Exploring conceptual understanding and personal epistemologies through metaphor

While epistemologies have long been of interest in other fields, they have only recently begun to receive attention within engineering education. In particular, engineers´ personal epistemologies (PEs) are a significant but understudied facet of engineering and engineering education. PEs are individuals´ beliefs and attitudes that consciously and subconsciously affect the ways they think about knowledge, learning, and the validity and justification of arguments. PEs encompass various dimensions of knowledge: where it comes from, how it is created, how it is organized, how universal it is, etc. Likewise, despite their significant role in structuring thought and action, metaphors have received scant attention within engineering education. The work that does explore metaphors in engineering education focuses on issues of underrepresentation. Metaphors are not mere linguistic devices, but rather play central roles in cognition and categorical perception. Therefore, this paper draws on epistemological and metaphorical work from other fields in order to analyze the metaphors employed by engineering students in discussions of their personal epistemologies.