The concept of culture as applied to schools is difficult to define as well as to operationalize in research terms. That is why there are attempts to create different models of school culture with a promise of more comprehensive and coherent approach to school culture research (e.g. Kent, 2006; Brady, 2008; Schoen & Teddlie, 2008; Torres, 2022). Undoubtedly, the study of school culture is quite a challenge, not only because of the difficulty in operationalizing the object of analysis itself, or even because of the need for interdisciplinary profiling. The study of school culture requires reaching the subtle elements of the phenomenon being explored. Elements such as values, perceptions, experiences, feelings can be difficult to accurately capture quantitatively. However, taking them into account is necessary to build a coherent, complementary picture of the school environment.

Given these difficulties, researchers turn to metaphor as a tool of knowing the culture of the school. Metaphors can play a vital role in conceptualizing and reflecting the nature of learning and are used in establishing a connection between educational theories and personal beliefs (Leavy et al., 2007). From this point of view, metaphor is a beneficial tool in close examining teachers’ and students’ thoughts on their learning and teaching environment (Martinez et al., 2001; Saban, 2013). It is also a tool in the process of organizational assessment and change (Cleary & Packard, 1992).

Lakoff and Johnson (1980, p. 5) state that person’s perceptions of concepts are based on metaphors. They argue that the essence of metaphor is understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another. Educators use metaphors as a way to attract the students’ attention through comparing objects, reflecting on them in their mind and teaching them. Although the context for the development of values by young people has grown more complex and the possibilities for choice have expanded as a result of sociocultural development and globalization, schools still operate as major social environments where pupils share their beliefs, norms, values, and fears for a substantial part of their lives (Demir, 2007).

According to the social, cultural and economic conditions of the society, different metaphors emerged in the field of education, such as the school as a figurative factory, a plant, a social center, a welfare agency etc. (Bishop, 2019; Eshenkulova & Boobekova, 2022). Metaphors not only structure the way of thinking about schools but also help create a world of the school. Some researchers (e.g. Jordan, 1996) identified several powerful metaphors for schooling and school improvement that dominate the thinking of policy-makers, scholars and practitioners (Demir, 2007).

Transferring ideas about the school to other objects allows researchers to reach subtle elements of school culture which resist quantitative approaches. The aim of the poster presentation is to show a fragment of research material collected as part of a team project. The methods and tools used in this project provides an insight into the cultures of selected institutions: their specificity and the interactions between individual dimensions and cultural elements. This, in turn, allows to compare the cultures of selected non-public primary schools – schools "other than all".

The purpose of this study is to analyze the perceptions of two primary school students of school and schooling by examining the metaphors they produce. The process of verbalizing school experiences through a metaphorical description of them is a component of communication processes, but it can also be used for consensus, decision-making or persuasion. It makes it possible to discover existing beliefs that subjectively describe the functioning of the school, and which can be used as one of the sources of knowledge about it.

Inspired by Gareth Morgan's (1986) theoretical model of reading and understanding organizations on the basis of metaphorical analysis, we attempted to reach the perception and understanding of school reality expressed through metaphor by primary school students, while maintaining the awareness that the image of school built in this way remains, after all, partial. Using metaphor as a textual tool to study empirically elusive elements of school culture, an attempt was made to get closer to students' ways of reading and understanding school reality. The study was conducted in two non-public primary schools, implementing an alternative education model in practice. This means that the study involved students who had been learning in the so-called open didactic environment for several years – an environment free of transmission-behavioral solutions dominant in the Polish mainstream school system. The source of the data was a task carried out by the eighth grade students. It consisted of a text and a drawing part. The students were asked to complete the sentence: My school is like... Then to illustrate the metaphor and explain why the school was presented the way it did. The examined material (N = 22) provided data in the form of texts and drawings. The main analysis was focused on students' texts, while drawings were treated as an important support in the process of reaching the meanings attributed by young people to the school reality – its various dimensions and elements. Analytical work included the initial ordering of data (line-by-line coding), their supplementation with interpretations and suggestions for ordering metaphors. This work was carried out individually and in parallel by two researchers. Then, during the discussion, the effects of these activities were confronted and the final categorization of student metaphors was made. As a result, five categories were selected. In a separate group were placed those texts in which the school was not presented in a metaphorical way, but in a factual way (n = 2).

As a result of the collected material analysis, five groups of metaphors were identified: (1) culture/climate: among the analyzed metaphors, the largest number are those whose authors in their perception of the school focus on the atmosphere of the place, interpersonal relations, but also the adopted philosophy of education and the norms regulating the life of their school; (2) hybrid (collage): this group brings together metaphors that carry a wide variety of cognitive content, reflecting the complex nature of school life that can be perceived in many ways and interpreted differently, taking into account its physical, axiological or socio-didactic dimensions; (3) catastrophic: this category includes the metaphor of the Titanic or an airplane whose engine has suffered a major failure – this means a subjectively perceived difficulty, a complication of everyday school life: the daily routine is stressful, full of aggravating problem situations and, as such, often requires quick decisions and efficient actions from the student; (4) chaos: this category includes metaphors such as the museum of modern art and “random chance” and emphasizes chaos, randomness, unpredictability, and creativity in the school environment; (5) prison: this category includes metaphors exposing external coercion at school, different types of constraints and coercion. The analysis of the data revealed a diversity of perception and inter¬pretation of school reality. It is worth adding, however, that the image of the school obtained by means of a metaphor should be approached with the criticism typical of scientific activities. In the context of this study, it is worth considering to what extent the students' metaphors accurately reflect the key features of their school's life, as well as the relationships between the various elements of the complex, multi-level structure of school organization.

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