuring that all students achieve their full potential, regardless of their differences in qualities and backgrounds. Nuances in this perception concern, for example, seeing students as unique, allowing students to be who they are, valuing every student, and that all students should enjoy education. A number of student teachers show in their narratives that giving students space is important for this (e.g., ST-20).

The task-centered metaphors are very similar to the student-centered metaphors. The difference is that the student teachers’ narratives in the task-centered metaphors explicitly emphasize the responsibility of the teacher for a good course of events. The teacher does not let the teaching–learning process take its own course, for example, through good planning, organization, or guidance. The teacher certainly gives students space but is clearly present to keep an eye on everything (e.g., ST-13).

4.2.2. Nuances in Out-of-Classroom Metaphors

A closer look at the out-of-classroom metaphors shows that many of them represent fairly stereotypical perceptions of a school, either being of positive or negative nature. Nuances in the positive perceptions, for example, are about the school (and the teacher within it) in which collaboration occurs across subject boundaries and helping students to look beyond these boundaries (e.g., ST-8) or about seeing the school as a place where students feel safe and where their learning processes are supported (e.g., ST-58). Nuances in the negative perceptions express dissatisfaction with the way things are going in the school, i.e., the school organization (e.g., ST-35), and the school as a safe place where one should feel at ease (e.g., ST-11).

In line with these latter perceptions is the perception of the school as an institution where, as a teacher, you have to ‘fight’ for how or what you want and, for example, make compromises about it (e.g., ST-62). Regarding such a rather negatively colored perception of the school, it must be said that it mainly concerns a few student teachers who already have a role as a ‘real teacher’ in a school but who are, nevertheless, following teacher education in order to be allowed to work as qualified teachers. Actually, they follow an alternative certification route, in practice largely the same route as that of regular student teachers.

4.3. Interview Results: The Experiences of the Teacher Educators

The ways in which the metaphors were discussed in the small mentoring groups differed per teacher educator and per year. When carrying out the assignment for the first time, the teacher educators mainly decided to discuss the metaphors plenary and in pairs later. Two teacher educators supported this peer discussion by providing example questions to the student teachers that they could ask each other. Four of the five teacher educators indicated that they also had to prepare well for the metaphor assignment themselves, for example, by mentioning a suitable metaphor, writing an accompanying narrative, and discussing this with each other. All teacher educators found that it was a difficult assignment for many student teachers who, probably partly because of their background in science and mathematics subjects, are not used to this type of assignment. In itself, this does not have to be a problem; one of the teacher educators said the following in this regard:

‘I also like it when students say that they find it a difficult assignment to start, but while writing, and therefore the interpretation, the story follows naturally.’ (TE-1)

Two teacher educators mentioned that in their narratives, the student teachers mainly related their metaphors to their experiences; one other teacher educator mentioned that students also gained new insights. Although the assignment provoked resistance at the beginning, this teacher educator experienced that the student teachers really came up with beautiful metaphors, visually supported with images (photos, pictures, drawings), in which they had put a lot of work. Another teacher educator experienced a real personal touch of the student teachers in their descriptions of the metaphors. In general, however, the teacher educators found that emotions, process descriptions, or intentions were often missing in many narratives. One of the teacher educators said the following about this impression:

‘As a science student you mainly choose logic and objectivity. This is also the core of their subject education; so, logic and objectivity in particular receive a lot of attention. These students don’t want too much fuss about emotions. Their subject education, as it were, reinforces this idea; it is a kind of selection mechanism of their study. Still, it is good that as a beta you develop your more people-oriented side. So, if you wish to become a teacher, you have to know who you are as a teacher. If you know yourself, you also know what your students need. Your behavior influences the behavior of the students and vice versa.’ (TE-4)

Another teacher educator openly doubted the usefulness of metaphor use for science and mathematics student teachers and said the following:

‘A metaphor is an imaginative way of understanding: what is, what should be and what you could wish for. It’s a very un-beta way; an imaginative way of raising awareness. For many student teachers the metaphor assignment is hard to perform. Some do not want to work with metaphors, other students cannot work with it.’ (TE-5)

