Metaphors and Cultures in University Training: A Pedagogical Analysis of Education Sciences in Italy

Any university training course features different actors who hold different cultures, and these visions interact in complex ways producing the students’ experience and growth. Cultures can be revealed by elicited metaphors, as this study does in an Education Sciences degree course in Italy, interviewing a sample of university teachers, students, working educators, and two types of internship supervisors. For every chosen theme (educational relationship, educational planning, educational evaluation and culture of education) the elicited metarphors are very diverse, not only semantically but conceptually, creating an ecosystem of cultures in which the training of future educators takes place. After mapping and relating with each other the cultures of different groups of interviewees, the study asks students to pick and choose from the pool of produced metaphors: students often choose university supervisors’ metaphors as if they were their own; educators’ metaphors are considered stimulating; teachers’ metaphors are chosen rarely. In training, metaphors open up a creative space in which neighboring — but not coincident — imageries meet to generate new meanings. And perhaps in metaphors lies a possibility to study and improve training.