1177-threshold-concepts-and-transformational-learning

SCHWARTZMANA resource for teaching faculty. Many presenters at the 2008 TC conferencespoke about their attempts to reach disengaged, even disaffected, students, andtheir various successes or difficulties in doing so. A theoretical foundation for TC(and its defined explanatory theory) should serve as a resource for such faculty;suggesting meaningful interpretation(s) of student behaviors and expanding thediscourse to explore their causes and origins (Gurwitsch 1974).Resolving Lacunae: representations of student experience. Lacunae remain in thedefinitions stated above for threshold concepts. All defining characteristics, exceptfor troublesome, describe the aftermath – not the experience – of students’successful acquisition of challenging material. In themselves, these characteristicsinclude no reference to what would facilitate teaching tc content. Like tc’s,liminality has been defined by its consequences: anxiety; and by its hoped-forconsequences: transformation and ontological shift. To date, TC scholarship regardingliminal space employs a metaphor from anthropology concerning states of beingdefined by social structure, and transitions among them (Turner 1969, Meyer &Land 2005 p. 375). It depicts implications of journey through that space astransformations or ontological shifts, but does not address the nature of either thespace or the journey. In itself, the definition includes no information that facilitatessupporting a student on the journey. A theoretical foundation for TC (and itsdefined explanatory theory) should serve as resources for resolving such lacunae,suggesting useful possibilities to facilitate teaching tc content and support studentsexperiencing difficulty in the face of that content.Rigorously defined terminology. Existing TC terminology conflates elementswith distinct, even divergent meanings, and implicitly expresses assumptions thatmay not hold; making careful analysis more difficult. For example, “threshold” canbe understood to refer to both the experience and the content of an encounter withdeeply challenging material. It can also imply that to learn means to be hoistedover an existing (provisionally) stable threshold in a fixed world, so that theindividual acquires ... a new status and identity (Meyer & Land 2005 p. 376).A theoretical foundation for TC (and its defined explanatory theory) should serveas clarifying resources, enabling greater precision in terminology – and thereby inscholarship.Questions to be AddressedA traditional scientific community participates in a coherent research tradition(Kuhn 1996 p. 46) delineated by – and communicated through – its extant paradigm.In a traditional scientific field, the paradigm grows out of the central motivatingquestion for the discipline. No such question has yet been defined – or evenexplicitly sought – in TC scholarship. I propose a central question for TC, and poseit from three perspectives, those of:1) the practitioner teacher: How to ensure students’ learning of deeply challengingmaterial?26