1177-threshold-concepts-and-transformational-learning

TRANSCENDING DISCIPLINARY BOUNDARIEScommunity of practice and scholarship will be determined by whether faculty in avariety of disciplines find it helpful to employ individually: to observe, analyze,and support students’ encounters with the existentially unfamiliar, educationallycritical content of their respective fields; and collectively: to provide a commonvocabulary and establish a common standard for evidence (Rowland 2000) oflearning – or not – and the exploration of how to support it.This candidate (if deemed substantive) will be evaluated through communitypractice and scholarship. The proposal (in itself) is meant to expand the discourse –perhaps others will be encouraged to offer additional candidate theoreticalfoundations; all this accruing, one hopes, to the benefit of developing ThresholdConcepts theory.ACKNOWLEDGEMENTSI thank Caroline Baillie for encouraging the role of my work in the developingtheoretical foundation for TC; Ray Land for providing his perspective on thecurrent direction of TC scholarship; Lauri Malmi for his repeated suggestions thata reflectiveness/defensiveness framework has relevance to tc’s; Keith Miller for hisgenerous assistance; and Raymond Lister, without whom this paper might not havebeen written.REFERENCESBarer-Stein, T. (1987). Learning as a process of experiencing the unfamiliar. Studies in the Education ofAdults, 19, 87–108.Bauman, Z. (1990). Thinking sociologically. Oxford, UK: Basil Blackwell.Booth, S. (1997). On phenomenography, learning, and teaching. Higher Education Research andDevelopment, 16(2), 135–158.Boud, D., & Walker, D. (1998, June). Promoting reflection in professional courses: The challenge ofcontext. Studies in Higher Education, 23(2), 191–206.Brown, J., Collins, A., & Duguid, P. (2001, January–February). Situated cognition and the culture oflearning. Educational Researcher, 18(1), 32–42.Conolly, J. (2008, June). A term of art introduced by in private communication.Dijkstra, E. (1972, October). The humble programmer. Communications of the ACM, 15(10), 859–866.Dewey, J. (1991 edition, originally published 1929). How we think: A restatement of the relation ofreflective thinking to the educative process. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books.Dreyfus, H. (1993). Being-in-the-world: A commentary on Heidegger’s being and time, division 1. MITPress.Feldenkrais, M. (1981). The Elusive Obvious. Capitola, CA: Meta-Publications.Gurwitsch, A. (1974). Phenomenology and the theory of science (L. Embree, Ed.). Evanston, IL: NorthwesternUniversity Press.Gurwitsch, A. (1964). The field of consciousness. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press.Heidegger, M. (1927). Being and time. Tubingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag.James, W. (1890). The principles of psychology (Vol. 1). New York: Henry Holt.Kuhn, T. S. (1996). The structure of scientific revolutions (3rd ed.). University of Chicago Press.Land, R. (2008, November). Private communication.Lister, R. (2008). After the Gold Rush: Toward sustainable scholarship in computing. Proceedings,Tenth Australasian Computing Education Conference (ACE 2008), Wollongong, NSW, Australia.CRPIT, 78. Simon and Hamilton, M. (Eds.), ACS: 3–18.43