Using visual and textual metaphors to explore teachers' professional roles and identities

In this study, teachers explored their professional identities by reflecting on their teaching role(s) and contexts through elicitation of textual (written) metaphors and visual (drawn) metaphors of teaching. Participants created impromptu drawings emblematic of their conceptualized metaphor. Analysis of participants' written metaphors and impromptu drawings suggests participants' preference for action-based (e.g. sports) metaphors to depict their professional teaching roles and identities. Findings further suggest a complementary relationship between textual and visual data, although contrasting or oppositional relationships of image and text are also possible. The authors found that visual data adds potency to teacher's self-metaphors and ponder the affordances that emerging visual research methods bring to future investigations.