The emotional metaphors of Prospective Childhood, Primary, and Psychopedagogy Teachers

Abstract

This study analyzes the personal metaphors related to emotions of students in the first year of Maestro degree studies, and students of Psychopedagogy degree in the last year, from the Faculty of Education of Badajoz. The sample comes from 35 students of Maestro degree of Childhood Education, 50 students of Maestro degree of Primary Education, and 46 students of Psychopedagogy degree, during the year 2010/2011 where he raised two open questions. In research conducted metaphors in the four categories of Leavy, McSorley and Boté (2007): transmissive/ behavioral, cognitive/constructivist, situated and self-referential.The results indicate that most of the prospective teachers were able to conceptualize their roles in the form of metaphors. The greatest number of metaphors expressed by the prospective primary and childhood teacher, belonged to the behaviourist/transmissive category, followed by the cognitivist/constructivist, self-referential, and situative categories. However the psychopedagogy group, expressed the same number of metaphors in the categories behaviourist/transmissive and cognitivist/constructivist, followed by the situative and self-referential categories. In emotional metaphors the result is very different: The greatest number of emotional metaphors expressed by the three groups belonged to the cognitivist/constructivist category, especially in prospective primary and childhood teacher, followed by the self-referential category, with fewer in the behaviourist/transmissive and situative categories. For preservice teachers, reflecting on their own metaphors, both cognitive and emotional ones, can be a powerful tool to conceptualize their ideas, attitudes, emotions and teaching roles and to initiate changes in them.

Keywords

• metáforas
• emociones
• formación del profesorado
• educación infantil y primaria
• psicopedagogía