1177-threshold-concepts-and-transformational-learning

SCHWARTZMANScholarship in liminality to this point has taken the form variously of description,metaphor, and analogy. Meyer and Land construe approaches to teaching withinthe TC framework as entirely discipline-specific, and have eschewed those thattranscend disciplinary boundaries.BackgroundUnderlying Premises. This paper is predicated on two premises: 1) Crucial elementsof student experience of difficulty as they encounter existentially unfamiliar,educationally critical content of their respective disciplines occur in commonacross all disciplinary contexts; and 2) These crucial elements constitute core issuesdefining TC. I agree with Meyer and Land regarding the importance of liminality,but diverge from their dismissal of scholarship transcending disciplinary boundaries.Faculty at TC conferences invariably recognize in each others’ descriptions ofstudent behavior – either at formal presentations or in informal conversations, andirrespective of discipline – depictions of their own students’ response to encounterswith deeply challenging content. Their consistent mutual recognition makes a strongcase that the significance and potential of TC as an analytic framework derivesfrom the universality of student experiences of difficulty in encounters with thatcontent in any – and all – of their respective fields. One may conclude that, withrespect to the nature of the learner’s experience of difficulties in encountering –and the mechanism involved in her / his learning – deeply challenging content, manymore elements of commonality than difference hold across disciplinary boundaries.Certainly the specifics of learning deeply challenging, educationally criticalcontent of a discipline (tc’s) must be addressed within their respective disciplinarycontexts. However, the very notion that liminality will likely be experienced bystudents in any (and every) field indicates that crucial elements of that experience –which constitute core issues defining TC – are unrelated to disciplinary context.This paper is motivated by an interest in developing TC scholarship of liminalitybeyond its current forms (description, analogy, and metaphor) to explanation. I arguethat doing so requires a theoretical foundation through which these core issues canbe investigated and understood independent of disciplinary context.The argument is based in phenomenological analysis (not psychology orsituational dynamics), according to which: student experiences of difficulty underthese circumstances are considered to be founded in reflective and defensiveresponses to rupture in knowing, a universal human pattern of encounter andresponse to the existentially unfamiliar (what appears initially as the unknowableunknown), rather than to result from individual inadequacies or to differ in kindaccording to the context in which it occurs. I propose the constructs of reflectiveand defensive responses to rupture in knowing as a discipline-independenttheoretical foundation for TC.Origins. The proposal grows out of an exploration of student encounters withthe existentially unfamiliar, educationally critical content of computing science(my discipline), where such a framework has proved relevant and illuminating.22