1 Introduction
It is a tenet of the Threshold Concepts Framework (TCF) that learning can be understood as a transformative process that goes beyond conceptual or cognitive change, that can entail a transformation of personal identity, and has a strong affective component. The liminal traverse, and the transformation it engenders in the learner, are central to the threshold concepts view of learning; yet (because it is essentially subjective and not directly observable) this remains one of the less well understood aspects of the TCF (Rattray, 2016). While student experiences and voices have recently begun to come to the fore of TC inquiry (see for instance Timmermans & Land, 2020), many questions remain around how students might make the liminal traverse.
This chapter considers aspects of transformation emanating from the representations of students in a peer group-based learning programme in economics at a South African university, the design of which was influenced by a threshold concepts orientation. We explored the experiences and processes of students’ learning in a tutorial programme that complemented a standard, lectured second-year Microeconomics course at the University of KwaZulu-Natal.
Undergraduate economics offered fertile ground for this study as students often find the discipline to be ‘difficult’. Furthermore, failure and dropout rates tend to be high, and students who pass are often unable to transfer and apply the principles they have supposedly learnt (Dubas & Toledo, 2016). Indeed, it was in a study of learning in economics that Meyer and Land’s (2003) seminal idea first emerged.
In South Africa, the last three decades have seen a rapid expansion in undergraduate enrolments, with a significant increase in access for previously disadvantaged Black students. Success rates, however, are skewed by race and prior education (CHE, 2016). Authoritarian, one-way delivery and an emphasis on rote-learning are still typical of much secondary schooling and many students from educationally disadvantaged backgrounds continue to apply
Distilling insights from our study, this chapter addresses two broad questions:
- –What transformations might disciplinary learning at university bring about – or require?
- –How might these transformations occur – what processes affect their unfolding?
In the sections that follow, we outline the programme in which the study was based and explain our use of Interactive Qualitative Analysis (IQA) (Northcutt & McCoy, 2004) to arrive at a holistic representation of participants’ understanding of their learning. Three key transformative shifts, or dimensions of transformation, could be distinguished in the students’ portrayals. Foregrounding composite quotes in the students’ voices, we unravel some of the processes that might affect each dimension. We conclude with some reflections on our findings.
2 The Study: The Threshold Concepts-Infused Tutorial Programme and Interactive Qualitative Analysis
The learning programme from which this chapter draws served as a ‘greenhouse’ in which we could study learning. A sample of 20 volunteers from the mainstream class (of 400 students) attended weekly 100-minute tutorial sessions over a semester. The small class size and additional time afforded by the programme allowed us to depart from traditional lectured delivery and use active, cooperative learning pedagogies.
For the tutorial tasks, we mapped the Microeconomics syllabus to relevant concepts from the ‘web’ of threshold concepts proposed by Davies and Mangan (2007), and adapted activities from their Embedding Threshold Concepts (ETC) project.1 The ETC activities embed (likely) economics threshold concepts in relatable, real-world examples and break the analytical task down into component steps. Students worked on these mainly in small-group discussion (four to six per group), which was followed in each session by class discussion, and oral or written reflection.
At the end of the programme, the students participated in focus group sessions and individual interviews. Their accounts aligned with the view of learning inherent in the TCF, including vivid descriptions of experiences of liminality and transformation. We draw on the students’ accounts with the intention of advancing understanding of what happens ‘inside’ the liminal phase of learning, and of what transformation may entail.
Our use of IQA (Northcutt & McCoy, 2004) afforded an insider perspective of the experiences and processes students navigated in the tutorial programme. In IQA, participants themselves begin to analyze and interpret the data they generate while the researcher serves as facilitator. Because IQA casts the participants – those closest to the phenomenon – as integral to the analysis, the findings may be seen to emerge ‘from the inside’.
IQA is initiated in a focus group. Through silent brainstorming, participants generate a multitude of individual responses to the phenomenon – in this case, their learning in economics. Brainstorming is followed by analysis and interpretation, as the group arranges the responses into thematic clusters (referred to as ‘affinities’), and assigns each affinity a descriptive name. Checking and refining occur until the group reaches consensual understanding of the meaning of each affinity. Participants then identify relationships of influence among those affinities.
