Conference Agenda

The effective functioning of a modern school in an Age of Uncertainty requires conscious creation of its culture, which, when shaped, ensures the school's implementation of its mission in a dynamically changing social, economic and cultural reality. Recognizing the possibility of influencing culture and shaping it in accordance with a given direction means focusing on identifying its elements subject to modification, learning about the factors conducive to cultural change and the possibilities and ways of carrying it out. School culture highlights specific aspects of school life and brings out the importance of "who we are" and " the way we do things around here" (Deal & Peterson, 2010). Research on school culture is one of the most interesting directions in the search for factors in the development and improvement of school organization (Hoy, 1990).

Many researchers agree that school culture is a crucial variable in school improvement (Deal & Peterson, 1999; Stoll & Fink, 1996).

Scientific analyzes regarding intra-school processes, referred to as "school culture", come from various disciplines and were initially associated with the concept of school life by Waller (1932), who noted that schools have an identity of their own, with complex rituals of personal relationships, a set of folkways, mores, irrational sanctions, and moral codes (see also: Maslowski, 2006; Schoen & Teddlie, 2008). The concept of organizational culture began to receive attention in the research communities (e.g., Deal & Kennedy, 1982; Ouchi, 1981) as a factor associated with organizational performance in the 1980s. Lack of early attention by researchers may be because culture is associated with taken-for-granted values, underlying assumptions, expectations, collective memories, and definitions in an organization (Cameron & Quinn, 1999, p. 14). Over the last few decades, the discussion on the concept of school culture has become an integral part of both the educational discourse ongoing in various circles and empirical studies devoted to school. Despite different interpretations of the category of school culture itself (see e.g. Deal & Peterson, 1999; Schoen & Teddlie, 2008; ), there is consensus among researchers that its cognitive value results from a comprehensive understanding of various aspects of everyday school life and is therefore helpful in learning and understanding the nature of school life and institutionalized education.

The aim of the poster presentation will be to present a research project on the cultures of alternative education schools, to discuss its conceptual assumptions and planned methodological solutions. The project is a team effort, prepared with the intention of identifying the cultures of selected institutions, defining their specificity and analyzing the interactions between individual dimensions and cultural elements. An equally important goal of research activities will be to compare the cultures of the studied institutions - to determine whether the teaching-learning environments, which are unique examples of innovative educational ventures, are clearly different and how this is expressed.

Learning about different educational proposals is cognitively fascinating, but also in the social interest. Typical human characteristics are activity, searching for new solutions, improving the existing reality, and this, in relation to the school reality, becomes particularly important due to the need to provide high-quality modern educational services. The planned research will primarily provide new knowledge and is therefore significant for building and developing school culture theory.

The concept of culture as applied to schools is difficult to define as well as to operationalize in research terms. That is why there are attempts to create different models of school culture with a promise of more comprehensive and coherent approach to school culture research (e.g. Kent, 2006; Brady, 2008; Schoen & Teddlie, 2008; Torres, 2022). Undoubtedly, the study of school culture is quite a challenge, not only because of the difficulty in operationalizing the object of analysis itself, or even because of the need for interdisciplinary profiling. The study of school culture requires reaching the subtle elements of the phenomenon being explored. Elements such as values, perceptions, experiences, feelings can be difficult to accurately capture quantitatively. However, taking them into account is necessary to build a coherent, complementary picture of the school environment.

Given these difficulties, researchers turn to metaphor as a tool of knowing the culture of the school. Metaphors can play a vital role in conceptualizing and reflecting the nature of learning and are used in establishing a connection between educational theories and personal beliefs (Leavy et al., 2007). From this point of view, metaphor is a beneficial tool in close examining teachers’ and students’ thoughts on their learning and teaching environment (Martinez et al., 2001; Saban, 2013). It is also a tool in the process of organizational assessment and change (Cleary & Packard, 1992).

Lakoff and Johnson (1980, p. 5) state that person’s perceptions of concepts are based on metaphors. They argue that the essence of metaphor is understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another. Educators use metaphors as a way to attract the students’ attention through comparing objects, reflecting on them in their mind and teaching them. Although the context for the development of values by young people has grown more complex and the possibilities for choice have expanded as a result of sociocultural development and globalization, schools still operate as major social environments where pupils share their beliefs, norms, values, and fears for a substantial part of their lives (Demir, 2007).

According to the social, cultural and economic conditions of the society, different metaphors emerged in the field of education, such as the school as a figurative factory, a plant, a social center, a welfare agency etc. (Bishop, 2019; Eshenkulova & Boobekova, 2022). Metaphors not only structure the way of thinking about schools but also help create a world of the school. Some researchers (e.g. Jordan, 1996) identified several powerful metaphors for schooling and school improvement that dominate the thinking of policy-makers, scholars and practitioners (Demir, 2007).

Transferring ideas about the school to other objects allows researchers to reach subtle elements of school culture which resist quantitative approaches. The aim of the poster presentation is to show a fragment of research material collected as part of a team project. The methods and tools used in this project provides an insight into the cultures of selected institutions: their specificity and the interactions between individual dimensions and cultural elements. This, in turn, allows to compare the cultures of selected non-public primary schools – schools "other than all".

The purpose of this study is to analyze the perceptions of two primary school students of school and schooling by examining the metaphors they produce. The process of verbalizing school experiences through a metaphorical description of them is a component of communication processes, but it can also be used for consensus, decision-making or persuasion. It makes it possible to discover existing beliefs that subjectively describe the functioning of the school, and which can be used as one of the sources of knowledge about it.