1177-threshold-concepts-and-transformational-learning

CHANGING OUR MINDSat the epistemological level, calling upon learners to ‘change their minds,’ not bysupplanting what they know, but by transforming how they know. Furthermore,that learners respond to discrepancies in different ways, that is, by avoidance,assimilation, or, as we shall see, by accommodation (integration), suggests thatthere may exist highly individual reasons determining responses to thresholdconcepts, reasons such as alternative commitments and readiness for change.Finally, given the affective nature of these changes, our task as educators is toacknowledge the difficult journey on which we are asking students to embark. Wemay thus envision ways of foreshadowing for students the impending sense of lossand help them to live more comfortably with their discomfort.TRANSFORMATIVENESS, OR, ON OPENING UP OF EPISTEMOLOGICAL,CONCEPTUAL, AND AFFECTIVE SPACESKegan (1982) notes that epistemic doubt may indeed lead one to ‘the limits of[one’s] ways of knowing the world’ (p. 59), and, as we have seen, this may causesome learners to temporarily arrest their epistemic development. Yet, is this theresponse of most learners? Perry (1981) remarks that it is not. The response toepistemic doubt caused by troublesomeness may also take the form of actiontowards change, action marking the beginning of the transformative process, actionwhich may ‘open[…] up a new and previously inaccessible way of thinking aboutsomething’ (Meyer and Land, 2003, p. 1).The idea of ‘opening up’ new ways of thinking is captured in the work of manyresearchers interested in learning. Baltas (2007) characterises the disclosure ofbackground ‘assumptions’ in conceptual change as ‘widen[ing] up and modify[ing][…] the […] space available to inquiry’ (p. 65). In their exploration of professors’developing conceptions of teaching, Entwistle and Walker (2002) characteriseprofessors’ sophisticated, learning-centred conceptions of teaching as ‘lead[ing] toan expanded awareness – seeing additional goals for teaching and learning whichwere originally not perceived explicitly at all’ (p. 17). Kegan (1994) eloquentlynotes thattransforming our epistemologies, liberating ourselves from that in which wewere embedded, making what was subject into object so that we can ‘have it’rather than ‘be had’ by it – this is the most powerful way I know to conceptualizethe growth of the mind. (p. 34)We may therefore begin to envision that the transformative process involves notonly the expansion of epistemological and conceptual spaces, but also, as Meyerand Land (2005, 2006) explain, the expansion and transformation of identity, ofa learner’s ‘sense of self ‘ (2006, p. 19). We must also consider that this processof transformation, and hence movement within these liminal spaces, is notunidirectional, yet may ‘involve oscillation between stages, often with temporaryregression to an earlier status’ (Meyer and Land, 2005, p. 376). Boyd and Myers(1988) speak of the ‘oscillating movement […] from disorganization to despair’(p. 278) that characterises this phase of grieving in the process of transformational11