These affinities and their interrelationships are later elaborated in individual interviews, adding richness and depth to the representations. In our study, the participants’ reflective journals were an important additional source of data. The affinities provided the basis for coding the interview transcripts and the participants’ reflective writing.
IQA thus involves participants deeply in exploring their learning, and captures their perspectives in rich, first-hand descriptions. In alignment with the approach taken in the tutorials, IQA encourages reflective agency: as the group had been entrusted with responsibility for their learning through the pedagogical approach, so they were entrusted with generating and analyzing the data that represented the experiences and processes of their learning.
Systems influence diagram: Students’ learning in the TC tutorial programme
An interpretation of the SID serves as a verbal summary of the experiences and processes of learning. Group Dynamics encompasses all the qualities and processes that defined students’ interactions during the tutorial group sessions, and that they saw as impacting on their learning of economics. Group Dynamics drove participants’ learning by influencing the Learning Journey. The Learning Journey describes their progression in learning economics and comprises two sub-affinities: (metacognitive) Learning about Learning, and (conceptual) Stumbling Blocks and Successes encountered on the way to disciplinary understanding. The Learning Journey brought about a shift to Economic Thinking – students’ development of a distinct disciplinary perspective that they could use to analyze real-world events. This in turn influenced participants’ academic and career Goals. Goals represents future plans or aspirations and ranged from performance-oriented goals centred on passing the module to an intrinsic desire for understanding of economic phenomena, or conscious, long-term study or career aspirations. Their Goals in turn ‘fed back’ to affect the course of the Learning Journey. Participants’ Goals also influenced their Personal Outcomes – a range of academic and personal development benefits that students ascribed to their learning on the programme which in turn affected their Feelings. The Feelings affinity describes the range of emotions arising from and affecting participants’ learning of economics. Feelings in turn fed back to shape their Goals.
Two continuous loops are evident: from Journey to Economic Thinking to Goals and back to Journey; and from Goals to Personal Outcomes to Feelings and back to Goals. The elements of the first sub-system suggest a cerebral,
Much can be spun from the graphic, conceptual representation of the SID, including interdependencies, self-perpetuating constructs, likely locations of failure, possibilities for redemption, and promising areas for intervention (see Goebel & Maistry, 2020, for a detailed exposition). For this chapter, we focus on the dimensions of transformation that the participants’ descriptions suggest came about through their learning.
Three dimensions of transformation may be discerned in the SID: metacognitive changes, centred in ‘Learning about learning’; cognitive changes, captured in ‘Economic Thinking’; and identity shifts, reflected in ‘Personal Outcomes’. Because of the looping, non-linear nature of the progress of learning as participants described it in the SID, these dimensions are also not linear or perfectly distinct. The next section offers a closer look at each dimension and some of the processes that might affect such transformation, particularly those processes linked to Group Dynamics, the primary driver of their learning as the group conceived it.
3 Peers, Pedagogy & Processes of Transformation
The quotes that make up the greater part of the descriptions that follow are composites – multiple quotes taken from many individual participants, woven together to sound like one voice. Each can be seen as a tapestry made up of individual realities, at times revealing shades of variation within participants’ shared understanding of their learning.
3.1 Crossing a Metacognitive Threshold to ‘Understanding’ and ‘Knowing Why’
The participants described changed views of learning, knowledge, and self-as-learner:
I developed in my academic world. I know what to do now next time, in terms of studying and the things that I’ve learnt … not just in class, and not just in the module that I’m studying, but in all the other modules. I need to understand the concepts of things … and not just be cramming things. I need to know why the theory applies as it is. By myself … I can cram everything up, and just put it in my brain without understanding it. But then in the group I got understanding.
3.2 Constructing Understanding through Peer Discussion and Articulation
The means by which students reached understanding centred on peer group processes of articulation and discussion that supported cognitive shifts and conceptual threshold crossing:
Having people explaining different views, it comes together and forms an entire picture. Bringing different individuals’ understanding into my own helped me build my knowledge on whatever we were discussing. When we start to talk about things, that’s when I comprehend and understand things. I felt there was more learning in the group, because if I said something, somebody else would comment on it, and if I was wrong they would correct me, and if I disagreed I would explain my case, and then in the middle of it I’d find – oh no wait, that actually doesn’t make sense – I think he or she was right. When you share, when you speak, you’re learning.
