1177-threshold-concepts-and-transformational-learning

EDITORS’ PREFACEhence becomes a necessary consideration in the reasoning and judgement ofengineers. However, as these authors note, ‘the established ways of thinking withina community or a group can serve as barriers toward new knowledge building, i.e.potentially create thresholds.’ The ‘thought collective’ that the engineeringstudents had entered, one of the authors found when teaching a course on socialjustice, seemed to constitute such a threshold. As students encountered the learningthreshold of social justice they seemed to adopt the oscillative behaviourcharacteristic of liminal states. Students taking the course ‘appeared to move into aliminal space, some passing through, some getting stuck and others moving backand forth uncertain of what to do.’ For both experienced and novice engineers therequired adoption of a socially just perspective to their practice and professionappeared to provoke a ‘transformative and troublesome’ state of liminality. Theauthors adapted the phenomenographic framework of Marton and Booth (1997) toassess variation in the response of learners to understanding and integrating thenotion of social justice.A key thing that varies over the different conceptions is the students’awareness of the complexities surrounding social justice, which goes fromsimple and superficial to complex and deep. Other shifts are from active topassive and individual to collective.The outcome space achieved through this approach produced nine conceptions ofsocial justice, ranging from a preliminal state of virtually no understanding,through a (liminal) moral awareness of social justice as duty and responsibility, toa more sophisticated recognition of social justice as a participatory undertaking,and on to a postliminal capacity to employ social justice ‘as a lens for deconstructionand critical analysis’. The authors stress however that the nine conceptions are notto be seen as a linear progression ‘since they both overlap and can exist simultaneouslyin how a student views social justice’. The barriers to understanding andprogression were found to be often ontological, requiring a letting go of taken forgranted collective cultural assumptions that engineering tends to be focused onmoney, profit making and efficiency rather than social justice. At the level ofindividual response, the learning threshold required ‘sacrifice, risks, doubts anddiscomfort’ and difficulty in moving ‘beyond the things they took for granted’. Asone student commented:[The course] really messed with my head. Sometimes I was scared going toclass because I didn’t want to think about stuff. [...] it put some guilt on myactions [...] I feel that it might have an impact on my success in a company,for example if I don’t do it the next person might.In her work with colleagues on the Freshman Learning Project at IndianaUniversity Leah Shopkow (Chapter 19) has encountered this kind of learningthreshold, or as they term it, a conceptual ‘bottleneck’ or ‘impasse’ in understanding,across many disciplines. The difficulty may lie in ‘“basic” concepts,some of which may be threshold concepts, others of which may be clusters ofthreshold concepts, and some of which constitute disciplinary ways of knowing’.xxix