In Terry Pratchett’s Unseen University, there are only two rooms associated with teaching. The main one (3b) is where (virtually) all the teaching takes place, and the lectures are timetabled at the same hour on the same day for all classes … every week. This arrangement works very smoothly as long as nobody tries to turn up in person, and is particularly efficient, given that the room does not, as a result, need to physically exist. The other teaching room (5b) sort of exists with the proviso that time and space have become detached from one another there. As a result, one can walk in to find it is twenty minutes ago (or perhaps an entirely different timezone). In theory, one might inadvertently be an entire year late and still a little unsure about timezones.
The 8th ‘Biennial’ Threshold Concepts conference synthesized the most useful attributes of both these rooms to run a year later than planned, (almost) uninterruptedly for almost three days, in almost every timezone, and all in one room – which did not physically exist. In the circumstances, we were rather pleased with how it went.
The usual conference dilemmas (‘Which session shall I go to? Why do those two have to clash? What is this coffee made of?) were displaced by finding Zoom links, wondering just how late one could stay up, and being persistently a little unsure about timezones. One wonders what van Gennep would have made of it: in most of his accounts, a subset of the population are powerfully displaced into a liminal wilderness before returning to a way of life that emphatically has not changed; it is the initiates who are different, who see differently, who understand now as adults. But the lockdown to tackle COVID-19 was virtually global, lasted for months on end, and affected just about everyone. People found themselves ‘in the wilderness’, ‘betwixt and between’, yet – for many – they did so in their own homes.
Of course not all lockdowns were created equal; in the UK and most other ‘Global North’ countries, non-white workers bore the brunt of infection, ever at the violent end of chronic systemic injustice. The murders of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd received more publicity than such deaths typically do, and universities were often among the first to release carefully-worded institutional statements promising to tackle inequalities. Within education, voices calling for extra support for marginalised students were heard to varying degrees as stories emerged of children and young adults trying to share meagre technology to continue their education.
Other marginalised groups, such as the neurodiverse or disabled, cautiously welcomed sudden accommodations and flexibilities which they had been
This volume bears witness to that disruption: the original conference was to be held in UCL in 2020 and key to its design was a formal and lavish tribute to Mick Flanagan, creator of an exhaustive bibliographic website devoted to threshold concepts that had been instrumental in building up our community. Mick, now retired from UCL, was originally part of the steering group but his ill-health unfortunately led to him dropping out. The ‘Flanagan archive’, still online at the time of writing,1 ceased updates on 20th March 2020. By the time the virtual conference went ahead in July 2021, he was unable to attend so tribute was paid in his absence and is represented in this volume.
The importance of Mick’s work providing a single, coherent and detailed point of reference for threshold concepts cannot be exaggerated. This was also to be the first conference held after the retirement of Ray Land, and Erik Meyer was not expected to attend; it therefore marked an important transition for the field, as its originators all stepped back to see how we got on without them (we have, however, given them the last word here). That conference was essentially already fully planned when it was postponed and the steering group went back to the drawing board.
The consequence in many cases was that the usual cycle of ‘present then publish’ was interrupted; abstracts were 18 months old by the time they were presented, and some had already been developed and published elsewhere. The chapters in this volume were therefore selected more loosely than has been done in the past; presenters at TC2021 were invited to submit an abstract of revised work or related topics. New collaborations appeared serendipitously, based on interaction at the conference; others incorporated what they had found during the extra time – and within even the conference itself – into their chapters. The resulting collection, like the previous volumes in this series,
When attempting to see how (or even if) the framework has changed since the first appearance, the ‘seminal’ 2003 paper that brought threshold concepts to the world, the process (for me, at least) is often oddly circular. If we include the two ‘new’ (2005) criteria of ‘boundedness’ and ‘reconstitutive’, it is easy to think ‘it’s all there at the start’. Meyer and Land noted the importance not just of cognitive shifts but also of the affective, of liminality, the possibility of mimicry, the difficulties of curriculum design, pre-liminal variation, and so on; Land’s endnote says more about their aims. Meyer’s endnote in particular takes us back to the deliberate flexibility and adaptability that was there at the start. In the twenty years since that paper, we as an academic community have puzzled over its implications, taken it to corners of academia they did not anticipate, mulled over ‘threshold skills’ (and now ‘threshold competences’).
