Good Teachers: Visions of Values and Virtues in University Student Metaphors

Good teachers in university education embody combinations of continuity andchange. In the first part here, university teaching is considered in Western philosophies andeducational discourse to suggest teacher characteristics and meta-functions, but this articleproposes wider internationalised dialogues within humanities which crucially take studentviews into account. In the second part, we analyse a database of 863 metaphors aboutteachers given by 439 university students in Malaysia, adopting a socio-cultural approachbased on cognitive linguistics. This elicited metaphor analysis explores student views of“good” teachers expressed in such metaphors as “a good teacher is a burning candle” or“a piece of chalk”. Our analysis of metaphor entailments reveals meta-functions andvirtues of good teachers which though absent in some official discourses, cohere with theeducational philosophy of part one: they include cognitive, social/cultural, affective, moral/spiritual and aesthetic meta-functions. These emphasise the purposes of what teachers “do”and the character of what teachers “are”, as models for what students “do” and what they “become”. This gives challenging insights for teachers (and students) to self-cultivatevirtues if these participant visions are taken seriously for learner-centred approaches tohumanities in new balances of continuity and change.