Abstract:

Teaching material properties in technical building construction modules often relies on content-driven instruction, specification descriptions, and retention assessments. While this approach ensures technical accuracy, it can encourage passive learning, resulting in a surface-level understanding of material behaviour.

This paper introduces a teaching approach that uses metaphor-driven storytelling to personify construction materials and explore their characteristics and properties.

By framing materials such as glass, timber, steel, and concrete as metaphorical agents, each embodying characteristics like fragility, resilience, tension, and compression, this approach encourages students to actively construct their own understanding rather than passively recall technical information.

The study adopts an exploratory, qualitative autoethnographic approach grounded in a reflective analysis of teaching practice within a building construction module. Students are required to select a construction material and write a metaphorical, personified narrative that accurately represents its structural properties, performance characteristics, and applications in the built environment.

Drawing on classroom observations, teaching artefacts, and reflective analysis of the exercise, the study examines how metaphor-based personification supports students’ interpretation of material behaviour and articulation of performance characteristics.

Findings suggest that narrative personification strengthens conceptual connections between material properties, structural limitations, and practical applications, while also increasing student engagement and reflective participation in a technically oriented module.

The paper argues that narrative cognition offers a relevant pedagogical strategy for technical curricula by supporting conceptual learning and expanding teaching approaches within construction education.

Keywords:

personification, metaphor, storytelling, construction pedagogy, conceptual learning.