The teacher educators were all careful with statements about the depth achieved while discussing the metaphors; one missed the emotions and another missed the intended actions. All pointed—as was explained above—to the ‘resistance’ of student teachers because of their science background. All the teacher educators considered attention to identity development important, but the form in which this has to take place remained open for them. They talked about ‘raising awareness’ through the metaphor and/or ‘planting a seed’, but they wondered to what extent the metaphor discussions really had an influence on the student teachers’ beliefs and functioning in practice. However, the teacher educators’ prevailing opinion was that the conversations about the metaphors can contribute to student teachers thinking about themselves, especially regarding the personal side of being (and becoming) a teacher. One teacher educator said the following:

‘Comments from three student teachers are still clear in my mind: (…) ‘You get to know yourself in a different way’; (…) ‘The assignment is fun because it differs so much from other assignments in the course’ and (…) ‘Before the identity assignments, I thought they were vague assignments, but now that I have more practical experience, I think that teaching is mainly about your identity.’ I think I have achieved something with these student teachers. I notice that it does make them think. They are not used to talking about themselves and/or their situation in this way. But here too the differences are large.’ (TE-1)

About the differences between the student teachers in terms of their introduced and discussed metaphors, one of the teacher educators said the following:

‘These differences clearly indicate from which perspective student teachers view certain matters. You could say: ‘Unity through diversity’. The student teachers ultimately arrive at the same point, for example that they want to ‘build bridges’, but they come from different backgrounds with different points of view. They need to learn that they are not alone. They come to the course with a certain image and their learning often takes place in separate compartments. Of course we are all individuals, but we have to make something of it together. The student teachers started to understand the meaning of the assignment: they started to think about their role.’ (TE-2)

This teacher educator emphasized the focus on the inside-classroom and out-of-classroom metaphors and the number of perspectives student teachers can have regarding teaching students and the school as a working environment. This teacher educator also experienced the exchange of these perspectives as a useful learning outcome.

In order to make a statement about the depth of the metaphor discussions, all teacher educators indicated that they wanted to have a sense of control, for example, through one-on-one conversations with the student teachers and a plenary discussion after student teachers’ discussions in pairs. The teacher educators indicated that working with the metaphor assignment as part of student teachers’ identity work also made them reflect. Three of them mentioned that working with both the inside-classroom and out-of-classroom metaphors also triggered them to think strongly about themselves: what is their own image of education and how do they feel about it? One teacher educator now uses metaphors more often, while another teacher educator was mainly shaped by thinking about the identity that the two metaphor assignments have given rise to (and less by the separate assignments themselves).

In response to a final interview question about improvements to identity work using metaphors, the teacher educators made various recommendations. An important recommendation concerns the teacher educators’ own ability to help student teachers go into depth about themselves as (future) teachers. In this context, one of the teacher educators said ‘I have not learned to guide this kind of work, I am not a therapist or psychologist’ TE-3). Other recommendations concerned making sure that a safe environment is created so that student teachers feel free to write and talk ‘deeply’ about themselves or the possibility of providing the option of doing an alternative identity assignment next to the metaphor assignment, to cater for diverse abilities. When the metaphor assignment is too challenging for those student teachers who are not talkative or who dislike imagery, they could work with another assignment.

5. Discussion

This study shows that most student teachers’ inside-classroom metaphors were centered either around themselves, both in terms of their position towards their students and their learning process of becoming a teacher, or around the students’ learning and development. To a lesser extent, their metaphors centered around the teachers’ task in terms of, for example, doing justice to all students or organizing the conditions for students to work and learn. This finding resembles student teachers’ concerns found by Fuller and presented as a stage model of teacher development. This model posits three chronological stages of teacher development: (1) concerns about self, (2) concerns about tasks, and (3) concerns about the impact of their teaching on students [40]. Over the years, the chronologicity of these stages has been questioned; also, in the current study, the metaphors of the student teachers (all with 4–8 months of internship experiences) cover all three types of concerns.

