The Mountains of Metaphor: A Visual Teaching Resource

Have you ever supervised a researcher, knew they were struggling, but weren’t quite sure why? Maybe they didn’t want to share personal matters? Maybe there was a cultural divide, or they were just private? This blog post won’t solve all your problems, but it might give you one tool for communicating differently with research students.

The Mountains of Metaphor project was written from the other side of the equation, from the perspective of a research student. It is a visual narrative of my PhD journey, developing a metaphor that I found kind, supportive, and helpful for keeping a sense of perspective and focus on what was, at times, a tough journey. You can read a bit more about why I created the piece here, and how it speaks to reflective and autoethnographic accounts of doing research. This post is slightly different. This is about how you can use the metaphor and the resource to communicate with PGRs, or any students, about their research, progress, ambitions, and other life events without the conversation needing to become too personal.