Threshold Concepts On The Edge

Threshold Concepts on the Edge explores new directions in threshold concept research and practice and is of relevance to teachers, learners, educational researchers and academic developers.

"Threshold Concepts in Practice brings together fifty researchers from sixteen countries and a wide variety of disciplines to analyse their teaching practice, and the learning experiences of their students, through the lens of the Threshold Concepts Framework. 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.

The twenty-first century has seen an increased awareness of the forms of environmental destruction that cannot immediately be seen, localised or, by some, even acknowledged. Ecocriticism on the Edge explores the possibility of a new mode of critical practice, one fully engaged with the destructive force of the planetary environmental crisis. Timothy Clark argues that, in literary and cultural criticism, the “Anthropocene”, which names the epoch in which human impacts on the planet's ecological systems reach a dangerous limit, also represents a threshold at which modes of interpretation that once seemed sufficient or progressive become, in this new counterintuitive context, inadequate or even latently destructive. The book includes analyses of literary works, including texts by Paule Marshall, Gary Snyder, Ben Okri, Henry Lawson, Lorrie Moore and Raymond Carver.

It has long been a matter of concern to teachers in higher education why certain students ‘get stuck’ at particular points in the curriculum whilst others grasp concepts with comparative ease. What accounts for this variation in student performance and, more importantly, how can teachers change their teaching and courses to help students overcome such barriers? This book examines the difficulties of student learning and offers advice on how to overcome them through course design, assessment practice and teaching methods. It also provides innovative case material from a wide range of institutions and disciplines, including the social sciences, the humanities, the sciences and economics.

Naming What We Know examines the core principles of knowledge in the discipline of writing studies using the lens of “threshold concepts”—concepts that are critical for epistemological participation in a discipline. The first part of the book defines and describes thirty-seven threshold concepts of the discipline in entries written by some of the field’s most active researchers and teachers, all of whom participated in a collaborative wiki discussion guided by the editors. These entries are clear and accessible, written for an audience of writing scholars, students, and colleagues in other disciplines and policy makers outside the academy. Contributors describe the conceptual background of the field and the principles that run throughout practice, whether in research, teaching, assessment, or public work around writing. Chapters in the second part of the book describe the benefits and challenges of using threshold concepts in specific sites—first-year writing programs, WAC/WID programs, writing centers, writing majors—and for professional development to present this framework in action. Naming What We Know opens a dialogue about the concepts that writing scholars and teachers agree are critical and about why those concepts should and do matter to people outside the field.

Threshold Concepts in Women’s and Gender Studies: Ways of Seeing, Thinking, and Knowing is a textbook designed primarily for introduction to Women’s and Gender Studies courses, with the intent of providing both a skill- and concept-based foundation in the field. The third edition includes fully revised and expanded case studies and updated statistics; in addition, the content has been updated throughout to reflect significant news stories and cultural developments. The text is driven by a single key question: "What are the ways of thinking, seeing, and knowing that characterize Women’s and Gender Studies and are valued by its practitioners?" This book illustrates four of the most critical concepts in Women’s and Gender Studies—the social construction of gender, privilege and oppression, intersectionality, and feminist praxis—and grounds these concepts in multiple illustrations. Threshold Concepts in Women’s and Gender Studies develops the key concepts and ways of thinking that students need to develop a deep understanding and to approach material like feminist scholars do, across disciplines.

While education is based on the broad assumption that what one learns here can transfer over there– across critical transitions – what do we really know about the transfer of knowledge?The question is all the more urgent at a time when there are pressures to “unbundle” higher education to target learning particular subjects and skills for occupational credentialing to the detriment of integrative education that enables students to make connections and integrate their knowledge, skills and habits of mind into a adaptable and critical stance toward the worldThis book – the fruit of two-year multi-institutional studies by forty-five researchers from twenty-eight institutions in five countries – identifies enabling practices for, and five essential principles about, writing transfer that should inform decision-making by all higher education stakeholders about how to generally promote the transfer of knowledge.This collection concisely summarizes what we know about writing transfer and explores the implications of writing transfer research for universities’ institutional decisions about writing across the curriculum requirements, general education programs, online and hybrid learning, outcomes assessment, writing-supported experiential learning, e-portfolios, first-year experiences, and other higher education initiatives. This volume makes writing transfer research accessible to administrators, faculty decision makers, and other stakeholders across the curriculum who have a vested interest in preparing students to succeed in their future writing tasks in academia, the workplace, and their civic lives, and offers a framework for addressing the tensions between competency-based education and the integration of knowledge so vital for our society.

In the twenty years since Ray Land and Erik Meyer published their first paper on Threshold Concepts, there has been a steady stream of papers mulling over their original suggestions that learning, far from proceeding in an orderly fashion, is instead a process of struggle – perhaps alienation and confusion – that puts students in a troublesome liminal ‘in-between’ state. As their understanding develops, liminality gives way to transformational insight whereby a whole field of study comes, often quite abruptly, into focus. There is a gain but often also a loss: in this new world, old certainties, assumptions and even aspects of our identity can be left by the wayside. Threshold Concepts in the Moment is the sixth collection in the series on the subject of Threshold Concepts, following the 8th Biennial Conference held in 2021, anchored at London’s UCL but running online across the world. Its contributors, who range from ‘old hands’ to new members of the community finding their feet, mull over the insights of the threshold concepts framework in higher education, scrutinise their own fields of study, explore the implications of liminality for pedagogy and becoming professional practitioners, and consider the broad implications for pedagogy of factoring in the troublesomeness of knowledge and learning.