1 Introduction
As we approach two decades since Meyer and Land published their landmark study introducing the threshold concepts framework, attention now turns toward examining the nuances and limits of the framework. The threshold concepts framework was originally conceived of as a way to characterize essential concepts within disciplines, and numerous scholars have applied it fruitfully to disciplines as wide ranging as mathematics, physics, and physiology (e.g., Breen & O’Shea, 2017; Harrison & Serbanescu, 2017; Horrigan, 2018). Our work examines how the threshold concepts framework might apply to professional domains that are multidisciplinary, such as education or library and information science, where learners must acquire domain-specific knowledge and also professional dispositions that enable them to fully join a community of practice (Wenger, 1998). By applying constructivist grounded theory methodologies to undergraduate students’ discourse about their identity development as they transition from university students to professional educators, we discovered ways to differentiate between professional domain essentials and threshold knowledge. Both the methodology and the findings have broad relevance to educators and threshold concepts researchers.
2 Theory: How the Threshold Concepts Framework Was Used
To introduce the theory section of this chapter, we are mindful that the chapters herein are framed with the assumption that readers have a basic understanding of the threshold concepts framework (TCF). This includes the original five primary characteristics of a threshold concept put forward by Meyer and Land in 2003 (transformative, troublesome, irreversible, integrative, bounded), and that the main purposes of TCF are for curriculum development (Cousin, 2006). We therefore build on these assumptions, going beyond and into the threshold
- –Discursive – affecting a learner’s discourse about the knowledge acquired and its domain, with “new thinking brought into being, expressed, reflected upon, and communicated” (Meyer & Land, 2005, p. 374).
- –Reconstitutive – integrating threshold knowledge requires “a reconfiguring of the learner’s prior conceptual schema and a letting go or discarding of any earlier conceptual stance” (Land et al., 2010, p. XI).
- –Liminal stuckness – “understanding threshold concepts may leave the learner in a state of ‘liminality’, a suspended state of partial understanding, or ‘stuck place’” (Land et al., 2010, p. XI). A learner experiences “unstable space in which the learner may oscillate between old and emergent understandings” (Cousin, 2010, p. 3) when in the process of mastering a threshold concept.
Identity shift and liminality are closely coupled with the transformative and reconstitutive characteristics of threshold learning experiences.
Two indispensable characteristics of a threshold concept – that it is integrative of the domain and that it is transformative for the student – suggest two distinct units or components of analysis: conceptual and experiential.
(Park & Light, 2010, p. 260)
In our study, we explored how the participants reported their learning of concepts. We attended closely to how they experienced this learning through the affective and emotional impacts they recounted in the interviews and their reflective writings. Research into the dimensions of affect in liminal experiences (Rattray, 2016) note that the learner’s hope, optimism, resilience, and their emotional and psychological capital contribute to measures of motivation and perseverance when they encounter troublesome threshold learning experiences. This phenomenon was important to our study’s design and how we elicited the participants’ reflections on their emotional and cognitive experiences as they learned about becoming teachers and transitioned from the identity of student into teachers themselves (Devitt et al., 2012; Henry, 2019; Ó Gallchóir et al., 2018). Integrating new aspects of identity during their learning was a holistic experience for them, drawing on their abilities, not only to grasp new concepts, but also putting to the test many facets of their dispositions. We sought to understand their internal struggles with new experiences by methods that supported the students in externalizing their thoughts, emotions, and reflections.
3 Research Design and Methodology
Our central research question was: What threshold concepts are evidenced in professional identity formation in student teachers? In order to answer this question, we examined the experiences of students in a teacher preparation program through analysis of interviews and written reflections. We coded the student discourse in the transcripts of the interviews and the written reflections as a way to see patterns within a single student’s discourse and among multiple students’ discourses about teaching. We had previously coded the data (Simmons & Tucker, 2018) and, for this phase of the research project, we completed a second analysis of the datasets in order to explore factors in identity transformation that spoke to transferability and relevance to other academic domains. We also sought to contribute to TCF theory in how we had applied the newer threshold characteristics to better understand the learners’ experiences when transitioning from student to teacher, from novice to expert, acquiring readiness to join a professional community. This required another and deeper look through our original datasets and coding.