One of the great gifts of the framework is that while other strands in education were effecting a shift from ‘teacher-centred’ to ‘student-centred’, often smuggling in expectations of straightforward and linear development, thresholds constituted us differently – as a community gathered around the defamiliarised discipline(s), puzzling it out together. We have been attuned to thinking beyond ‘the subject’ to a consideration of the wider experiences of being learners and tutors. In particular, it brought our attention towards trouble, rather than minimising it, blaming the students for their struggles or hoping it would simply go away. Our insistence that transformation of understanding includes transformation of identity takes students profoundly seriously. It sets up this community well to inquire into particular issues that have only reached the attention of higher education as a whole fairly recently, and still erratically; issues of race, intersectionality, marginalisation and exclusion are just starting to be given the attention they have long deserved. A wider issue is that so much learning has become interdisciplinary and interprofessional – a theme that gains its own section in this volume. Though these threads were all there in the early days, they have increasingly moved closer to centre stage and are certainly not likely to retreat in the near future. We at least have the beginnings of those important conversations in this community and it is to be hoped that our interest in the troublesome will equip us well to pursue them as far and as long as they need to go.
The two decades of threshold concepts so far have not then been so much a circle as a spiral that has kept true to the aspiration to keep alive a vivid sense of what learning is like for students, to acknowledge and celebrate their individuality while also seeking general, even universal, insights into the (frankly) still mysterious process of learning and personal transformation.
Big Questions
The opening section steals Timmermans’ helpfully open phrase ‘big questions’ to group chapters that take a step (or two) back from particular disciplines or ‘thresholds criteria’, and consider not only the ways that we integrate and work with the framework but also the psychological and epistemological space in which we do so.
Julie Timmermans begins the book, as she began the ‘third shift’ of the conference, by considering failure, but not as a black sheep or something to be avoided – rather as a ‘native informant’. If we let failure ‘speak’ to us, what might we discover? Drawing on and extending earlier research, she notes that, at times, ‘while small failures might involve missing out on opportunities, “big” failures appeared to be tied to issues of identity’. As we make meanings (and therefore construct) our failures, it is often more than the outside world that provides us with a ‘map’ or a framework to refer to in order to guide our judgements; sometimes failure helps us see what we are not. It is we who (sometimes painfully) make the meaning, and we make it (for) ourselves in a dynamic relationship with the world and others – a theme that is prominent in recent publications such as Ravenstahl (2021).
And if identity begins and ends at home, so to speak, then there may be times when, instead of considering threshold concepts to be ‘out there’, as something to be attained, an amended definition of threshold concepts might bring the active and agentic process of making meaning and the transformation of identity even more into the foreground than Meyer and Land originally suggested.
Jan-Martin Geiger reviews some of the issues that have emerged in the almost twenty years we have been mulling over threshold concepts. He notes the difficulties of keeping our attention on the individual learning process, the oscillating experience of crossing the threshold, and the difficulties of gathering evidence about that journey. Analysing the relevant threads around assessment (learning preconditions, learning processes, and learning outcomes), he emphasises just how far the threshold concepts approach is from fixed linear
David Riley also invites us to consider ‘big questions’ about TC s. He notes that over time our focus has moved from collective to individual, from epistemological to affective, and from ‘pathways and journeys’ to spaces, domains, flow, and similar. Though it is not a word he uses, this volume itself bears witness to just how eclectic threshold concepts scholarship is. Bringing a range of other perspectives to bear on the field, he mulls over landscapes and timescapes of threshold concepts and considers what kinds of futures lie in store for us. This provides some structure to questions that have been asked since 2003 about whether they are a ‘concept’, ‘theory’ or ‘framework’ – even a ‘brand’; we have a ‘collegial and potentially anarchic landscape’ (the questions of definition and what the original one made possible is something Meyer will pick up in his endnote). Riley steps back and asks ‘what unites us?’ One answer, he suggests, is values and he hopes that the adaptive cycle model he has drawn on, with its differentiation of four phases (or perhaps ‘modes’), gives us some clues as to which areas will be, and should be, the focuses of our activities.
