What do you do with an idea? Teaching about metaphor using quality literature

This presentation draws on the presenter’s experience of teaching about metaphors in children’s literature in a final-year preservice teacher education English and literacy curriculum course. Discussions about metaphors revealed the need for the preservice teachers to develop more knowledge and understanding of: what metaphors are; ways they are embedded in everyday language and lives; how authors and illustrators use them; and their power to deepen conceptual understanding and thinking. The presentation uses Biesta and Tedder’s view of agency as something an individual achieves rather than possesses. This view is combined with Emirbayer and Mische’s triadic view of agency as comprising past, future, and present orientations. The presentation combines these two frameworks to examine how the preservice teachers’ past experiences, future work in classrooms, and present pedagogical choices and actions exposed potential challenges for them to effectively teach metaphor. Using the picture book, What do you do with an idea?, by Kobi Yamada, strategies developed by the presenter using material objects and dialogic pedagogies to build the preservice teachers’ resources to address these challenges are explored. The need to research these and other strategies to better prepare preservice teachers to use quality literature in their future classrooms is also discussed.