Eliciting Student Teachers’ Conceptions of Teaching from Metaphorical Lens: Pre- and Post-Teaching Practicum

This study aims at finding out the student teachers’ conceptions of teaching before and after teaching practicum, and whether the metaphors of teaching reflect conventional or constructivist before and after teaching practicum. Twenty students majoring in the English language education (batch of 2017 and 2018) of UIN Ar-Raniry who had taken teaching practicum were selected purposively as the participants. The data were collected via a metaphor elicitation task in which every participant was asked to fill in the blank “Teaching is like........ because........” (based on their perspectives before and after teaching practicum). The data obtained were coded inductively by categorizing each metaphor based on its general character. The results showed that there are some metaphor categories before teaching practicum found which are “an easy thing”, “a hard thing”, and “preparation”. Then, some metaphor categories of teaching after practicum found which are “a complicated thing”, “taking a long process”, and “providing knowledge”. Meanwhile, the metaphors of teaching before and after teaching practicum which reflect the conventional teaching paradigm are more dominant than the constructivist one.