S. NIXON
in to develop strategies to support students in their development
and personal understanding of themselves and each other. Ap-
proaches to PDP are varied (Clegg & Bradley, 2006) across the
Higher Education (HE) landscape both in the UK, Europe and
across Australasia but there is consensus around its practices in
helping students structure; plan and reflect on their learning
(Quality Assurance Agency, 2009). To do this in a meaningful
way is enhanced if the individual understands their ways of
thinking and working and their own unique preferences; abili-
ties and attributes. The metaphor is a vessel which can hold this
information in a way that can be developed and changed as the
individual grows and builds on their learning and understanding;
this is known in the field as “emergent knowledge” (Johnson,
2001).
The metaphors in this process have been developed through a
set of exercises looking at time; decision making; what’s im-
portant and the one that has been most meaningful has been
around students exploring what they are like when they are
“learning at their best”. As metaphors are known for their abil-
ity to move the mind from one place of understanding to an-
other (Cook-Sather, 2003), this type of creative thinking can
enable students to explore their own mental models. The idea
around this concept is that once the student understands what
they are like when they are “learning at their best” they can
recreate the environment, conditions and attitude whenever they
need to be in learning mode and therefore be at their best more
of the time. If for example a student, when learning at their best
resembles a magpie (which is a bird that has a reputation for
taking and stashing shiny objects), liking to gather everything
and take it back to their nest, this can inform both the students
and tutors how they may go about learning and ways they may
need to be supported (Nixon & Walker, 2009). According to
Saban, Nazli Kocbeker & Saban, (2007) building linkages be-
tween two dissimilar ideas, in this example learning at best
which is the abstract concept and the magpie the concrete, makes
a metaphor an effective cognitive device for learning.
As part of the PDP process in this programme the students
start to think about the “learning at best” concept at the begin-
ning of their first year they develop their ideas over the first few
weeks and then re-visit it at the beginning of second and final
year. Re-visiting and updating the model yearly have been found
to be an excellent way for the students to reflect on where they
are have come from, where they are now and what they need to
move forward thereby supporting their meta-learning. The m od e l
that they build up becomes more sophisticated over time and on
the whole they become more able to both develop the metaphor
and also make sense of it both for themselves and others. It is
important to note that the staff team working on this pro-
gramme have been involved in development activities using
metaphors to conceptualise ideas in order to help them support
the students. This is not an easy process and takes a certain
level of awareness from both the staff and students to be able to
help facilitate the ideas; thoughts and reflections.
Exploring the Student Metaphors
In this paper, six students from one degree programme who
were coming to the end of their studies were asked to volunteer
to undertake a session where they would explore and develop
their “learning at best” metaphors. The sample was chosen for
convenience and was purposive (Robson, 2002), selected due to
the researcher knowing that this group of students were all fa-
miliar with this way of thinking. This decision was taken in
order that the resulting metaphors would be more easily ob-
tained and developed and therefore detailed, which was impor-
tant so the resulting metaphors could be used as a resource for
other students. All students signed consent forms in which they
agreed to the use of their metaphors being shared with fellow
students and staff and also being used for the research. The
session was videoed and this was used to help support the
analysis to construct the detail behind the metaphor as the use
of videotaping helped ensure that participants’ narratives were
accurately presented (Creswell, 2007).
The six students spent a morning with the expert who devel-
oped the original approach for the programme, to develop their
own metaphor for “learning at best”. The facilitation of the
metaphors in this session was detailed and in-depth to make
them as true a representation of the students ideas as possible. It
is acknowledged that they may not be completely accurate in
relation to the learning patterns of those students, however they
were what those students were thinking at that particular time.
The group then shared their metaphors and asked each other
questions to probe for meaning. When each student had devel-
oped their metaphor, they drew the idea onto paper and then
talked the rest of the group though the image and what it meant
to them. The ideas were drawn as images as Palus and Drath
(2001: p. 29) proposed that this can “provide a vehicle for fos-
tering a ‘mediated dialogue’ by helping bridge the gap between
the different meaning perspectives of the speaker and listener”.
Each metaphor in this paper is described individually with the
key ideas being highlighted in relation to the students percep-
tions of what they needed to learn at their best and their learn-
ing preferences. When all six representations were explored key
themes did arise that were discussed by a number of the group
and these are highlighted in the discussion as they hold valuable
information which could be used to support others thinking
about their own pre fe r e nces.
A limitation to the project was that the students undertook
the work at the very end of their studies and therefore it was not
possible to go back and check with them that the interpretation
was as close to their original idea as possible. As this is to be an
on-going resource for the next set of metaphors, time will be
built in to review the resulting resources with each student to
ensure they are accurate and meaningful. The six student me-
taphors are now shown with the diagrams that they produced
and the analysis of the meaning attached.
1) Learning at best is like being a marathon runner. Male
student who graduated with a top class degree.
“like a marathon runner, once I get started I keep going and
going and then at the end its almost like just forcing myself to
go, pushing myself to keep doing it. I like running metaphorical
marathons, I enjoy it. The longer the race the better.”
The key ideas for this individual, whose metaphor is shown
in Figure 1, were about starting on something and keeping
going until it was finished, hurdles appear and you have to look
beyond them in order to carry on. Hurdles are overcome by
asking others, getting help or sometimes just slogging through
until you are over it and in this case normally that is about
reaching a level of understanding. In the metaphor the sky was
grey, “because I am focused, it’s not all sunny and blue. I am
running under grey skies, it’s not miserable it’s just focused”.
You start work “first thing in the morning and stop when it is
done”.
2) Learning at best is like being a cat. Female student who
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