Learning Through Metaphors With Adult Doctoral Students

Abstract

With doctoral attrition rates at 50%, there is a need to better support and facilitate doctoral student success. Although multiple solutions are needed, addressing students' experience in the classroom is a vital component. This chapter argues that one method to do so is through the power of metaphors as an engaged pedagogical tool. The first part offers the theory and research on metaphors, teaching, and adult learning. Requiring competence and creativity from the teacher, metaphors can help facilitate effective learning because they are comprehensive ways of orientating a student's conceptual understanding around a topic. As the foundation of their research, all doctoral students complete a literature review. And the second part of the chapter presents a pedagogical illustration about how to teach argumentation, analysis, and synthesis in the literature review via an extended engaged metaphor around film popularity. This final section brings the theoretical rhetoric around metaphor and doctoral learning into tangible reality.