David Reeping surveys the field from another angle, reflecting on how we have grappled with ‘definitions’ from the very start; the very vagueness that deliberately permitted adaption to potentially any discipline, as Meyer highlights in his endnote, also inevitably left room for differing interpretations or even doubt. Noting this issue of ‘floating signifiers’, where the same thing can have different meanings for different people (something that Rattray and Ravenstahl will approach from another angle later on), he notes that critics of threshold concepts point at ‘inconsistent’ use of the criteria, going beyond the ‘identification problem’ and issues of definition to considering the choice of methods and the level of detail in reporting research results. Like a number of others in this volume, he notes the question of whether all students experience the same threshold concepts, (or experience them the same way) and that the question of whether the understanding of teachers and/or theoreticians coincides with students’ experience.
Noting the same qualitative emphasis as Geiger from a different angle, and drawing on a range of scholars’ work to demonstrate the need for student, teacher, and theoretician perceptions to be acknowledged, he proposes a mixed-methods approach that he suggests can accommodate both convergent
Isaac Calduch brings another critical dimension of our studies to the forefront, pointing out that if threshold concepts are constructed by communities, we must pay attention to the power dynamics and distinctive character of those communities. If we are to avoid the epistemic violence of the hegemonical suppression of some knowledge (and therefore communities of practice), we must make room for an even wider set of stakeholders, some of whom will help us begin discerning the hitherto invisible contours of the socio-political hegemony that shapes our thinking.
Drawing on his recent phenomenographical research, where Calduch was deliberately alert to this epistemicide (e.g. through trusting ‘majority consensus’ to make judgements that suppress minority perspectives), he notes that some threshold concepts in educational research belong to different disciplinary and epistemological traditions. They might even contradict one another. If we require consensus as a criterion for identifying legitimate threshold concepts, some of these these (such as ‘researcher as subject’) could easily be lost.
Further, since some threshold concepts are far less prescriptive of what one becomes after crossing the threshold, they underpin and authorise greater post-liminal variation; if approached as prompts by the use of open questions, they move us away from quashing difference in a bid for (apparent) commensurability, and towards a landscape where distinctive differences can more easily co-exist.
The joint chapter by Sharday Mosurinjohn and Jason Davies owes its existence to a creative response to failure – Julie Timmermans would no doubt approve. The recording of Mosurinjohn’s conference presentation was lost due to technical issues, and the offer to re-record it for posterity on the blog led to one of those discussions. Like Calduch’s chapter, this mulls over marginalisation of particular ways of being and knowing, but identifies the hegemony in play as secularism, and particularly secularism in higher education excluding viewpoints and knowledge constructed as, and associated with, religion. As they point out, this is a rather large and unwieldy object of study and one whose outer contours we cannot arguably see clearly; where would we stand to get such a viewpoint? Their underlying question throughout is ‘if hegemony changes our view in a distinctive and transformative way, can threshold concepts help to discern that process and that hegemony? Is this a pan-disciplinary threshold concept?’ After anchoring ‘the university as a secular project’ in history, they nominate the UK Quality Assurance Agency Subject Benchmark Statements (SBS) as a useful reference point, given that these are
Journeys through Liminality
Our next set of chapters, ‘journeys through liminality’, tackle the journey through liminality and some of the different ways it might be navigated. Julie Rattray and Matt Ravenstahl introduce an idea that has had a comparable effect to threshold concepts, travelling across a range of disciplines – the ‘boundary object’. Boundary objects act as point of focus, discussion, and divergent meanings, where different communities of practice will have their own distinctive meanings and come together to enrich those meanings from one another. They can serve this function even where those meanings, like Calduch’s different communities, are in many ways incommensurable. Reflecting on whether such objects can assist learners into and across the liminal space, they suggest that a boundary object can circumvent discursive and linguistic ‘trouble’, flushing out formerly tacit or elusive aspects of a student’s understanding (or stuckness), and deliberately using objects at the boundary to develop threshold capital.
In a pair of chapters considering architecture, Leif Martin Hokstad and Bjørn Otto Braaten first consider the various roles and functions that a teacher can have, and how they not only shape the experiences the students learn from but can also have a critical role in framing the role of liminality in the learning experience. A teacher can be a number of things: keymaker; disruptive trickster; master of ceremonies (and many others). Given that ‘liminality’, rather than van Gennep’s constrained and limited experience which one will leave behind for good, is now a space in which we sojourn or even dwell, how do we prepare our graduates (and ourselves) for that world of contingency?
