Determination of the perceptions of school, teacher and school management in primary fourth year students through metaphors: A case of Giresun province

Metaphors are defined as the use of a word in a meaning other than its basic meaning, comparison of one idea with another or revealing an invisible analogy. This study aims to reveal the metaphoric perceptions of primary school fourth grade students about the concepts of school, teacher and school administration and to analyze these metaphors. For this purpose, students' metaphors were applied and the metaphors were divided into categories. However, the reason for the participants' mention of these metaphors was examined and compared in various ways. This study was carried out with phenomenology which is one of the qualitative research designs and the sample of this study is composed of 462 fourth grade students studying in 6 different sociocultural environments in rural, city center and private schools in Giresun province. As a data collection tool, a semi-structured questionnaire consisting of two parts, which was developed by the researcher using pre-test application, was used. In the first part, there are some demographic information such as school information, gender, educational status and occupation of the parents; in the second part, they were asked to produce and justify metaphors for the concepts of school, teacher and school management. Content analysis technique was used to analyze and interpret the data. According to the results of the study, metaphors related to the concept of school were gathered under the conceptual categories of 8, metaphors related to the concept of teacher were 7 and metaphors related to school management were 6. According to the results, it was found that the students who were studying in rural, city center and private schools had different thoughts about the mentioned concepts.