Exploring learner discourse is well established as a way for researchers to support study participants in externalizing their learning experiences (Rumenapp, 2016). We were especially interested in exploring how threshold concepts manifest themselves in experiences that mark the transition from student to teacher, and which may have similarities to the transition from novice to expert (Berliner, 1994; Dreyfus, 2004; Ericsson, 2009; Moroney, 2021). For this reason, we were mindful of research that weighted transformative characteristics in our analysis of the data (Calduch & Rattray, 2021) that were “threshold transformations requir[ing] both an epistemological and ontological shift” (p. 2).
Our aim in the study was to explore undergraduate students’ identity formation as they prepared to join a professional community of practice. This work
3.1 Participants and Research Context
The participants in this study1 were undergraduate students at a residential liberal arts college with an enrollment of approximately 1000 undergraduates in the rural upper Midwest United States. At the time of the study the participants were enrolled in their final semester in the teacher education program; all students were completing their student teaching experience in local schools and taking a student teaching seminar course one evening per week, taught by one of the researchers.
The study had a total of ten participants, with four students in the first phase (Fall 2017) and six in the second phase (Spring 2018). Eight of the students in the study identified themselves on a brief demographic survey as female and two identified as male, and nine of the students identified themselves as Caucasian, with one identifying as Latino. These demographics are representative of students in the teacher education program at the college and in teacher education programs nationally (U.S. Department of Education National Center for Education Statistics, 2017). All students were between 21 and 23 years old. Eight of the students were earning Elementary Education licensure (grades 1–6), and two of the students were earning K-12 licensure in music.
3.2 Data Sources
The researchers collected eight to ten reflective writings from each participant and conducted semi-structured interviews with both researchers present. The writings were the reflection papers the students had done during their seminar course, which were designed to help them connect their coursework during their four years in the teacher education program to their current experiences in their student-teaching practicum. The first part of each reflection paper summarized the salient ideas from the course, and the second part made connections between this learning and their teaching experiences. The goal for these weekly papers was for students to see how their coursework informed their practice. For example, one week the students would reflect on their Theories of Learning class that they would have taken their second year, and then explain how they might have seen illustrations of Vygotsky’s theory of social learning in their classrooms in the previous week. Some of the writings focused on peculiarities of the class or semester, such as a conflict with a professor or personal problems that affected the students’ learning of the material. For this reason, not all of the written pieces had the same level of relevance to the study, and therefore, we co-selected three reflections per student with the
The interviews were semi-structured, lasting on average 30 minutes per person. After explaining the purpose of the interview and informing the participants that they would be recorded, the researchers asked pre-written questions about memorable learning experiences and perceptions of identity shifts throughout the program. Additionally, the researchers asked questions guided by extracts from the interviewee’s written reflections. Based on the participant responses, the researchers probed with follow-up questions to further explore experiences they reported. Interviews were transcribed and the transcripts edited for accuracy. This interview method of using excerpts of written work as prompts during the interviews produced thoughtful reflections from the participants, and it could be fruitfully adopted by other researchers doing similar work with learners reflecting on transformative learning moments.
3.3 Thematic Analysis
The researchers used qualitative research methods, strongly informed by grounded theory techniques, to code and analyze the data (Charmaz, 2014; Tucker et al., 2016). Through this thematic analysis we developed the initial set of codes, then refined these codes as we re-examined the data iteratively. “Data analysis and collection inform and shape each other in an iterative process” (Charmaz, 2014, p. 343). During this refinement of codes and the grouping of codes into categories, we collapsed similar categories and also split up some code groups that needed more nuance. We used memoing during the coding to expand on the meanings conveyed in the participants’ words.
The themes became consistent and were reinforced in the final iterations of analysis as we found no new codes were required (Morse, 2008; Charmaz, 2009). As this development proceeded, the themes were in flux, and we ultimately arrived at ten themes that accurately represented the data. The ten themes accommodated the meanings in the data as we re-analyzed each written piece or interview transcript (Tucker & Simmons, 2021) and are summarized in Table 16.1.