Rather than it being (just) about ‘danger’, we can embrace liminality as an affordance and embark on ‘strangemaking’, bringing the students’ attention directly to the new and unfamiliar in the already familiar. The teacher then might take on a ‘steadying’ role, such that the students can ‘dare to dare’. In a comparison that Ray Land would no doubt approve of, they invoke the world of jazz, where (in Keith Jarrett’s words) ‘you’re never at a point where you have it all sewn up’.
Braaten and Hokstad go into more detail about liminality in architecture education in their next chapter. Just as Rattray and Ravenstahl pondered the
Laura Blackburn, Dora Regoczi, Larissa Kempenaar and Sivaramkumar Shanmugam follow a doctoral hero’s (Blackburn) journey from preliminal, through liminal to postliminal, alternating between student and staff perspectives and particularly with an eye on professional development rather other doctoral characteristics. This individual account brings down to earth many of the studies in this section, with a vivid sense of what it was like to have deeply held personal understandings challenged such that one can move ‘towards a fluid, sophisticated epistemic stance’. Blackburn articulates her experience via Vogler’s ‘heroic journey’, seeing how student discussions and staff input were vital to challenging disruptive past experiences and narrow preferences and understandings. Interwoven with her story are staff reflections on how best to guide, support, and challenge students on their very individual – yet shared – quests.
Jessica Schroenn Goebel and Suriamurthee Moonsamy Maistry return us to an early stamping ground for threshold concepts, the world of students learning microeconomics, and detail another study that set out to explore liminality from the inside. Students undertook reflective accounts of their learning and then worked collaboratively, guided by the Interactive Qualitative Analysis framework. These reflections permit the authors to map three kinds of breakthrough across three dimensions: metacognitive; conceptual; and personal and affective. Many students reported a clear sense of belonging and discovery through their discussions though, as with any group, some felt less confident they had found their feet. Reticent students and/or those working in a second language sometimes found themselves stuck in liminality. Though they note the limited scope of the study, their model points at ways to include all three dimensions while also identifying where perhaps further support might be needed.
Michelle D. Lazarus, Amany Gouda-Vossos, Jaai Parasnis, Elizabeth Davis, Swati Mujumdar, Angela Ziebell and Gabrielle Brand draw parallels with ‘uncertainty tolerance’ (UT) and liminality, and consider how insights from this framework might inform working with TC s. They raise the issue of the definitional flexibility of threshold concepts (something Meyer will pick up in his endnote) and suggest that focussing on the troublesome aspect creates synergies with insights of UT. Exploring findings from ten different faculties, they conclude that ‘the human element’ is a shared ‘uncertainty stimulus’ across multiple contexts but note that different sectors respond differently to it, some (for instance) by operationalising via guidelines and the like, and others by predictive modelling, drawing on models to inform future responses. Their findings strongly imply that reflectively developed teaching practices, which deliberately create chances to learn to manage uncertainty and liminal spaces, is a key part of universities’ mission to support our students and prepare our graduates for their future lives.
Learning from & with Students
Our next section groups studies of work done directly with students, particularly the elucidation of potential threshold concepts that emerged during student reflection; for the most part, the thresholds concept framework was explicitly put in front of them in some way as a prompt for that reflection, thus creating a partnership of inquiry that would avoid the imposition of teacherly priorities and perceptions.
Matthew Atherton and Yvonne Meulemans outline their process of using the threshold concepts framework deliberately and explicitly to support and accelerate student reflection and metacognition. In particular, they tackled the ‘articulation gap’ whereby students struggle to ocusing the personal value and skills gained in their education and (not surprisingly) to then articulate those to potential employers. Taking theocusingk directly and explicitly to the
Matthew Dunn and Jenny Anne Wynn also foreground the process of grappling directly with threshold concepts as they explore the dual identity of trainee teachers in the UK: as both students and teachers, they found that the greatest benefit to their participants came from discussion, which enabled them to make ‘threshold connections’. Discussing ‘webs’ or ‘matrices’ of thresholds, their participants were empowered by those (dis)agreements to draw on their own reflections and struggles to think through to appropriate pedagogical approaches for their own, younger, students. What emerged were interdisciplinary ‘threshold epistemes’ relevant to chemistry, biology and physics (including ‘models’, thus echoing Rattray and Ravenstahl’s discussion earlier). Like several other chapters here, students were actively asked to reflect on their own conceptual shifts, bringing the transformation and the trouble to the foreground.