Two related processes can be discerned here. First, hearing various explanations or interpretations of economic concepts from peers helped to complete or correct students’ understanding. The idea of building understanding through exposure to multiple perspectives affirms the value of social interaction and discourse in meaning-making and the construction of disciplinary knowledge (Entwistle, 2009; Reznitskaya & Wilkinson, 2015). Second, the process of verbalising in itself served to create and refine students’ understanding – their accounts highlight the power of articulation to effect learning and to advance thinking (Vygotsky, 2012 [1934]; Reznitskaya & Wilkinson, 2015), and illustrate the ‘theoretical intersection’ between Vygotskian and TCF views of language and thinking (elaborated by Thompson & Michell, 2020).
Group discussion may be especially accommodative of some threshold characteristics – students can change their minds and adjust their understanding
3.3 Activating the Capable Self through Pedagogy and Peers
The peer group and the pedagogical approach of the tutorial programme engendered a sense of solidarity, validation and capability for many students:
In the beginning I was nervous and anxious … I did feel less than average … I was lacking good learning styles and encouragement, and these were caused by the poor school [I attended]. Being in the group helped me to realize that I will not just know everything. I wasn’t alone in ‘the economics struggle’! We all related in the tuts [tutorials], and if I wasn’t sure about something I’d ask my colleagues – friends who are really intelligent people. I discovered that some of the things I thought of were helpful …. I learnt to trust my mind. That’s how the group dynamics helped me the most – it was just being around the guys who already have it. It gave me hope that I would excel in economics. This group has given me the ability to believe and trust myself.
Many students admitted to having doubted their own abilities: self-doubt and anxiety were endemic at the outset of the programme, and were not attributed to specific features of economics. For some, these concerns may be linked to biography, especially with regard to their schooling (Savin-Baden, 2016; Cross et al., 2009).
Group interactions in the tutorials reassured participants that their experience of difficulty and ‘not knowing’ was shared (Cousin, 2004) – and that peers could be a resource for learning. This fostered a growing sense of solidarity. Self-doubt gave way to a sense of empowerment and capability: in the tutorials, the usual interconnected relations of power and pedagogy were dismantled as responsibility for meaning-making was transferred to the group, directly encouraging students to see themselves as active agents in their learning. Participants’ own accomplishments, validation from their peers, and vicarious learning experiences boosted their sense of self-efficacy and capability (Bandura, 1977; Walker, 2005).
3.4
Reaching understanding of disciplinary concepts culminated in students’ development of a distinct new way of viewing, interpreting, and speaking about the world:
All those concepts or principles were suddenly making sense. Like if this fog is just being lifted, then you see how things work. After the dust has settled, things come into place, like a jigsaw puzzle … I understood everything. The way I’m thinking now is different from last year. You don’t just see what everyone else is seeing, you see a bigger picture. When I look at most everything I do, I am now privileged to be seeing the concepts scattered everywhere. The language [of economics] is actually different, for example opportunity cost and explicit cost … There are times when I even use economic terms … in such a way that they become part of everyday life.
Participants recounted experiencing stuckness, difficulty and eventual conceptual understandings in ways which TC theory would anticipate (Meyer & Land, 2003; Davies & Mangan, 2007). We focus here on the dimension of transformation reflected in the cumulative effect of these conceptual threshold crossings (encapsulated as ‘Economic Thinking’ by the participants in the SID). Given the vivid visual metaphors students used to describe this shift – fog lifting, dust settling, a puzzle coming together – this transformed way of viewing and interpreting real-world events may be characterized as the development of a ‘disciplinary gaze’. This is accompanied by increasing fluency in the language through which disciplinary understanding may be expressed. Disciplinary language is thus both a means to and a marker of mastery. The shift in subjectivity resulting from this new perspective on reality can change learners’ sense of self (Davies & Mangan, 2010; Land, 2013).
These descriptions match the epistemic and ontological shifts envisaged by TC theory (Cousin, 2008; Davies, 2012) – and, read together with participants’ accounts of constructing understanding, suggest that this dimension of transformation was precipitated (in our study) largely through discipline-based discourse. The role of language in the development of “new, transformative, gestalt-like understandings and insights” has been noted as an element of Vygotskian theory which could usefully inform the TCF (Thompson & Michell, 2020, p. 79). The accounts from our study similarly point to the central role of deliberative discourse with the peer group in enabling and supporting students’ development of a disciplinary gaze, allowing us to trace a possible route through liminality to eventual epistemic and ontological transformation.
3.5
The learning environment fostered a sense of safety, comfort and community that enabled the expression of students’ developing disciplinary understandings and emerging identities:
It’s just like home in the TC groups. Like having our own forum as economists in the making … the people you can relate with, the people who can understand your language. It’s like your world is there. I became more comfortable and more outspoken. I became more confident and I developed as a person, I became motivated, and my self-esteem grew. My journey in the tuts was difficult at first but through this, I’ve seen myself being another person. ‘Thinking like an economist’ – I’ve become one of those people. A long time ago it was just a course … [but now] it’s becoming a part of me, and I’m starting to like it even more, because now I can see I can do it. I feel confident to talk, to express myself and learn other things. I’ve grown as a person. I got to discover myself.
Most participants referred to a sense of belonging and ease in the tutorials, which they linked to their common purpose of disciplinary learning. Many alluded to a changed sense of self and credited the group with supporting personal and academic growth. The group could thus be seen as a disciplinary community supporting affective, identity-related aspects of learning (Land et al., 2006; Cousin, 2008).
These shifts in identity are the third dimension of transformation to which we draw attention. Learning brings new perspectives and personal development, which may bring about changes to students’ self-concepts (Cousin, 2008; Barnett, 2009). This sense of self may evolve to include a stronger disciplinary identity, personal growth, and increased capacity for self-expression. Note though that students’ identity or self-concept affects and is affected by the progress of their disciplinary learning, and that their engagement is always mediated by personal biographies. A sense of belonging seems to have been instrumental in facilitating students’ ‘becoming’ with regard to the discipline. In this sense, the tutorial group offered participants “refuge and prospect” (Land, 2015) – a safe place from which to contemplate and initiate learning transitions and personal transformations.
3.6 Stuckness and Locations of Trouble
For a multitude of individual reasons, some students did not experience significant transformative shifts over the course of the tutorial programme and the semester course:
I don’t know if in economics I have got it; I don’t know, I feel like something’s missing, there’s something I’m not getting … I don’t have that ‘aha moment’. Economics, I just have those glimpses. The thing is – I don’t really understand it! So I’m still stuck. Can I be honest? (laughs) Then no … there was no personal outcome. Like … no, no. Honestly, I cannot see the personal outcome.
Their reflections on why this may have been so contribute to a richer understanding of the dimensions of transformation, and – together with the holistic view of learning presented in the SID – may point to possible locations of trouble or sources of stuckness. Two possibilities invite further exploration.
3.6.1 Constrained Engagement
Two students expressed a reticence to engage in the peer group discussions that were central to the pedagogy of the tutorial programme:
Working with people that you don’t know well – that was not cool. I think I was there more to listen than to do anything else. Because I’m a reserved person. I don’t know how to express myself when I’m in a group. Plus, the other thing is the language barrier … having to communicate by speaking [in English] … That held me back in interacting with the group. I think it did help, but it was not that comfortable for me.
This holding back could be linked to personal biography – which, for the students quoted above, included a lack of confidence in spoken English. English proficiency presents as an ongoing challenge in a South African context where Black students study in a language that is not their mother tongue (Ngcobo et al., 2016). Disciplinary learning in a second language is an area that might benefit from invoking a threshold concepts theoretical approach to better understand how students mediate language as they navigate conceptual thresholds.
3.6.2 A Possible Clash of Values
For some, a potential dissonance between personal and (perceived) disciplinary values might hold back learning:
Before economics – the part about maximizing my happiness or utility – well, I have to say that in a way it does seem as though if you’re maximizing your personal happiness or utility, you’re selfish. So before learning it, I didn’t do things selfishly. Whatever maximizes the utility of the
majority, I used to say that. It’s not about personal gains. I can’t think like that, my feelings get in the way … You can’t walk around thinking ‘I want to maximize my benefits, I don’t care what happens to someone else!’