Summary of themes resulting from thematic analysis of interviews and reflective writings
| Theme | Student-teacher is developing … |
|---|---|
| 1 Teacher as questioner | sense of self as one who asks questions (teacher), not one who answers questions (student) |
| 2 Teacher as impactful | recognition that their actions have an impact on student learning |
| 3 Student-centered instruction | understanding of students’ developmental readiness & adapting instruction for different students; students do not all learn the same way |
| 4 Presence | “teacherly voice”; teacher presence |
| 5 Broadening approaches | understanding that one way is not the only way; humility about one’s own background |
| 6 Perspective-taking | knowledge of how little one knows; like learning a foreign language and recognizing how much one does not know |
| 7 Connections | ability to connect theory with practice |
| 8 Understanding it vs. teaching it | understanding that knowing a concept is different from being able to teach it |
| 9 Responsibility | understanding of the weight of being responsible for student learning; understanding the work and time involved in teaching |
| 10 Students’ cultural context | recognition that students bring their cultural assets to the classroom; that culture and background affect learning and performance in school |
Once the ten primary themes were solidified through iterative analysis, we examined each theme for evidence of the eight characteristics of threshold concepts to determine whether it rose to the level of a threshold concept. We recursively examined the coded data, further informed by the researcher memos, to determine whether the theme fit each of the characteristics of threshold concepts. Using our thematically organized data excerpts, this recursive analysis determined whether the theme could be characterized as a threshold concept. We determined that seven of the ten themes could be characterized as threshold concepts, with the remaining three (4: Presence,
4 Findings and Discussion
Two of the ten resultant themes are explicated here, selected for their strong relevance both to professional identity transformation and to the domain
4.1 Student-Centered Instruction (Theme 3): A Threshold Concept, Deeply Affecting Identity
To demonstrate the deeper analysis of each threshold characteristic that led to our findings, we selected one participant quote per characteristic that most clearly and vividly illustrated the theme-characteristic pair. For each quote, we included one of the researcher memos that shows some of the analysis and elaboration of the experience being described or the memory recalled. Table 16.2 shows the analysis for Theme 3, Student-centered instruction, which we ultimately determined had evidence of seven of the eight characteristics of a threshold concept. This theme also represented a transdisciplinary concept, not unlike empathic thinking (Tembrevilla et al., 2021); becoming a teacher in any subject area and fully grasping and internalizing the importance of student-centered instruction is threshold knowledge in any discipline. Theme 3, Student-centered instruction, measured quite convincingly as a threshold concept. Only in its lack of disciplinary boundedness did it not meet a threshold concept characteristic.
Analysis of Theme 3, student-centered instruction, with illustrative quotes and researcher memos
| Threshold concept characteristic | Present ✓ or not ✘ |
Illustrative quotes from the data and researcher memos |
|---|---|---|
| Transformative | ✓ | “I was a good student. I was quiet, and I never had really strong relationships with my teachers because I was just a good student. I think sometimes those students don’t get attention because I didn’t need it, right? But to know now how much teachers are thinking about each of their students is something that I couldn’t really have thought of until I did it. And how much I care for my students. I have students who have really rough home lives and for them they might not realize that that affects me, but it’s hard to see that. So, I think that relationship isn’t something you can really understand until you’ve experienced it yourself”. (Megan, interview)
|
| Irreversible | ✓ | “Even now I find that I plan a little too much and I almost never get through everything I planned. The amount that I had planned in one day at the beginning compared to now is a lot less because I was thinking about all those little things compared to now where I’m like we can maybe get through one worksheet in this hour”. (Megan, interview)
|
| Integrative | ✓ | “Just the amount of things a teacher has to think about – it affects everything. Not even just things you have to do in a day, but for example, when you plan a lesson, you don’t just plan, OK, I’m going to teach math and we’re doing addition and this is how we’re going to do it. You have to plan for so many student needs. I have to think about, OK, I know these five kids are really going to struggle, how can I make sure they are going to get that support? I have these three kids who I know won’t be able to stay on task, how can I plan around that? I have some students that I know aren’t going to be able to do their homework at home because they don’t have support. Thinking about all of those different students is throughout the whole day and throughout the whole year”. (Megan, interview)
