Threshold Concepts in Practice
Description
In any discipline, there are certain concepts - the 'jewels in the curriculum' - whose acquisition is akin to passing through a portal. Learners enter new conceptual (and often affective) territory. Previously inaccessible ways of thinking or practising come into view, without which they cannot progress, and which offer a transformed internal view of subject landscape, or even world view.
These conceptual gateways are integrative, exposing the previously hidden interrelatedness of ideas, and are irreversible. However they frequently present troublesome knowledge and are often points at which students become stuck. Difficulty in understanding may leave the learner in a 'liminal' state of transition, a 'betwixt and between' space of knowing and not knowing, where understanding can approximate to a form of mimicry. Learners navigating such spaces report a sense of uncertainty, ambiguity, paradox, anxiety, even chaos. The liminal space may equally be one of awe and wonderment. Thresholds research identifies these spaces as key transformational points, crucial to the learner's development but where they can oscillate and remain for considerable periods. These spaces require not only conceptual but ontological and discursive shifts.
This volume, the fourth in a tetralogy on Threshold Concepts, discusses student experiences, and the curriculum interventions of their teachers, in a range of disciplines and professional practices including medicine, law, engineering, architecture and military education.
Cover image: Detail from 'Eve offering the apple to Adam in the Garden of Eden and the serpent' c.1520-25. Lucas Cranach the Elder (1472-1553). Bridgeman Images. All rights reserved.
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Content
Foreword.- Preface: Threshold Concepts in Practice.- Acknowledgments.- Part 1: Theoretical Directions.- On the Threshold with Students.- Toil and Trouble: Threshold Concepts as a Pedagogy of Uncertainty.- Integrated Threshold Concept Knowledge.- The Career of Threshold Concepts in a Large-Lecture History Course: An Examination of Uptake of Disciplinary Actions.- A Threshold Concept Framework for Use Across Disciplines.- Part 2: Negotiating Liminality.- Affective Dimensions of Liminality.- Ambivalence, Hybridity and Liminality: The Case of Military Education.- Learning Experiences and the Liminality of Expertise.- Stuck at the Threshold: Which Strategies Do Students Choose When Facing Liminality within Certain Disciplines at a Business School?.- Part 3: Threshold Concepts and Interdisciplinarity.- 'Threshold Guardians': Threshold Concepts as Guardians of the Discipline.- Building Blocks: Threshold Concepts and Interdisciplinary Structures of Learning.- Part 4: The Doctoral Journey.- The Importance of Liminal Space for Doctoral Success: Exploring Methodological Threshold Concepts.- Beyond Blockages to Ownership, Agency and Articulation: Liminal Spaces and Conceptual Threshold Crossing in Doctoral Learning.- Part 5: Threshold Concepts in Professional Practice.- Engineering.- Modular Approach and Innovations in an Engineering Program Design.- What to Do with a Threshold Concept: A Case Study.- Make Links: Overcoming the Threshold and Entering the Portal of Understanding.- Medicine.- Becoming a Different Doctor: Identifying Threshold Concepts When Doctors in Training Spend Six Months with a Hospital Palliative Care Team.- Nursing.- Exploring Sources of Trouble in Research Learning for Undergraduate Nurses.- Computer Science.- How NOT to Identify Threshold Concepts.- Discussion of Methods for Threshold Research and an Application in Computer Science.- Legal Practice.- Navigating Our Threshold Concepts to Enable Students to Overcome Theirs.- Teaching.- Threshold Concepts and the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning.- Knowledge, Belief and Practice in Language Teacher Education: Integration and Implementation of Threshold Concepts over a Teaching Career.- Architecture.- Transformative Learning in Architectural Education: Re-Thinking Architecture and the Education of Architecture.- About the Contributors.- Index.
