‘Is That Enough?’ An examination of the conceptual metaphors post-primary pre-service teachers use to make sense of collaborative learning

Collaborative Learning (CL) is resoundingly endorsed throughout the academic literature and developing more collaborative cultures at all levels of education has become an explicit goal, nowhere more so than in Initial Teacher Education. Despite this, it continues to encounter noticeable ‘student resistance’ and stunted rates of propagation. This investigation centres on the language-in-action of seven groups of Pre-Service Teachers from 2016 to 2019, as they engage in CL as part of their Initial Teacher Education. Adopting a duality of Cognitive Linguistic and Conversation Analysis lenses allowed audio recordings of these collaborative conversations to be scrutinised and understood in terms of the interactional behaviours and learner- expressed goals, as well as the conceptual models depicted through the metaphoric language embedded in that speech. This revealed an absence of a clear and shared understanding of CL, a problem compounded by the systematic alignment of the conversation away from epistemic engagement and development, commonly exhibiting discomfort with epistemic authority. This phenomenon was echoed in the emergence of a system of cognitive metaphors which structurally provided for conceptualising their collaboration task, not in terms of an epistemically- developmental activity, but as a labour-centric one. This inquiry uniquely builds on both existing CL and ITE literature, particularly in the context of student resistance and the epistemic ramifications of various conceptual metaphors. It further contributes to literature which recognises the critical role PSTs’ epistemic beliefs can impact their teacher training.

Grantor dc:publisher

University College Cork

Year dc:date.issued

2023

Author dc:creator

• Harrington, Fergal

Advisors dc:contributor.advisor

• Long, Fiachra
• Ni Riordain, Maire
• Rutherford, Vanessa

• Collaborative
• Cooperative
• Learning
• Metaphor
• Pre-service
• Cognitive
• Post-primary
• Teachers

Statement dc:rights

• © 2023, Fergal Harrington.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/

Language dc:language.iso

en

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/10468/15019

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:cora.ucc.ie:10468/15019