Project studies are important studies in increasing the interest in science lessons and creating an inquisitive, questioning and creative classroom atmosphere. In this respect, it is thought that it is

important to examine how preservice teachers, who have an important position in the structuring of the future, perceive the concept of project. In order to determine these perceptions, metaphors were used in the present study. The aim of the study is to reveal the perceptions of preservice science teachers about the concept of project through metaphors. The phenomenology design, one of the qualitative research designs, was used in the research. The study group consists of 56 pre-service science teachers who participated in the TUBITAK project named “Preservice Teachers Meet with Applied Activities”. Research data were collected through an online open-ended form. The form includes a question to determine the metaphorical perceptions of the participants about the concept of the project. This question is “The project is like.................... because ...........”. In this context, the participants were asked to embody the concept of the project and compare it to something, and to express the reason for this analogy in the sentence starting with "because". The obtained data were analyzed by content analysis method. The data of the research were examined by the researchers, it was checked whether the metaphors were written, whether the reason was explained, whether the relationship between the metaphor and its reasoning was in logical integrity. After it was determined that all the data met these criteria, the data were numbered as S1, S2, ..., S56, based on the confidentiality of the names of the participants. Metaphors were determined from the data, and then they were divided into categories according to their common features and similarities with each other. As a result of the study, it was determined that pre-service teachers produced a total of 45 different metaphors for the concept of project. Cooking, building, baby, imagination and creativity, scientist, map, innovation and process are the metaphors most produced by preservice teachers.

Keywords: Metaphor, project, preservice science teachers