Full Description
In the twenty years since Ray Land and Erik Meyer published their first paper on Threshold Concepts, there has been a steady stream of papers mulling over their original suggestions that learning, far from proceeding in an orderly fashion, is instead a process of struggle - perhaps alienation and confusion - that puts students in a troublesome liminal 'in-between' state. As their understanding develops, liminality gives way to transformational insight whereby a whole field of study comes, often quite abruptly, into focus. There is a gain but often also a loss: in this new world, old certainties, assumptions and even aspects of our identity can be left by the wayside.
Threshold Concepts in the Moment is the sixth collection in the series on the subject of Threshold Concepts, following the 8th Biennial Conference held in 2021, anchored at London's UCL but running online across the world. Its contributors, who range from 'old hands' to new members of the community finding their feet, mull over the insights of the threshold concepts framework in higher education, scrutinise their own fields of study, explore the implications of liminality for pedagogy and becoming professional practitioners, and consider the broad implications for pedagogy of factoring in the troublesomeness of knowledge and learning.
Contents
Foreword
Julie A. Timmermans
Preface
Jason P. Davies
Acknowledgements
A Tribute to Mick Flanagan
List of Figures and Tables
Notes on Contributors
PART 1: Big Questions
1 Failure as a 'Native Informant': A Potential Threshold Concept
Julie A. Timmermans
2 Assessment of Student Learning in Threshold Concepts-Oriented Teaching and Learning: Existing Approaches and Future Research Perspectives
Jan-Martin Geiger
3 Threshold Concepts: Where Next? Reflections on Educational Spaces, Times, and Identities
David Riley
4 Intersecting the Identification Problem and Mixed Methods Designs in Threshold Concept Research
David Reeping
5 Reframing Threshold Concepts as Open Questions
Isaac Calduch
6 Secularism as a Universalising Threshold Concept
Sharday Catherine Mosurinjohn and Jason P. Davies
PART 2: Journeys through Liminality
7 Mediating Liminality: Artefacts as a Means of Supporting Threshold Transformations
Julie Rattray and Matthew J. Ravenstahl
8 Thinking with Liminality: The Many Faces of Liminality
Leif Martin Hokstad and Bjørn Otto Braaten
9 Spatial Response to Liminality: Empirical Examples from First Semester Architect Students' Design Work
Bjørn Otto Braaten and Leif Martin Hokstad
10 Step into the Unknown: Liminality as a Safe Playing Space to Learn
Laura Blackburn, Dora Regoczi, Larissa Kempenaar and Sivaramkumar Shanmugam
11 Liminality from the Inside: Dimensions of Students' Transformations in a Threshold Concepts-Infused Economics Programme in South Africa
Jessica Schroenn Goebel and Suriamurthee Moonsamy Maistry
12 Embracing Liminality: Tools for Negotiating Identity Shift in New-to-SoTL Practitioners
Diane E. Boyd
13 The Human Element: How Educators Can Prepare Learners for Future Workplace Uncertainties and Troublesome Knowledge
Michelle D. Lazarus, Amany Gouda-Vossos, Jaai Parasnis, Elizabeth A. Davis, Swati Mujumdar, Angela Ziebell and Gabrielle Brand
PART 3: Learning from & with Students
14 Developing a Threshold Concept Curriculum: Facilitating Student Understanding of the Value of Their Education Experience
Matthew Christopher Atherton and Yvonne Nalani Meulemans
15 Threshold Connections: Engaging Trainee Teachers in Collaborative Curriculum Research to Explore Threshold Concepts within Secondary School Science Disciplines
Matthew James Dunn and Jenny Anne Wynn
16 Analyzing Written and Oral Learner Discourse: Methods to Discern Truly Thorny Thresholds and to Enrich TCF Theory
Virginia M. Tucker and Michelle Holschuh Simmons
17 The True Nature of Threshold Concepts in ELT Teacher Education
Marwan Alyafaee
18 Mathematical Proving as a Threshold: Proving in Undergraduate Mathematics
Bert Zwaneveld, Hans Sterk and Jacob Perrenet
19 Threshold Concepts in Higher Education Physics as Identified by Students of Environmental Sciences
Paquita Perez, Bert Zwaneveld and Gé Nielissen
PART 4: Students Getting the Hang of It
20 Out of the Comfort Zone: The Trouble with a MOOC-Virtual Exchange Blend at the Time of the COVID 19 Pandemic
Marina Orsini-Jones and Kyria Rebeca Finardi
21 The Light at the End of the Tunnel: A Study of Adult Learners Transitioning into the Online Study Space
Trish Powers
22 Applying Threshold Concepts and Addressing Bottlenecks in ePortfolio Implementation
Brenda Refaei and Ruth Benander
PART 5: Becoming a Professional
23 The Hidden Threshold: Tacit Learning in Interpreting
Dai-Ling Chen
24 Trustworthiness as a Practical Threshold in Authentic Translation Project-Based Learning
Amani Albuwardi
25 Thresholds and Liminal Spaces: Advancing Understanding of Becoming a Scholarly Teacher in Higher Education
Linda Martindale and Stella Howden
26 Faculty Thresholds for Information Literacy Teaching: Discovering Threshold Concepts through a Professional Learning Course and Networks of Practice
Sara D. Miller and Craig Gibson
27 A Phenomenographic Study of Interprofessionality: The Threshold Concept for Health Profession Students
Natasha Hubbard Murdoch
28 Threshold Concepts in Graduate Apprenticeships
Hebatallah Shoukry and Anne Tierney
PART 6: The Last Word?
29 Twaddle, Conformity, and Variation: A Retrospective 'Endnote' for Meyer and Land (2003)
J. H. F. Meyer
30 Getting into Trouble: Twenty Years of Threshold Concepts
Ray Land
Index
