Category Archives: ETEC 532

Visual Representation of Education Metaphor

This Visual was created using the Tagul Word Cloud Art generator website. I used this write-up and my own choice of image to generate the cloud.

Usually, when asked to think about what my metaphor for education would be, I’d say a growing tree of knowledge, where the things we learned are the nutrients that help the tree grow and in terms, helps us grow. Or I would say a classroom metaphor for me would be a Chef’s Cooking Pan, where all the ingredients are different students who enter the classroom, and it’s up to the chef/teacher to bring the best out of each ingredient/student, to make the best possible dish. However, this time around, for my visual representation, I chose to use the image of a campfire to metaphorically represent what and how I’ve learned in this course.  I chose a campfire for various reasons, some academic, some not so much.  My non-academic reason is simply because it’s the summer, and so it’s camping season, so bonfire season. Though it’s not what I would usually do during my summers, it’s what most people think of when people think about summer which is also when this course is taking place.

My academic reasoning for choosing a campfire is due to the metaphoric process of keeping the fire burning. I pictured our class as the ring of people who would surround the campfire on a cool summer night, and the whole campfire experience as the learning that occurs. The firewood are the weekly contents and readings that we covered, and the process of adding the wood to keep the fire going are the discussions that we conducted for our weekly topics. Our weekly reflections are our own occasional or frequent actions of adding the logs to the fire to keep the fire going.  And finally, the warmth that we each receive from the campfire as the knowledge we gain from this process. I picture our campfire to grow even bigger with more time, perhaps to the point when it’s big enough to be considered a bonfire.

 

CIP – Self Assessment