Metaphorical Mirror: Reflecting on Our Personal Pursuits to Discover and Challenge Our Teaching Practice Assumptions

The goal of this paper is to examine how our personal pursuits--hobbies, activities, interests, and sports--can serve as a metaphor to reflect who we are in our teaching practice. This paper explores the notion that our favorite personal pursuits serve as metaphorical mirrors to reveal deeper assumptions we hold about the skills, values, and actions we encourage, recognize, and reward in our classrooms. The paper has four principle objectives: first, to understand the importance of identifying the skills, values, and actions that form our basic assumptions of knowing in our personal pursuits and teaching practices; second, to appreciate the importance of reflection on experience as an epistemology for self-knowledge and for developing in our teaching practices; third, to understand the power of metaphors to enhance our ability to see previously unavailable and therefore unexamined assumptions; and fourth, to examine and challenge for validity, through dialogue, our assumptions to improve our teaching practices. In addition, in this article we offer a metaphorical mirror exercise designed to help facilitate application of personal pursuits through reflection and dialogue to one's teaching practice. [Note: The publication year (2009) shown on the PDF is incorrect. The correct publication year is 2008.]