The Metaphors of Pre-service History Teachers Regarding the Concept of "History"

This study aims to determine preservice history teachers' metaphors about the concept of history. The research group consists of 75 university students. The study data were obtained by the students completing the forms in which the sentence “History is like/similar to ....... because .......” was written. The metaphors created by the students were identified and categorized according to their common features. In this study, phenomenology design, one of the qualitative research methods, was used. The data obtained were analyzed using the content analysis technique. The SPSS data analysis program was used to analyze the collected data. Descriptive statistics of the collected data are given in detail. In addition, it was examined whether there was a relationship between “gender,” “type of high school students graduated from,” “the number of siblings,” and “categories of history metaphors given as examples.” As a result of the Chi-Square Independence Test, no relationship was found between these and the main categories of historical metaphors given as examples (p>0,05). The participants produced 53 distinct metaphors for the concept of history, divided into three categories. As a result of the research, it was found that the most preferred metaphor among the metaphors developed by the participants was the metaphor of light.