Most student teachers’ metaphors can best be characterized as standard metaphors [5], for example, seeing oneself as the captain of a ship, guide, or orchestra conductor (teacher-centered inside-classroom metaphors) and seeing the classroom as a landscape with different plants that are all beautiful or as a group of students that build walls themselves (student-centered inside-classroom metaphors) [23]. More or less, standard metaphors were also used by student teachers to represent their own learning process of becoming a teacher, for example, by indicating this process as a difficult bridge to cross and walking through a hilly landscape with winding roads. Several student teachers used inside-classroom metaphors centered around teachers’ tasks that were of a more imaginative nature, such as seeing the classroom as a universe with planets and as a construction site. Noticeably, the out-of-classroom metaphors were more diverse and idiosyncratic, such as ‘seeing the school as a group of separate islands, ecosystem, or political arena’. In learning to become a teacher, teacher education programs tend to focus on ‘teaching in the classroom’ while often neglecting the other part of being a teacher, namely, being a teacher outside the classroom and functioning in the context of a school [15,32,36]. Apparently, the diversity of out-of-classroom metaphors mentioned by the student teachers indicates that school contexts differ much from each other. School contexts as perceived by student teachers’ metaphors may, therefore, be a relevant trigger for discussing the impact contextual aspects have on teachers’ professional identity and its development [41].

In their courses, teacher educators often use standard (inside-classroom) metaphors as a means to make student teachers aware of and talk about their own beliefs and related expectations, assuming that it is difficult for them to come up with metaphors for this themselves [2,5]. The metaphors that most of the student teachers came up with in our study resemble these generally used metaphors in teacher education, although this might have been influenced by instructing them in advance with the help of the metaphor of seeing teachers’ professional landscape as a ‘storied landscape’. Particularly, the use of the word ‘landscape’ may have triggered them to use metaphors such as ‘gardener, garden complex, safaripark’.

If we look more deeply at the narratives that explain the metaphors, there is quite a lot of nuance. Even though many metaphors look similar, the narratives make clear that they often have different meanings for the student teachers [23]. It, therefore, seems to be very valuable, when using metaphors, to also have them explained metaphorically in the form of narratives. With the exception of a few student teachers, the vast majority of them succeeded fairly well in performing this. By writing metaphorically, they were able to find the right words to express their thoughts. Writing metaphorically appeared to help them to look at their reality from a certain distance, which may make it easier to put this reality into words and to talk about it. It was striking that despite the word limit (300 maximum), the narratives, albeit from the writers’ points of view, provide a fairly complete picture of how they saw themselves as teachers. This particularly pertains to the inside-classroom metaphors, not to the out-of-classroom metaphors. These last metaphors, namely, represent images that are still further away from many student teachers’ reality who mainly focus on learning to teach in the classroom.

In line with the results of the study by Thomas and Bauchamp [2], the interview with the teacher educators indicated that, in their combination, the metaphors and accompanying narratives were useful sources for discussion among the student teachers about their (implicit) beliefs and experiences, with the potential to raise awareness and to lead to new insights regarding aspects of becoming and being a teacher. These aspects are essential for developing a professional identity [34,36,42]. However, the experiences of the teacher educators also show that the added value of metaphor use in the context of identity work should not be overestimated. This concerns both the (lack of) depth that relatively many student teachers seem to demonstrate when discussing their metaphors with peers and the importance they attach to this type of assignment (in addition to the many other assignments they also have to do for their course work). The teacher educators suggested that this might relate to the study background of the student teachers (science and mathematics) and the extent to which they themselves are competent enough to make this type of assignment part of student teachers’ identity work. Despite this experience of the teacher educators involved, particularly, the plenary discussions in the small mentor groups may contribute to a better understanding of the complexity of the profession as a result of the different beliefs and experiences that are brought forward by and in response to the metaphors. The choice to have student teachers come up with both inside-classroom and out-of-classroom metaphors seems like a valuable choice from this point of view.

Based on the interview with the teacher educators, we noticed tension among student teachers regarding the use of metaphors for the purpose of identity work. On the one hand, student teachers are quite capable of coming up with metaphors and describing them in a narrative way [5,23]. On the other hand, they do not immediately see the importance of such metaphors in view of becoming and being a good teacher. We also experienced this tension in identity work with beginning teachers in the context of an induction program [32]. Both student teachers and beginning teachers are strongly focused on the knowledge and skills that will immediately help them further. Consequently, teacher educators are often focused on knowledge and skills that can be used in practice as well. They seem less inclined to go into depth or consider this less their task (compare, for example, TE-3 in our study, who said ‘(…) I am not a therapist or psychologist’).

