Images of Teaching with Computer Technology: A Metaphorical Perspective. Research Paper: Moving Beyond the Crossroads: Teachers as Agents for Change.

This paper focuses teachers' images of their own computer-integrated teaching: the way the teaching process is structured by teachers' relationships with computer technology and how this relationship defines their work and their thoughts, voices, and experiences. It also examines how teachers themselves comprehend and convey their roles and thus search for a new paradigm of opportunities that encompass these roles. Image is proposed in this study as a construct to understand teachers' particularistic knowledge in the context of teaching with computer technology. This study incorporates the utilization of teachers' metaphors as a tool to investigate teachers' images of computer-assisted instruction. Data were collected in three steps. Teachers were instructed to write down personally constructed metaphors in the form of explicit metaphorical statements. This was followed by their creation of narratives of selected metaphorical statements. The last step involved the teachers' derivation of metaphors for the statements. Findings indicate that these underlying images are significant and should be embraced by technology trainers and teacher educators to help better prepare teachers for using technology in instruction. Contains 35 references. (AEF)