Teacher’s practical knowledge is potentially relevant to the teaching practice in
his/her classroom. The research explored early childhood teachers’ practical
knowledge of ‘curriculum’ via conceptual metaphors. The participants (N=348)
completed a prompt, “Curriculum is like A because B” and then the metaphors
were analyzed according to the procedure proposed by Moser (2000). The analysis
found that 8 themes (i.e. ‘educational basis’, ‘learning opportunity’, ‘educational
material’, ‘difficulty’, ‘change’, ‘pre-determination’, ‘discordance’, and ‘reconstruct
-ion’) were the underlying conceptions signified in those metaphors. The
implications regarding early childhood teachers’ practical knowledge were discussed
on the perspective of post-modern curriculum. Moreover, it recommended the
practical knowledge based approach for early childhood teacher education, and
transformation of current policy for program evaluation relevant to curriculum
conceptualization.