A study of differences among faculty of education third year students' perceptions of visual images in terms of metaphor

The main purpose of this study is to investigate the differences among 3rd year undergraduate students at Faculty of Education in terms of their perception of visual images through quality ( originality and creativity) and to inquire if this quality varies according to whether they receive art education or not. Accordingly, the resarch is intended to study students' visual-image-related metaphores, distribution of creative thinking abilities and what changes this distribution. It also discusses the impact of such factors as whether they are Art Education students or not, what they are majoring in and and what their gender is on their perception of visual images. The study employs phenomenological design, one of the qualititive design methods, and the sampling group consist of 3rd year undergraduate students majoring in different departments of Çukurova University. The tools for data collection are "Transformation from Image to Metaphoric Concept" and "Transformation from Concept to Metaphoric Image". The former holds visuals with different contents and subjects, and the latter has twelve concepts including emotions, colors and actions. Qualititive data has been analysed by means of content analysis and the obtained results, after being turned into numerical values, have been interpereted with the use of a statistical analysis method, cross table. The analysis of the findings has demonstrated that most of the metaphores the respondents have used exist in the Convergent Thinking Category. On the other hand, when looked at the results on the basis of the departmental distribution of the students, it is seen that almost half of the metaphores created by Art Education students and some of those produced by the students from other departments have been found to belong in the Divergent Thinking Category. Among the interesting and attention-catching results of the research, one stands out. Apart from Art Education students, respondents from different fields such as Philosophy, Psychological Counselling and Guidance, and Turkish - disciplines which basically deal with human feelings and thoughts - have used metaphores to be placed at the upper levels of Divergent Thinking Category. Key Words: Visual image, metaphor, perception, creativity