Threshold Concepts in the Moment

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.

Table of 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