Identifying threshold concepts and proposing strategies to support doctoral candidates

Abstract

In this article I argue that doctoral candidates undertake a form of rite of passage, generally incorporating several shorter rites of passage, during their candidature of three to five years. Furthermore, there are times during their research education when many candidates demonstrate through their writing, presentation, discussion, and even demeanour, that they have undergone a change in the way they understand their learning and themselves as learners. These changes, it is suggested, indicate that the candidate has encountered a threshold concept and has crossed that threshold. Encountering these concepts can be a challenging experience for candidates as they transform their ways of viewing knowledge and themselves. For many doctoral candidates there is at least one stage during candidature when they could be described as being ‘stuck’ as they encounter a particular threshold concept which challenges them. The experience of being ‘stuck’ can manifest as depression, a sense of hopelessness, ‘going round in circles’ and so on. This sense of being ‘stuck’ occurs at the time when a candidate can be described as being in a liminal state, the state prior to the crossing of a threshold. Having established this context I then discuss the role of communities of learners and research culture as ways to assist candidates in recognising this ‘stuckness’ and to assist them to become ