1177-threshold-concepts-and-transformational-learning

TIMMERMANStrajectories of learning. Indeed, Perkins (2007) notes that threshold concepts are‘especially pivotal to a stage-like advance in understanding a discipline’ (p. 36).The focus of my current project is therefore to examine issues central to thresholdconcepts, such as ‘liminality,’ and to explore the characteristics used todescribe threshold concepts, such as ‘troublesome,’ ‘transformative,’ ‘irreversible,’‘integrative,’ and ‘bounded’ in light of developmental principles in order to help usbetter understand the complex nature of the learning process.In exploring the characteristics of threshold concepts from a developmentalperspective, we begin to capture a sense of the work that threshold concepts aredoing: they are transforming, integrating, making trouble, but of what? Thus, thequestion remains as to what is changing and allowing us to remark that a thresholdhas been crossed, that a transformation has occurred, that a learner has moved fromone stage, one way of making meaning to the next?Indeed, what we are witnessing, experiencing, or contributing to is the transformationof the essence of a particular position or stage from which meaning ofthe world is constructed. Kegan (1982) theorises that at the heart of a stage ofmeaning-making is a way of knowing, an epistemology, which shapes the ‘windowor a lens through which one looks at the world’ (Kegan, with Debold, 2002, p. 3).While we will return to the question of essence later, here, I wish to emphasise thatthe great value of threshold concepts is that they serve to instigate a process of‘epistemological transitions’ (Meyer and Land, 2005, p. 386); that is, transitionsnot only in what learners know, but in how they know; transitions that may providea ‘transformed internal view of subject matter, subject landscape, or even worldview’ (Meyer and Land, 2003, p. 1). This chapter is therefore an attempt to captureand qualify the transitional process instigated by threshold concepts and explore itspotential influence on our practice as educators.UNDERLYING ASSUMPTIONSMany questions remain to be investigated in our exploration of the developmentalnature of threshold concepts, questions such as ‘How might a developmentalperspective be used to explain variation in learners’ responses to threshold concepts?’,‘What is the relationship between learning and development?’, and ‘How mighttroublesomeness be developmentally productive?’. I would now like to commentbriefly on the approach I will take to answering these questions.One of my fundamental assumptions is that questions are best approached fromwhat I qualify as an integrationist approach. As people trained or training tobecome disciplinary experts, we may so easily become mired in our own contextsthat we may fail to consider that the questions about which we feel so passionateare the same questions that intrigue our colleagues in other fields. The question ofthresholds and the processes and mechanisms which drive development towardsand across thresholds are not only questions of educational psychology (my ownfield), but also those of the fields in which educational psychology is rooted:philosophy, biology, and psychology. Consequently, in my attempt to situate thecharacteristics of threshold concepts within a developmental framework, I draw on4