The main purpose of this study is to investigate pre-school teachers’ creativity perceptions through metaphors. The study investigated teachers’ metaphors in relation to creativity, creative child and creative teacher concepts. This descriptive study is a phenomenology study in nature. The participants were 250 pre-school teachers who worked in center towns of Adana (Seyhan, Çukurova, Yüreğir and Sarıçam). The participants had a work experience that ranged from 1 to 37 years (=11.36) and their age ranged between 23 and 57 (=34.74). The data were collected through the Metaphor Questionnaire in relation to the creativity concept developed by the researchers. The questionnaire was formed in a way that enabled teachers to express their ideas about “creativity” “creative child” and “creative teacher” concepts by completing the open-ended sentences such as “Creativity is like ………….. because……..”. The questionnaire included the teachers’ gender, age, years of experience in profession, the school they graduated from, and department information, as well. Results show that the teachers produced 261 metaphors: 90 metaphors about creativity, 86 metaphors about creative child, and 85 metaphors about creative teacher. The teachers’ general metaphors were collected under 10 conceptual categories. Perceptions about creativity, creative child and creative teacher concepts were found to be metaphorized under such categories as nature and space (rainbow, sea, island, mineral, snowflake, sun, star), occupation (theatre player, sculptor, director, carpenter…), human (mother, child, baby sitter…), action (swimming, walking, sky diving…), object (play dough, dough, ore…), art (theatre, poem, painting), animal (silk worm, bee, butterfly), and mythological features ( magic wand, fairy, angel, creating out of nothing). An examination of the teachers’ metaphors and explanations together indicates that creativity is not generally perceived with its originality dimension.