Virginia Tucker and Michelle Simmons also worked iteratively with trainee teachers to identify (and sometimes discard) potential threshold concepts. Their process, which they offer as a potential model for others’ enquiries, foregrounded ‘memorable learning experiences’ and ‘perceptions of identity shift’ among students, then worked iteratively with those surveyed via subsequent interviews and extensive coding of findings. The subsequent rich collection of quotes keeps with the emerging theme of drawing iteratively on learner (rather than educator) discourse, anchoring the enquiry in student reflections and inviting subsequent reflection on their understanding of those reflections. This permitted them to draw on not just transformation but the ‘full set of thresholds criteria’ to guide their inquiry, a key aim of which was to distinguish between important aspects of professional praxis and transformational threshold concepts.
Marwan Alyafaee worked with a specific set of student teachers, those learning English Language Teaching (in Oman), and ocusing particularly on troublesome and transformative concepts. Like so many others here, he urges that we work with students ‘as partners rather than objects’, including them in the process of nominating potential threshold concepts. Students were asked to suggest candidates, with particular focus on ‘troublesome and transformative’; staff were then consulted, before semi-structured interviews circled back to
Bert Zwaneveld, Hans Sterk and Jacob Perrenet set about inquiring into what initially appears a discipline-specific question: is ‘proving’ in maths a threshold concept? Like their peers, they ground their inquiry in iterative student responses, involving explanation of the threshold concepts framework and working in a spiral with the findings. They go beyond their clear finding that ‘proving’ does indeed satisfy the criteria to be a threshold concept, providing another model for how similar enquiries can work with student perceptions. Finally, they muse on whether the best term to think about what we are dealing with here is threshold concepts or perhaps it should be threshold skills or even whether – given the way ‘proving’ brings together a range of understandings and requires application – we should talk about threshold competence. They also reflect on the implications for teaching, suggesting that (for this subject at least) ‘telescoped reteaching’, where a framework of understanding is not simply worked through, but we iteratively teach a topic, each time in more detail.
Paquita Perez, Bert Zwaneveld and Gé Nielissen keep us close to the sciences, exploring threshold concepts with students of Physics in Environmental Sciences. Like the preceding chapters, they detail an inquiry into student understanding via student voices; they also consider the issue of whether threshold concepts are universal or can be individual and, again like the other studies here, they worked to ensure that students understand what they are being asked, providing explanations of what ‘threshold concepts’ are and giving opportunities for students to get clarification before reflecting on their experiences and understanding. Though they obtain a range of answers, with varying numbers of students invoking them, it is striking how often one or two themes emerge with an unmistakable generalisability; for instance, when it comes to mastering a threshold, ‘practice/application’ gets almost 50%. Perhaps surprisingly, ‘transformative’ and ‘integrative’ are the most important of the criteria for the students, but ‘counter-intuitive’ is the least mentioned. These quantified results permit them to ‘reasonably address’ some of threshold concepts’ criticisms, such as whether they are individual or more general; high consensus must be a useful indicator, in this context.
In this section, our contributors provide a range of scenarios in which students grappled with threshold concepts in a variety of subjects and pedagogical modes.
Marina Orsini-Jones and Kyria Rebeca Finardi, reporting on a series of linked studies, describe how a third space Virtual Exchange MOOC offered possibilities for students of English Language Teaching. Such a dispersed and varied cohort inevitably faced the challenge – and opportunities – of building communities that challenged the status quo and offered possibilities for decolonising and getting participants (and the field) out of their comfort zones in context of multiple crises or ‘pandemics’. Marshalling a range of pedagogical influences that aim to deconstruct and decolonise power and hegemony, it is perhaps no surprise that students needed psychological capital and, amidst positive results, there were also stubborn challenges (such as anxiety around using technology for learning). While many students did report breakthroughs, they suggest that Virtual Exchange (‘a challenging and fertile liminal Third Space for decolonising education’) might itself be a threshold concept; this will be one of the questions explored in the next cycle of their larger project.
Trish Powers keeps us online, with a study of mature Australian students studying online and part-time. The issue she starts with is retention, with high drop-out rates for this group. Seeking to stay close to the experience of the individual students and guided by the principles of Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis, she brings Turner/van Gennep’s three stages to bear on students’ journeys, and finds three groups emerging towards the end of the course: those still in the liminal space, those transitioning, and those who had emerged into post-liminality. Suggesting that ‘becoming an online student’ is itself a threshold concept, as well as noting the usefulness of bringing the threshold concepts framework to bear on these experiences, she concludes that this insight should be the basis of informing best practice in such pedagogy.
