Mental Images towards the Concept of Drama

Abstract

The aim of this study is to examine the mental images of preschool teacher candidates related to the concept of drama via metaphors. We questioned these questions; “What are the metaphors or mental images of teacher candidates?”, “Under which conceptual categories are these metaphors or mental images can be collected?” and “Is there any significant correlation between the categories?” For this purpose we studied with 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 4th grade bachelor degree students (preschool teacher candidates) who are attending to a faculty of education department of preschool education in Black Sea Region of Turkey. 34 teacher candidates from grade 1, 33 from grade 2, 44 from grade 3 and 41 from grade 4, totally 152 teacher candidates participated to this study. Teacher candidates from grade 1 and 2 haven’t attended to a drama course before, but 3 and 4. We used Mixed Method Research. Participants were asked to create metaphors as much as they want by completing “Drama is like …………… Because …………………” sentence. Teacher candidates created 624 acceptable metaphors related to the concept of drama. We analyzed the answers and divided them to 7 different conceptual categories as “Action”, ”Human”, “Object”, “Concrete”, “Abstract”, “Nature” and “Animal”. Most metaphors were created in the categories of “Action”, second in “Abstract” and third in “Object”. We found a significant correlation between the categories of “Concrete” and “Object”, “Nature” and “Object”. (p< ,05). There should be more studies on mental images related to the concept of drama may be with different samples or variables.

Keywords: drama, metaphor, mental image, perception