Year: 2010
Type: book-chapter
Abstract: Threshold Concepts and Transformational Learningfrequently troublesome, for a variety of reasons.These learning thresholds are often the points at which students experience difficulty.The transformation may be sudden or it may be protracted over a considerable period of time, with the transition to understanding often involving 'troublesome knowledge'.Depending on discipline and context, knowledge might be troublesome because it is ritualised, inert, conceptually difficult, alien or tacit, because it requires adopting an unfamiliar discourse, or perhaps because the learner remains 'defended' and does not wish to change or let go of their customary way of seeing things.Difficulty in understanding threshold concepts may leave the learner in a state of 'liminality', a suspended state of partial understanding, or 'stuck place', in which understanding approximates to a kind of 'mimicry' or lack of authenticity.Insights gained by learners as they cross thresholds can be exhilarating but might also be unsettling, requiring an uncomfortable shift in identity, or, paradoxically, a sense of loss.A further complication might be the operation of an 'underlying game' which requires the learner to comprehend the often tacit games of enquiry or ways of thinking and practising inherent within specific disciplinary knowledge practices.In this sense we might wish to talk of 'threshold practices' or 'threshold experiences' that are necessary in the learner's development.This is our third book on the topic of threshold concepts.The first, Overcoming Barriers to Student Understanding: Threshold Concepts and Troublesome Knowledge (Meyer and Land, 2006), drew together the early seminal writings and some first disciplinary applications of this approach.It offered, in an exploratory fashion, a tentative conceptual framework and a lens through which to view the pedagogy of higher education anew.After a lively international symposium on this topic in Glasgow, Scotland in the autumn of 2006, a second volume was published.Threshold Concepts within the Disciplines (Land, Meyer and Smith, 2008) built and expanded on the first in significant ways.It provided more empirical data concerning the experience of threshold concepts and troublesome knowledge, particularly from the students' perspective.It also extended the range of disciplinary contexts in which thresholds had been studied.This encouraged further work to be undertaken, culminating in a second successful international conference in Kingston Ontario organised by Caroline Baillie in the summer of 2008, from which this third volume has taken shape.With Threshold Concepts and Transformational Learning the empirical evidence for threshold concepts has been substantially increased, drawn from what is now a large number of disciplinary contexts and from the higher education sectors of many countries.The central section of this new volume adds to that evidence base, ranging across subjects that include, amongst others, economics, electrical engineering, education, clinical education, sociology, social justice, modern languages, law, computer science, philosophy, transport and product design, nanoscience, mathematics, biology, history and accounting.The authors included here work in colleges and universities in the United Kingdom, the USA, Canada, Sweden, Estonia, Australia, Hong Kong and the South Pacific.The opening section of the volume, moreover, challenges and extends the theoretical boundaries of the thresholds framework in relation to our understanding of
Authors: Ray Land, Jan H. F. Meyer, Caroline Baillie
Language: English
Subfield: Education
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: Quality education
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2889712837