A Study on Metaphorical Expression: Examining the Situations that Make Senior Year Students Enrolled in Classroom Teaching Programs Anxious

Abstract

The present phenomenological study aims to understand, through images and metaphors, how senior class teaching majors perceive their studies at the faculty of education. The study group was assembled via criterion sampling, a method of purposive sampling. The study group consists of 12 senior class teaching majors (10 females and 2 males) from the education faculty of a Turkish public university during the 2017–2018 academic year (10 females and 2 males). The data was gathered through focus group meetings and analyzed using content and descriptive analysis techniques. All prospective teachers are concerned about passing the KPSS recruitment exam, according to the study. They used metaphors such as "a dark figure in front of a blackboard, a dark figure pondering, a dark figure inside and out, a dark figure of a group of hopeless students, a figure with a split face, a figure with question marks in his mind, and a student figure with confusion." Half of the participants stated that recruitment tests should be made fairer, while nearly the same number stated that pedagogical training for teaching certification should be eliminated and the teaching profession should be valued. In addition to expressing concerns about social pressure and oppression, the participants requested that they be respected by society and not oppressed.