Making Meaning of Academic Identities Using Metaphor as an Arts-Based Educational Research Method

This chapter uses metaphor as an arts-based education research method to explore the complex nature of academic identities. Metaphor is a creative linguistic and conceptual device that uses the imagination to express what might be challenging to portray meaningfully in words. Using a sociocultural theoretical perspective as academics working across disciplines, we unpack our identities guided by the question: “How might narrative accounts of lived experiences, elicited through metaphor, make evident academic identities as complex and entangled?” We assembled our personal narratives to illustrate how metaphor enabled us to excavate the many facets of our personal and professional identities. Different metaphors (water, pattern making, a trencadís bench, and a spiritual image of Mary), offered opportunity to conceptualise distinct facets of our academic identities. Metaphors allowed us to understand how our socialisation had moulded us to think and act in specific ways in our academic spaces. They helped unearth our hidden assumptions and provided evidence of how practices modelled in our personal lives contributed to the makeup of who we are as teachers in higher education. Using metaphor as a heuristic device deepened our understanding of the potential for our shifting, multiple academic identities.