1177-threshold-concepts-and-transformational-learning

TRANSCENDING DISCIPLINARY BOUNDARIESWith this distinction, one can now formulate a question regarding the designationof tc’s: Should the term be restricted to content that requires transformativelearning (through reflectiveness), or should it also encompass content that dependson deep cumulative learning (through reflection)? Meyer and Land’s tc-definingcharacteristics suggest the former, wherein new meaning arises to be imposed upon(i.e., a reformulated set of expectations, assumptions, and world model are appliedto interpret) both old and new experience. However, the papers presented at bothconferences suggest the latter, wherein old meaning is imposed upon (i.e., one’sextant expectations are applied to interpret) new experience (Mezirow 1991 p. 11).By clarifying the difference, the proposed theoretical foundation brings thisquestion into focus – and into the discourse.Refining representation of liminality. For Meyer and Land, the ontological shiftassociated with liminality appears to denote externally defined change (Meyer & Land2005 p. 376). Following Turner’s metaphor (Turner 1969), they focus on identitytransformation as altered status or place of self within a fixed world. Liminality isunderstood to be experienced individually, while it is also treated as an entity untoitself: one enters into and exits from a pre-existing – and persisting – liminal space asone’s identity and one’s place are transformed in the pre-existing – and persisting –world. Students are cast as an exotic other to be placed under anthropologicalobservation. This representation of the encounter and its aftermath rests on knowing; itis organized around the principle of presentation of self to the unknown.I propose instead a phenomenological analysis of a universal human pattern thathappens (outside awareness) during encounter with and response to the unknown.Continuity of one’s self is preserved; change, if it occurs, appears to occur in theworld. Students are immersed in confusion and experience reflectiveness or defensiveness(liminality). This representation of the encounter and its aftermath rests onmeaning; it is organized around the process of meaning-making, of interpreting theexistentially unfamiliar, the principle of presentation of the unknown to oneself.The phenomenological analysis conforms to student feedback data from the casestudy course (Schwartzman 2008). It is also supported by an interesting mix ofliterature; and makes available more nuanced and more wide-ranging interpretationof student experience, and thus greater opportunity for intervention and support ofstudent learning: In Gurwitsch’s phenomenological examination of consciousness,he notes that at the moment of solving a problem, one experiences the perceptualfield through which one has been confronted with the problem undergo[ing]reorganization and reconstruction before one’s eyes (Gurwitsch 1964 p. 52). Inanalyzing scientific discovery, Kuhn writes that [a]lthough the world does notchange with a change of paradigm, the scientist afterward works in a differentworld (Kuhn 1996 p. 121).Separation of Concerns: Definition as Explanation for tc Terms and TC ConceptsIn themselves, TC terms of art and tc characteristics enumerated earlier describebut do not explain, and the terminology conflates elements with divergent meanings.41