|
| Troublesome | ✓ | “I think my a-ha moment happened last year. I thought: I plan a lesson, I teach the lesson, and then I’m done. Then I had one lesson where nothing went according to plan. I realized I had to be adaptable”. (Becky, interview)
|
| Bounded | ✘ | Memo: Because this characteristic involves the demarcations between and among concepts, this particular characteristic did not apply to our datasets regarding student-centered instruction. Education is inherently multi-disciplinary, and so the “bounded” characteristic is less relevant here than the others. |
| Discursive | ✓ | “This week I’m teaching third graders about a round in music. In my head I call it polyphony, but a third grader can hardly say that word, polyphonic. So I’ve had to change it. I have a circle on the board that shows that it’s like playing a game of tag. And you’re constantly one step behind the other group and you don’t actually ever catch up to them. It’s like today they were divided into Team A and Team B said, and it was like, did we ever catch up to Team A? We didn’t end together. So it’s just like, how do you take the word polyphony down to the third grade level?” (Lyle, interview)
|
| Reconstitutive | ✓ | “In my student teaching I had a lesson that I taught on similes and metaphors and I thought, I’ve been doing really good. My kids are really engaged …. But then we did a quiz afterwards, and they all failed it. And I was like, okay, now I have to go back and reteach. Those kids could have gone three lessons, and I would have never known whether they knew metaphors”. (Karen, interview)
|
| Liminal | ✓ | “We went on a field trip, a baseball game … I love baseball, and I had a kid say my name, and I was like, oh wait, I have to pay attention! It’s more than me here! [emphasis added] It was definitely a moment where I was like first felt a total identity shift”. (Karen, interview)
|
4.2 Presence (Theme 4): An Essential Professional Praxis, but Not Threshold Knowledge
In contrast to Theme 3 discussed above, in Theme 4, Presence, we found inconsistency in meeting the characteristics of threshold concepts. In fact, we concluded that only three of the eight characteristics of threshold concepts were evident; however, all of these three dealt with issues of identity – transformative, irreversible, and liminal. Therefore, this theme was an important praxis of the domain, even though it did not rise to the level of a threshold concept. See Table 16.3 for details about Theme 4, Presence.
Analysis of Theme 4, teacherly presence, with illustrative quotes and researcher memos
| Threshold concept characteristic | Present ✓ or not ✘ |
Illustrative quotes from the data and researcher memos |
|---|---|---|
| Transformative | ✓ | “When somebody does something that I know that they’re not supposed to do, I can sense my like teacher instincts of wanting to tell them not to do it”. (Karen, interview)
|
| Irreversible | ✓ | “It seemed like before now, I didn’t have authority to like tell [students], ‘No, you work together’.” (Kay, interview)
|
| Integrative | ✘ | Memo: While this theme does closely relate to identity, the data did not show evidence of it affecting all parts the ways they think about teaching and their professional knowledge. |
| Troublesome | ✘ | Memo: While the participants sometimes expressed discomfort with their new authority in their role as a teacher, they did not experience this theme as intellectually troublesome in the way that the threshold concept framework literature has described it. Instead, they experienced personal and social awkwardness in moving into their new role. |
| Bounded | ✘ | Memo: Because this characteristic involves the demarcations between and among concepts, it did not apply to our datasets regarding teacher presence. Education is inherently multi-disciplinary, and so the bounded characteristic is less relevant here. |
| Discursive | ✘ | Memo: While language and identity are closely intertwined, the participants did not express this new-found teacher-identity through language much in the data, unless we asked directly about their sense of identity as teachers. Therefore, this theme did not rise to the level of frequency to meet this characteristic. |
| Reconstitutive | ✘ | Memo: Because this theme deals with identity more than disciplinary knowledge, the data does not show evidence that participants thought of knowledge differently as they were moving through this identity transition. |
| Liminal | ✓ | “It’s like talking to a freshman (first-year) on [the college] campus. I have friends that are this age, and when I leave [campus] I have to remember that this is a different setting, even though they’re the same age. I have to keep a mental barrier and not let something slip. So that identity as a teacher comes out through those relationships of having that barrier”. (Lyle, interview)
|
4.3 Learners’ Discourse, Written and Oral
