Tuesday, April 29, 2008

Theme 5: Education development and threshold concepts

Discussion question:
How do you use threshold concepts to motivate lecturers/faculty to think about teaching?

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Ive found it particularly effective in getting interest in teaching and learning. Asking a grad student to do some interviews with faculty about what they think are threshold - actually get them talking about teaching without even knowing it!

Jens K said...

Session 1

James Atherton and Renee Meyers speculated about threshold concepts as articles of faith, e.g. Whiteness and Raceism.

Jens K said...

Anna-Karin Carstensen spoke of dealing with the Laplace transform in circuit theory as a threshold concept and introduced the idea of finding 'key concepts' that can help learners to look up the portal.

Jens K said...

Atherton and Meyers also brought up the idea of threshold myths.

Jens K said...

Jan Smith spoke about her ongoing study in which she followed new faculty during their first year. Professional learning - the process of becoming academic.

Some speculation on professional learning:
Affirmative precedes cognitive?
Ontological concerns dominate?
Conceptual epiphanies rare...

And Thresholds(?) in becoming academic:
Isolation
Idealism vs. reality
Values

Jens K said...

Helen Day proposes that in the UK the drive to teach employability has become more or less a part of academic identity and that this might serve as a threshold for lectures whose individual values don't match with institional values.