Narrowly defined self-interest or utility maximization, underpinning the economic approach to decision-making, could be dissonant with students’ feelings of altruism if interpreted as a code to live by. While neoclassical economics and its modelling device has an embedded ideology, it was beyond the parameters of our study to examine in any detail whether the disciplinary knowledge itself – by challenging students’ existing beliefs or values – might act as an emotional barrier to learning (Rattray, 2021). It is however another key area for further research revealed by this study.
3.7 Synthesis: Interlocking Dimensions of Transformation
Figure 11.2 encapsulates the dimensions of transformation we have outlined. These transformative shifts do not unfold in a linear way and cannot be neatly separated or categorized; rather, the processes described meld into each other – all affect each dimension of transformation (metacognitive, cognitive, and
These looping, non-linear processes can be traced to the SID that emerged from the IQA focus groups. The SID also suggests that the active, peer group discussion-based pedagogical approach taken in the tutorial programme, with the associated social aspects and the inversion of traditional power relations – indeed, all of the elements that the participants summed up as Group Dynamics – gave rise to many of the transformative forces that we have pointed to here.
4 Concluding Reflections
In reflecting on some of the limitations of our study, we acknowledge that the study was context-specific and that our findings arose from a small group of students in a once-off intervention in a single module. The tutorial programme worked with the curriculum as given – standard, neoclassical economics, which (although not uncontested) is the dominant orthodoxy in the discipline. The research could not fully account for different individual biographies – detailed data on participants’ schooling history or under-preparedness was not sought, other than as it came up in the focus group, interviews or written reflections. Moreover, the study relied on students’ self-reported perceptions without setting out to ‘measure’ their learning, or to verify objectively whether conceptual thresholds had been crossed. Finally, the tutorial programme was designed as a ‘greenhouse’, in that it was resource-intensive and not replicable at scale, but was intended to deepen understanding of experiences of learning.
From the students’ accounts, we have offered some insights that address our opening questions about the dimensions and processes of learning transformations. For students who experienced (some) success in our programme, the peer group processes they described as Group Dynamics precipitated and supported the cognitive, metacognitive, and identity-related dimensions of their learning transformations. Their descriptions suggest that in the process of learning, peers and personal empowerment were as important as the pedagogy with which they were entwined. A central question in TC-oriented enquiry is how students come to reach conceptual understanding and make the liminal transition. Our findings suggest that one means by which they may do so is through collaborative, peer-group pedagogy, because it promotes learning in dissectible cognitive and affective ways.
The mechanisms of discussion and articulation engendered by cooperative learning approaches can foster deep and transformative conceptual learning. It is worth exploring ways in which we might structure learning experiences that encourage deliberative verbalizing and move students towards comprehensible, conceptually rich articulations. A “flipped” classroom approach (Khan, 2011, cited in Roach, 2014) that allows for greater interaction (between teacher and students, and among students) holds promise for harnessing beneficial processes such as those noted in the tutorials.
If accommodating cooperative learning experiences within mainstream courses also includes the formation of small groups, this may allow for the leveraging of caring peer relationships. By virtue of their proximity to affective as well as contextualized aspects of learning, the peer group may be well placed to be entrusted with contributing to a more emotionally supportive “holding” environment (Land et al., 2006) and fostering a sense of belonging within the discipline and the institution.
Students’ accounts of liminal learning transitions reveal experiences and processes that might precipitate transformation across multiple, interlocking dimensions. We suggest that these insights may illuminate efforts to adopt teaching approaches that support conceptual threshold crossing and allow students to see themselves as capable learners in the discipline, and to create learning environments and relationships that support students’ evolving sense of self.
Acknowledgements
This work is based on research supported in part by the National Research Foundation of South Africa (UNIQUE GRANT NO: 98274), and by a University of KwaZulu-Natal Competitive Teaching and Learning Research Grant.
The Embedding Threshold Concepts (ETC), hosted by Staffordshire University in collaboration with three other UK universities, ran from 2004–2008. At the time of the study, the teaching materials were freely available for download from the project website but at the time of writing are no longer available.
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