Brenda Refaei and Ruth Benander also tackle an area that calls for context-sensitive integration, namely the still-emerging use (and somewhat erratic outcomes) of assessment through ePortfolios. The authors stress that their transformative potential has not been widely realised, and they, like many others in this volume, suggest this could be remedied by staff focussing in their designs on the threshold concepts and bottlenecks, and particularly by making expectations more explicit. The various stakeholders – not just students and staff but also employers – tend to fall into ‘audience silos’, where students see the work as ‘just’ an assessment exercise and staff could explain the genre and expectations better. Key to making more of ePortfolios is reflection on different stakeholder purposes; the critical bottlenecks are technology and time.
Becoming a Professional
Much of the initial work on threshold concepts tended to consider specific thresholds for specific disciplines, but it was not long before ‘messier’ areas of education began to grapple with inter- and multidisciplinary scenarios where integrating that learning and learning to apply it made the picture much less defined. Lazarus et al foregrounded that the biggest source of liminalising uncertainty is ‘the human element’; our final set of chapters address the issue of learning to put things into actual practice – with plenty of human element in the picture.
Echoing Refaei and Benander’s call to centre threshold concepts in pedagogic design, and particularly where a range of factors must be integrated, Dai-Ling Chen takes us back to language-related subjects in her study of English-Chinese interpreters. Interpretation (oral translating) requires a multidisciplinary and pragmatic approach that is sensitive to the range of disciplines involved, transferring language phenomena across cultures and successfully integrating cultural values. As such, it does not lend itself well to linear models of learning. Chen combines the threshold concepts (or skills) framework with ‘self-determination theory’, which distinguishes different levels of motivation. Drawing on both qualitative and quantitative methods, she teases out a range of insights, such as the need for context-sensitivity in teaching approaches and materials, as well as the elusiveness of tacit knowledge, once it has become tacit. She proposes a ‘two-layers-three-dimensions’ approach, whereby the epistemological and ontological comprise the first layer, and the second involves aspects of identity, which goes beyond learning transformation and concerns long-term engagement and nurturing.
Amani Albuwardi keeps us in the world of translation, this time into Arabic, but similarly with an eye on becoming a translator. Working with students’ experiences of authentic project-based activities, we see vividly how students go back and forth in their sense of their own trustworthiness as a translator; more complex than ‘confidence’, trustworthiness involves a judgement on one’s own abilities to deal with uncertain scenarios, with input both from oneself and others, and can be buffeted (or strengthened) by others’ perspectives and judgements. Students are clearly negotiating their identity rather than just the ‘cognitive’ aspects of their work together, and she concludes with a strong recommendation
Linda Martindale and Stella Howden move our attention to academic teachers becoming ‘scholarly teachers’ through SoTL, and with a particular interest in possible threshold concepts in that professional becoming. A literature review highlights the importance in this process of trouble and liminality, of identity (crisis), and of possible solutions. Their discoveries and ongoing reflection, consultation, and inquiry emphasise the iterative nature of crossing the liminal space and development as a scholarly teacher; this became particularly vivid when we faced lockdown due to COVID-19, when many ‘regressed’ in their practice to more familiar ways of teaching in the effort to adjust provision at high speed. As with so many of these studies, ongoing dialogue is suggested as a key way to juggle the complexities of making transitions across the thresholds.
Sara Miller and Craig Gibson keep us in the world of developing academics as teachers, with the specific focus of information literacy. Often ‘invisible’ and tacit, this is an area whose neglect has undermined student learning and excluded those who did not simply ‘pick it up as they went along’. They review the ways in which academic development has considered different approaches to community-building and landscapes of practice, and the way that challenging assumptions can be vexing experiences – but invaluable in surfacing tacit knowledge. Drawing on a range of frameworks, including threshold concepts and decoding the disciplines, they outline their findings while developing a course to further the particular aspect of information literacy in academic staff. The course itself, like so many recent initiatives, was heavily disrupted by COVID-19 but the design and reflection process provided a stimulus to suggest a range of potential thresholds relating to the interdisciplinary and expansive field of information literacy, where once again integration of context-sensitive understanding is key to both student and staff success, and transformation of identity.
