Metaphors of knowing, doing and being: Capturing experience in teaching and teacher education Cheryl J. Craig Houston Endowment Endowed Chair of Urban Education, Department of Teaching, Learning and Culture, Texas A&M University, 308 Harrington Tower, College Station, TX 77843-4232, United States highlights  Educators intuitively chose five storied metaphors to capture their knowing/doing/being.  Metaphors serve as proxies for experiences teachers have not previously had.  Narrative exemplars ably illuminate teachers' metaphors of knowing/doing/being. article info Article history: Received 30 January 2017 Received in revised form 9 September 2017 Accepted 15 September 2017 Keywords: Metaphors Teachers' experiences Narrative inquiry School reform abstract In this article, Bateson's idea of human beings thinking with metaphors and learning through stories is examined as it played out within accumulated educational research studies. Five storied metaphors illuminating knowing, doing and being are highlighted from five investigations involving different research teams. In the cross-case analysis, the importance of narrative exemplars emerges, along with the significance of metaphors serving as proxies for teachers' experiences. The plotlines of the meta- phors, the morals of the metaphors and the truths of the metaphors are also discussed. In the end result, the value of metaphors in surfacing teachers' embedded, embodied knowledge of experience is affirmed as well as the deftness of the narrative inquiry research method in metaphorically capturing pre-service and inservice teachers' storied experiences. © 2017 Published by Elsevier Ltd. Metaphors … create realities …. A metaphor may thus be a guide for future action. Such action will, of course, fit the met- aphor. This will, in turn, reinforce the power of the metaphor to make experience coherent (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980, p. 156). 1. Introduction This article explores the big idea that “the human species thinks with metaphors and learns through stories” (Bateson, 1994, p. 11). It examines the significance of metaphors and stories to the field of education, particularly where beginning teaching, mentoring, teachers' practices, teacher community and school reform are concerned. The work shows how storied metaphors have been personally and collectively used by teachers and principals to convey their lived experiences and to bring coherence to their knowing, doing and being, not because others demand it of them (which is the case with propositional knowledge), but in their own non-propositional knowledge terms. This article further demon- strates how narrative inquiry as a research method is well- equipped to unearth this fine-grained knowledge. The work be- gins with five key concepts from the literature and then launches into a discussion of narrative inquiry as a research methodology. After that, five exemplars excerpted from narrative inquiries con- ducted with different research teams and/or by myself are offered. The work ends with a cross-case, meta-level narrative analysis (i.e., Craig, 2002) and this article's conclusions. 2. Literature review Five conceptual understandings undergird this research. They are: 1) experience, education and life, 2) experience and story; 3) experience, story and metaphor; 4) metaphors in teaching and teacher education; and 5) types of metaphors. E-mail address: cheryljcraig@gmail.com. Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Teaching and Teacher Education journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/tate https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tate.2017.09.011 0742-051X/© 2017 Published by Elsevier Ltd. Teaching and Teacher Education 69 (2018) 300e311