In the class last week the lecturer also mention “threshold concepts” and I was very curious to found out what it is and what it entails, so I have read the article of Meyer and Land and they suggest that in order to progress in our learning we need to cross thresholds, moving from our old way of understanding or perceiving something, to a new way.
Once we've crossed that threshold, we can't go back to the
old way of understanding. They suggest that threshold concepts involve "troublesome
knowledge", a great term for expressing the fact that accepting a new idea
can be challenging and that learning may not be comfortable. Ray emphasised
that crossing a threshold implies moving from a safe to a riskier space so
learning requires stepping into the unknown. We may exist in a state of
liminality for a while, oscillating between known and unknown, old and new.
"Getting it" can be instant, or can be a gradual process. I think
this concept is very relevant to information literacy. Ray also talked about
the importance of language and how changes in language can affect threshold
concepts, very pertinent to the way in which we have developed lenses for the
Seven Pillars model.
I've always thought that in terms of IL, there are different
communities to be considered in terms of threshold concepts. It's not just
about challenging students to become more information literate, academic staff,
library staff and university leaders all have thresholds to cross so that we
all have a similar understanding. Ray mentioned a useful website
maintained by Mick Flanagan at UCL, which brings together all the references to
threshold concepts that he has found. Sadly, he has classified Information
Literacy under Library Studies, maybe a threshold concept for Mick there!
However, there are some useful papers listed and it's great to see the topic
being applied to IL. I'm sure this book: Meyer, J.H.F., Land, R. &
Baillie, C. (2010). Threshold Concepts and Transformational Learning. You
can also watch the slide share at http://www.slideshare.net/tmackey/ct-conference11
to get a better understanding of why threshold concepts are integrated in IL.
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