This paper reports on an investigation into the potential effects of the Symbol Literacy Approach (SLA) on the metaphorical reasoning of 25 five-year-old children attending a Maltese Catholic School. This was implemented via six pedagogical activities comprising the 'St. Michael Project', which sought to prompt the children's symbolic engagement…

In a series of sentence-picture verification studies we contrasted, for example, "… choose the balloon with "… inflate the balloon" and "… the inflated balloon" to examine the degree to which different representational components of event representation (specifically, the different object states entailed by the inflating…

Academic development is a mammoth undertaking that requires collective effort from all stakeholders, extending beyond academic developers alone. As early career academics, we explore our experiences of academic development within our community of practice. Through a collaborative self-study, we reveal how our community of practice has bolstered…

In this paper, a self-created analogy is presented based on comparing the process of osmosis with a situation recreated in a train carriage. It was implemented with upper-secondary education students at a secondary school in Chiclana de la Frontera (Cádiz, Spain). To assess the progression of the students' models on osmosis, their activities…

This account of practice offers reflections and insights on facilitating Action Learning (AL) in Leadership Programmes within the Higher Education context. The account shares our reflections and key observations as practitioner academics, facilitating AL Sets within three higher education leadership programmes. We draw on our knowledge and…

This paper provides educators a foothold in the tricky terrain of metaphor, its theoretical underpinnings and pedagogical possibilities. Metaphor provides us with a means of comprehending domains of experience that do not have a preconceptual structure of their own. Conceptual metaphors permit mental imagery from sensorimotor domains to hold sway…

Within an early childhood setting strong collaborative partnerships between the service and the family are critical to the success of a child's development and learning. Collaborative interactions with families are considered indicators of quality within early childhood services. Whilst the value and importance of collaborative partnerships are…

This study explores the metaphorical perceptions of gifted students towards basic science concepts. A total of 210 gifted students participated in the study, which utilized a phenomenology design to reveal the metaphors used by students to describe the concepts of 'universe, living thing, matter, light, sound, electricity and environment'. A…

The present understanding of professional identity formation is problematic since it underrepresents minority physicians and potentially excludes their professional identity formation experiences. Rural physicians are expected to have similar underrepresented aspects as minority physicians because of their specific sociocultural contexts and…

Background: Communicative participation is the primary outcome of speech and language therapy for people with communication disorders. However, there are no instruments that measure communicative participation from the perspective of adolescents and young adults. Moreover, little research has been conducted in which adolescents and young adults…

In this paper, we advance the examination of generative AI (GenAI) in educational contexts in two distinct ways. First, we introduce and evaluate an innovative workshop model designed to explore GenAI metaphors, helping participants to articulate their own and their peers' responses to the technology. These workshops included students, academics…

Teachers unconsciously, and at times intentionally, use metaphors to graphically image new reform policy. This qualitative multiple case-study explores how secondary school teachers employed metaphors to communicate excitement and/or frustrations with a new history curriculum they were implementing in Zimbabwe. Findings from semi-structured…

Two implicit metaphors can be seen as having dominated the study of the gifted--the savings bank and the investment bank. In the savings-bank metaphor, people have differential levels of IQ or general intelligence, which is viewed as determining whether they are gifted. Their cognitive ability is their metaphorical "money in the bank."…

Metaphors in gesture and speech play a pivotal role in the way that programming concepts are presented in the classroom. However, little is known about the function of teachers' metaphors in practice. This study aims to explore teachers' use of metaphors in gesture and speech in a lecture on programming. Based on video observations of three upper…

The main purpose of this study is to analyze the metaphor perceptions of Turkish students who have foreign students in their classrooms about foreign students. In the study, phenomenology design was used as the qualitative research method. Criterion sampling, one of the purposeful sampling methods, was used to determine the study group. In the…