War and peace metaphors of the 7th grade students

Abstract

Although it is known that there are people who are anti-war in the world, the sound of war is still increasing from the world. The concepts of war and peace which are seen as an action with mankind's existence now they are gaining meaning increasingly both in the world and in Turkey. The analysis of the seventh grade students' (sharing the same class, school or district with Syrian children escaping from the war and often facing with the news of death) war and peace metaphors can also reflect the students' point of wiev for today's date in the education system. In this study it is purposed to find that which the students' stated war and peace metaphors are and in which categories these metaphors can be placed. This study is a qualitative research. It has done with 65 students at a secondary school in İstanbul, in Turkey. Containing the phrase of "war/peace is like ... because ..." the papers aiming to collect data were distributed to the students. The data, obtained documents, were analyzed by descriptive and content analysis which are in document analysis. In accordance with the justification 47 war metaphors and 36 peace metaphors were detected. While war metaphors were incorporeted under 10 categories, peace metaphors were incorporeted under 5 categories. As a result, war and peace metaphors are noted with opposite contents for each other. War is descriped through neative metaphors on the other hand peace is descriped through positive metaphors. In this study, being less the metaphors evoking war related with Syria has been a point of attention.

Keywords: Peace, war, metaphor