Staying with the theme of integrating multiple perspectives, Natasha Hubbard Murdoch considers the complex world of being interprofessional in a healthcare context, where students must learn to be individual practitioners but also to practise as a team member. Drawing on professional and national frameworks, she took a phenomenographical approach to interviews to allow students to describe and name their threshold moments. This yielded a hierarchy of learning steps involving ‘connecting the threads’, ‘trust’, ‘leadership’ and being part of a community. Along the way we see identity shifts and ‘aha!’ moments, which rarely show up when expecting a linear approach. Bringing the threshold ‘lens’ to these findings revealed the trickiness of ‘boundedness’, since interprofessional work crosses so many of the boundaries that are
Hebatollah Shoukry and Annie M. Tierney present a different angle on a not dissimilar topic: graduate apprenticeships tackling the web of threshold concepts in maths. This study neatly embodies some of the major changes in higher education since thresholds made their first appearance; rather than being able to focus purely on the discipline, these students generally study one day a week around a job, with a great deal of self-study and task-juggling. ‘The challenge … is not subject material’. The affective aspect is strong here, as they memorably describe it: ‘even some students who know the definition [of a Taylor series] do not want to understand what it means, as they fear this will confuse them even more.’ A number of different interventions in design, for instance tackling the difficulties of bridging theory and practice, brought results that were successful enough with these cohorts to be worth considering for the non-apprenticeship undergraduate teaching, as they too consider how to enhance their application skills in due course.
The Last Word?
Finally, it seemed appropriate that, in the first collection of this type where Erik and Ray had stepped away, we ask for their reflections on the field of threshold concepts. Though they were not privy to the chapters, it is striking how many of the themes of the book appear in their endnotes. Erik Meyer picks up on the theme of the flexibility deliberately embedded in the original formulation, emphasizing that one either can have a tightly defined idea in a single discipline or a more flexible (and fertile) understanding that is of visible use to all. To paraphrase him, how can we do justice to variation among students if we do no justice to the variation of disciplines? The importance given in the language of the seminal 2003 paper is an importance given to the individuality of students, not a deliberate landmine to vex philosophers.
Ray Land picks up the theme of deliberate flexibility and definitional breadth’, stressing that they formulated threshold concepts ‘not in order to define universal requisites, but to indicate, to illustrate, to exemplify’. He then considers what might be the challenges ahead. Firstly, he notes the epistemic complexity that has been highlighted in a number of these chapters and the potential of a ‘rhizomatic analysis’; it is encouraging for our field’s future that he draws on an unpublished PhD by Mac Giolla Rí. Then he notes a societal challenge, the risk of students ‘recoil[ing] from the learning threshold’; on that
If all goes to plan, this book will be launched at the 2023 9th (and actually) Biennial Threshold Concepts conference in Port Macquarie in New South Wales, Australia.2 It will then – serendipitously – be the twentieth anniversary of the original paper that got us all started, the dates had previously not quite been synchronised. Expected to be hybrid but grounded by in-person sessions, the steering group hope that it will be a chance to strengthen old, and build new, relationships. Existing bonds and goodwill carried us through the last few years, with TC2021 as a stepping stone, but there are some aspects of community building that are hard to replace in virtual gatherings. Some of the best parts of learning together notoriously happen in liminal spaces and so it is hoped that the corridors, water coolers and catering points will come into their own as we think our way ever forwards about how we might effect the next twenty years of transformations. We should perhaps think not so much of having lost a year as having gained an anniversary.
References
Mac Giolla Rí, D. (2022). Visualising threshold concepts in social care through the semiotic lens of inquiry graphics: Developing threshold graphics [Unpublished PhD thesis]. Lancaster University.
Meyer, J. H. F., & Land, R. (2003). Threshold concepts and troublesome knowledge: Linkages to ways of thinking and practising within the disciplines. In C. Rust (Ed.), Improving student learning - ten years on (pp. 1–16). OCSLD.
Meyer, J. H. F., & Land, R. (2005). Threshold concepts and troublesome knowledge (2): Epistemological considerations and a conceptual framework for teaching and learning. Higher Education, 49(3), 373–388.
Ravenstahl, M. (2021). Understanding art education through the lens of threshold concepts. Brill.