Over the last decade the notion of 'threshold concepts' has proved influential around the world as a powerful means of exploring and discussing the key points of transformation that students experience in their higher education courses and the 'troublesome knowledge' that these often present. Threshold concepts provoke in the learner a state of 'liminality' in which transformation takes place, requiring the integration of new understanding and the letting go of previous learning stances. Insights gained by learners as they cross thresholds can be exhilarating but might also be unsettling, requiring an uncomfortable shift in identity, or, paradoxically, a sense of loss. The liminal space can be a suspended state of partial understanding, or 'stuck place', in which understanding approximates to a kind of 'mimicry'. Threshold Concepts and Transformational Learning substantially increases the empirical evidence for threshold concepts across a large number of disciplinary contexts and from the higher education sectors of many countries. This new volume develops further theoretical perspectives and provides fresh pedagogical directions. It will be of interest to teachers, practitioners and managers in all disciplines as well as to educational researchers. "This volume and its predecessors give ample evidence that threshold concepts entrance - they entrance scholars and teachers concerned with the nature and challenges of learning in the disciplines. Discourse around threshold concepts has proven to offer something of a common language, provoke reflection on the structure of disciplinary knowledge, and inspire investigations of learners' typical hang-ups and ways to help." David Perkins, Senior Professor of Education, Harvard University.
Over the last decade the notion of ‘threshold concepts’ has proved influential around the world as a powerful means of exploring and discussing the key points of transformation that students experience in their higher education courses and the ‘troublesome knowledge’ that these often present.
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.
This is a compelling exploration of the transformative power of art education through the personal journeys of several students. The book provides a complex theoretical explanation and insight that inspires personal reflection upon art pedagogy.
"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.
This book chronicles the revolution in STEM teaching and learning that has arisen from a convergence of educational research, emerging technologies, and innovative ways of structuring both the physical space and classroom activities in STEM higher education. Beginning with a historical overview of US higher education and an overview of diversity in STEM in the US, the book sets a context in which our present-day innovation in science and technology urgently needs to provide more diversity and inclusion within STEM fields. Research-validated pedagogies using active learning and new types of research-based curriculum is transforming how physics, biology and other fields are taught in leading universities, and the book gives profiles of leading innovators in science education and examples of exciting new research-based courses taking root in US institutions. The book includes interviews with leading scientists and educators, case studies of new courses and new institutions, and descriptions of site visits where new trends in 21st STEM education are being developed. The book also takes the reader into innovative learning environments in engineering where students are empowered by emerging technologies to develop new creative capacity in their STEM education, through new centers for design thinking and liberal arts-based engineering. Equally innovative are new conceptual frameworks for course design and learning, and the book explores the concepts of Scientific Teaching, Backward Course Design, Threshold Concepts and Learning Taxonomies in a systematic way with examples from diverse scientific fields. Finally, the book takes the reader inside the leading centers for online education, including Udacity, Coursera and EdX, interviews the leaders and founders of MOOC technology, and gives a sense of how online education is evolving and what this means for STEM education. This book provides a broad and deep exploration into the historical context of science education and into some of the cutting-edge innovations that are reshaping how leading universities teach science and engineering. The emergence of exponentially advancing technologies such as synthetic biology, artificial intelligence and materials sciences has been described as the Fourth Industrial Revolution, and the book explores how these technologies will shape our future will bring a transformation of STEM curriculum that can help students solve many the most urgent problems facing our world and society.
This book, by combining sociocultural, material, cognitive and embodied perspectives on human knowing, offers a new and powerful conceptualisation of epistemic fluency – a capacity that underpins knowledgeable professional action and innovation. Using results from empirical studies of professional education programs, the book sheds light on practical ways in which the development of epistemic fluency can be recognised and supported - in higher education and in the transition to work. The book provides a broader and deeper conception of epistemic fluency than previously available in the literature. Epistemic fluency involves a set of capabilities that allow people to recognize and participate in different ways of knowing. Such people are adept at combining different kinds of specialised and context-dependent knowledge and at reconfiguring their work environment to see problems and solutions anew. In practical terms, the book addresses the following kinds of questions. What does it take to be a productive member of a multidisciplinary team working on a complex problem? What enables a person to integrate different types and fields of knowledge, indeed different ways of knowing, in order to make some well-founded decisions and take actions in the world? What personal knowledge resources are entailed in analysing a problem and describing an innovative solution, such that the innovation can be shared in an organization or professional community? How do people get better at these things; and how can teachers in higher education help students develop these valued capacities? The answers to these questions are central to a thorough understanding of what it means to become an effective knowledge worker and resourceful professional.
The Teaching of Criminal Law provides the first considered discussion of the pedagogy that should inform the teaching of criminal law. It originates from a survey of criminal law courses in different parts of the English-speaking world which showed significant similarity across countries and over time. It also showed that many aspects of substantive law are neglected. This prompted the question of whether any real consideration had been given to criminal law course design. This book seeks to provide a critical mass of thought on how to secure an understanding of substantive criminal law, by examining the course content that best illustrates the thought process of a criminal lawyer, by presenting innovative approaches for securing active learning by students, and by demonstrating how criminal law can secure other worthwhile graduate attributes by introducing wider contexts. This edited collection brings together contributions from academic teachers of criminal law from Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and Ireland who have considered issues of course design and often implemented them. Together, they examine several innovative approaches to the teaching of criminal law that have been adopted in a number of law schools around the world, both in teaching methodology and substantive content. The authors offer numerous suggestions for the design of a criminal law course that will ensure students gain useful insights into criminal law and its role in society. This book helps fill the gap in research into criminal law pedagogy and demonstrates that there are alternative ways of delivering this core part of the law degree. As such, this book will be of key interest to researchers, academics and lecturers in the fields of criminal law, pedagogy and teaching methods.
"This volume provides examples and evidence of the various ways in which the Decoding the Disciplines framework has been applied across disciplines and used to inform teaching, curriculum, and pedagogical research initiatives at Mount Royal University"--Page [4] of cover.
Informed Learning Applications is the latest volume of rigorous research in the Advances in Librarianship series. Edited by experienced librarian Kim L. Ranger, the eight contributions to this volume describe various practices extending Christine Bruce's informed learning theory across a range of educational spaces.
Design Pedagogy explains why it is vital for design students that their education helps them construct a ’passport’ to enter the professional sphere. Recent research into design teaching has focused on its signature pedagogies, those elements which are particularly characteristic of the disciplines. Typically based on core design theory, enlivened by approaches imported to the area, such work has utility when it recognizes the visual language of designing, the media of representation used, and the practical realities of tackling design questions. Increasingly the 21st century sees these activities in a global context where the international language of the visual artefact is recognized. This book draws on recent work in these areas. It includes a number of chapters which are developed from work undertaken during the period of special funding for centres of teaching excellence in the UK up until 2010. Two of those in design have provided the basis for research and innovative developments reported on here. They have helped to enliven the environment for design pedagogy research in other establishments which are also included. Design students need support for the agile navigation through the design process. Learning experiences should develop students’ natural motivations and professionalise motivation to create a resilient, informed and sustainable capacity. This is the essence of ’transformative learning’. This collection explores how design education is, in itself, a passport to practice and showcases how some of the key developments in education use techniques related to collaboration, case studies and experience to motivate students, enable them to express their identity, reflect and learn.