Thinking about one’s identity as a teacher usually does not yield anything that immediately offers help; it is of a more abstract nature helping one to understand oneself as a teacher. Yet, it is important that student and beginning teachers not only give meaning to knowledge and skills relevant for teachers but also make sense of their beliefs and experiences and evaluate them in the light of the teachers they are, wish to be, and can become [8]. Metaphorically speaking, developing teaching competence and a professional identity are two complementary sides of the same coin. We believe that these are two learning processes that reinforce each other [8,37]. Throughout teacher education or induction programs, more attention should be paid to identity work that supports student teachers in the development of a sound and realistic professional identity that is recognized as such by others as well. Ultimately, it is this identity that, to a large extent, filters what and how one learns and develops [30].

5.1. Limitations of This Study

The teacher educators were not instructed on how to work with identity assignments in general and the metaphor assignment in particular. Based on their own experiences and after consulting each other, they chose a way to discuss the metaphors with the student teachers. This might be seen as a limitation of this study, but this is often common practice in teacher education where teacher educators learn by doing and by reflecting on experiences and through dialogues with their colleagues [43]. Furthermore, the teacher educators were interviewed about their experiences with the metaphor assignment without paying attention to their own professional identity. As was written in the introduction, teacher educators’ professional identity influences the professional development of their student teachers [19]. Their professional identity might also have influenced their interpretations or ways of discussing the metaphors with the student teachers in the small groups.

Another limitation pertains to the data sources of this study. The small group discussions were not recorded, and the student teachers were not interviewed about their experiences with the metaphor use and how they valued the metaphor assignment. Both these data sources would certainly have led to deeper and additional insights into the impact of metaphors on becoming aware of, reflecting on, and talking about a student teacher’s (developing) professional identity. Overall, the findings show a broad scope of student teacher beliefs and experiences, but the reached depth of discussing the metaphors and accompanying narratives is not judged by the student teachers themselves.

A last limitation to be mentioned here might have been that this study examined student teachers with a very homogenous background. Also, in the interviews, the teacher educators pointed repeatedly to the student teachers’ specific STEM background, assuming that these student teachers find it difficult to use metaphors and accompanying narratives. Yet, the student teachers came up with many conventional metaphors [23], and the same tensions about the metaphor assignment were found in another study in which the metaphor assignment was administered to in-service teachers with more heterogeneous backgrounds covering all school subjects [37].

5.2. Implications of This Study

The call for identity work is far from new [44], but the question is how to arrange identity work and what kind of tools or assignments are supportive of professional identity development [7,32]. The current study explores just one type of identity assignment. In view of developing systematic knowledge about designing and evaluating professional identity assignments, more research on similar and other assignments for enacting identity work in teacher education seems needed.

Our study shows that teacher educators do not need to be too concerned that student teachers find it very difficult to think about themselves as teachers in terms of metaphors [2]. Almost all students who participated in our study came up with metaphors generated by themselves; they were also very able to metaphorically explain their metaphors. It is, however, important to be aware of the differences between students’ beliefs and experiences that often underlie seemingly identical metaphors.

Following one of the limitations above, our study also indicates the need for well-equipped teacher educators who are able to support student teachers, both individually and in peer groups, to develop a sound, constructive, and realistic professional identity that is reflected in their image of themselves as teachers. It is important that this kind of work (i.e., identity work) is an integral part of student teachers’ process of becoming a teacher next to and in combination with learning relevant knowledge and skills necessary for becoming a competent teacher as well. Both teachers’ knowledge and skills development and their professional identity development are two sides of the same coin. The processes involved in both types of development reinforce and complement each other [8].

A final recommendation for identity work that might be important and brought up by the teacher educators who participated in this study is that identity work requires a safe environment so that student teachers feel free to write and talk ‘deeply’ about themselves [32,45].

6. Conclusions

Using metaphors is, among other ways, certainly one important way to become aware of, reflect on, and talk about relevant aspects of one’s professional identity and its development. Particularly useful are accompanying narratives in which student teachers explain their metaphors in writing. Discussing the metaphors and narratives with peers may lead to new insights, in this study regarding the teacher’s work in the classroom and the teacher’s broader work environment, in particular the school. However, our study of the use of metaphors indicates that engaging student teachers in identity work does not happen automatically and does not automatically lead to a deep understanding of oneself as a teacher as well. To achieve this, it is necessary to give this type of work a clear place throughout teacher education’s curriculum, guided by an explicit vision of the importance of developing a sound, constructive, and realistic professional identity that is clearly recognizable to others. Based on our study as well as studies by others, we believe that metaphors definitely have the potential to play a useful role in achieving this goal.