1177-threshold-concepts-and-transformational-learning

SCHWARTZMANspectrum of scholarship related to transformation theory (Mezirow 1991). JohnDewey (Dewey 1991) played a seminal role in the development of moderneducation practice and theory. Phenomenologist Aron Gurwitsch, a student ofHusserl, suggested that universal patterns of organization characterize fields ofconsciousness and inform the development of awareness (Gurwitsch 1964).Meaning. Meaning amounts to a coherent representation of experience, an interpretationthat occurs both prelinguistically and through language ... by processesinvolving awareness (Mezirow 1991, p. 4). Meaning arises out of experience, itcannot be arbitrarily imposed. Saliency of a group of data so that this group emergesand segregates itself from the stream [of experience] is a feature not introducedinto the stream, but yielded by the stream itself (Gurwitsch 1964, p. 31), (James1890). Dewey believes that the exercise of intelligence requires the existence ofmeaning; to grasp meaning constitutes the nerves of our intellectual life. ForDewey, individual learning may be defined as making meaning; what one caninterpret effectively, one understands both differentiated from and in relationshipwith its surrounding context (Dewey 1991, pp. 116, 117).Meaning frames. Meaning-making takes place under an orienting frame ofreference, a structure of assumptions within which one’s past experience assimilatesand transforms new experience, ... a habitual set of expectations. I use the termmeaning frame for such structures, which embody the categories and rules thatorder new experience, shaping how we classify our encounters with the world:what we take in and how we act. They also dictate what we notice and what weignore by selectively determin[ing] the scope of our attention ... informed by anhorizon of possibility, ... to simplify, organize, and delete what is not salient insensory input ... and provide the basis for reducing complex inferential tasks tosimple judgments. Thus, they function as both lions at the gate of awareness andthe building blocks of cognition (Mezirow 1991, pp. 49, 50). Thomas Kuhn (1996)introduced the term paradigm to describe the analogous structure(s) withinscientific communities of scholarship: a collection of unspoken expectations for,assumptions about, and model of relevant aspects of the world.Dewey states that [e]xplicit thinking goes on within the limits of what is impliedor understood, and describes the role of these ‘premises’, the grounds or foundations,in reasoning: the premises contain the conclusions and the conclusions contain thepremises. The importance of coherence as an organizing principle is embodied inthat relationship (Dewey 1991, pp. 81, 215). Meaning frames operate below thelevel of awareness, as an unarticulated, unconscious system of ideas. They inhabitthe realm of the unseen, taken-for-granted: The old, the near, the accustomed, isnot that to which but that with which we attend (Dewey 1991, p. 222).Meaning frames exist as dynamic entities. In the normal course of ourencounters with the world, meaning frames undergo continual refinement; one’sselective and conceptualizing faculties are persistently at work (Gurwitsch 1964,p. 30). Encounters with the world also occur outside that normal course: Deweyobserves that any aspect of the world, no matter how well known, may suddenly30