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Education Research Seminar 5 November 2015

The Education Research Centre and School of Education presented this seminar on 5th November 2015 on Falmer Campus.

Threshold Concepts and Troublesome Knowledge: a Transformative Approach to Learning

Professor Ray Land, Durham University

5 Nov research

The ‘threshold concepts’ approach to student learning argues that certain concepts or practices can act in the manner of a portal, or learning threshold, through which a changed perspective opens up for the learner. The latter enters new conceptual terrain, which permits previously inaccessible ways of thinking and practising.

These conceptual gateways are often the points at which students experience difficulty and can be troublesome as they require a letting go of customary ways of seeing. They provoke a state of ‘liminality’ – a space of transformation and transition from an earlier understanding or practice towards that which is required. This tends to be uncomfortable, and may leave the learner in a suspended state, or ‘stuck place’, in which understanding approximates to a kind of ‘mimicry’ or lack of authenticity.

Depending on discipline and context, knowledge might be troublesome because it is ritualised, inert, conceptually difficult, alien or tacit, because it requires adopting an unfamiliar discourse, or because the learner remains ‘defended’, resisting the inevitable shift in subjectivity that threshold concepts initiate.  As Dewey once observed ‘The path of least resistance and least trouble is a mental rut already made. It requires troublesome work to undertake the alteration of old beliefs.’

Such work often entails an ‘ontological’ or affective shift in the learner, leading to a changed subjectivity. However, as Shulman notes, ‘without a certain amount of anxiety and risk, there’s a limit to how much learning occurs.  One must have something at stake. No emotional investment, no intellectual or formational yield’.  This session provided an outline of the thresholds approach followed by an exploration of its implications for curriculum design.

Ray Land is Professor of Higher Education at Durham University and Director of Durham’s Centre for Academic Practice.  He previously held similar positions at the Universities of Strathclyde, Coventry and Edinburgh. He has been a higher education consultant for the OECD and the European Commission and has recently been involved in two European Commission higher education projects in Europe and Latin America.  He is currently advisor to the Norwegian TRANSark project on architectural education. He has published widely in the field of educational research, including works on educational development, learning technology and quality enhancement.  He is best known for his theory (with Jan Meyer) of Threshold Concepts and Troublesome Knowledge.  His last book (with George Gordon) was Enhancing Quality in Higher Education: International Perspectives (Routledge 2013).   A new book, Threshold Concepts in Practice (Sense, Rotterdam) will be published later this year.  He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and a Principal Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.

Prof Land’s slides are available here:

ray-land_threshold-concepts_brighton-november-2015-to-upload

 

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