Making Metaphors Community Workshop Guide

This guide supports community co-researchers to facilitate Making Metaphors workshops. Making Metaphors workshops is a technique that has been developed as part of a research project. It uses creative, arts-based methods to think about and express ideas and experiences in deep and rich ways. Participants are encouraged to think about a metaphor for an idea or experience, or an idea how things could be different in the future, and create it as a 3D model using craft materials. Playing creatively with physical materials in combination with stories and metaphors helps with critical and creative thinking. Making Metaphors workshops are usually fun and enjoyable for participants, but they are also very valuable for research: the metaphors are like ‘precise fictions’. They are a poetic and powerful way for participants’ voices to be heard and understood by others.