This two-step process of discerning threshold concepts based on learner discourse is novel in the threshold concepts literature. Many studies have examined threshold concepts from the teacher’s perspective, but this study highlights a method in which threshold concepts are derived from analyzing learner discourse. The importance of listening to students’ voices has received more attention in recent research, both in teacher education studies and in threshold concepts research (Neve et al., 2017; Steckley, 2020; Martens &
On balance, the research project also presented methodological challenges that we had to manage. For instance, as qualitative researchers, we were simultaneously researchers and participant observers. We engaged with the participants in the interviews, and one of the researchers interacted with these students in classes. This dynamic is common in qualitative research, and specifically in constructivist grounded theory. An additional challenge was the two-step process itself. As researchers, we coded the data to distill themes, endeavoring to not consider threshold concepts characteristics while we did this coding to determine the primary themes. In the second stage of the data analysis process, we considered each theme in relation to the threshold concept characteristics. While complete separation of our knowledge of threshold concepts was impossible, we iteratively checked our coding with each other to ensure accuracy. Additionally, each of the researchers has done qualitative research and thematic analysis outside of threshold concepts research, and so the task of coding the data with little influence of threshold concepts knowledge was possible. Finally, as we conducted the second pass through the data to support our goal of focusing on transferability to other domains, we discovered that the passage of time since the previous coding provided us opportunity to re-analyze the data with fresh eyes and to note evidence of threshold characteristics and identity shift experiences with more nuance and accuracy.
4.4 Recommendations
Several advantages of the methodological approaches we used emerged during the study. We have codified these advantages into recommendations for other researchers exploring threshold concepts in professional domains and academic disciplines. These recommendations are particularly relevant where a research study is looking to differentiate threshold knowledge from praxes and dispositional readiness benchmarks. We present these recommendations as phases in the study design:
- –Phase 1 was identifying characteristics in the datasets themselves that made them suitable for thematic analysis. Two complementary datasets, semi-structured interviews and reflective writings, provided a rich source of information.
- –
Phase 2 was iterative analysis of the data, by both researchers, to arrive at the primary themes present in the data. - –In Phase 3, we identified aspects of each primary theme with evidence of threshold concepts characteristics. The focus was on what the participants reported experiencing as they met learning challenges and reflected upon them.
Finally, we identified factors that are essential to a study’s design when evaluating the thematic outcomes according to threshold concept characteristics. Memoing the salient participant quotes supported the deeper analysis. This turned out to be especially important for the established characteristics of discursive changes, reconstituting the new knowledge, and liminality that were established after the initial five. Later phases in the research to be considered
5 Conclusion
Through thematic analysis of learner discourse, expressed in reflective writings and interviews, we were able to explore the identity development of university students as they transitioned into professional educators. Combining this approach with the threshold concepts theoretical framework (TCF), the research led to rigorous methods for differentiating between professional domain essentials and threshold concepts. The outcome of this research has three main contributions. First, our work was significantly strengthened by the threshold concepts characteristics later incorporated into the TC framework: discursive, reconstitutive, and liminal. By applying and drawing attention to these characteristics, our work contributes to a richer theoretical model for future research. Second, our focus on learners’ discourse about transformative learning experiences that signal readiness for entering into a community of practice may be especially useful for other researcher-educators, both for their own studies and for understanding and evaluating learners when designing curriculum. Combining learners’ written reflections and interviews, including the drawing out of further reflections during the interviews, proved to be a powerful tool for exploring learner experiences. Third, our methodology for data collection and analysis may be effectively applied for two major purposes: (1) to understand how professional domains can be similar to and different from academic disciplines vis-à-vis threshold concepts; and (2) to illustrate a method for determining whether or not difficult concepts in a field rise to the level of threshold knowledge.
Note
The study was approved by the Monmouth College Human Subjects Review Board in August 2017.
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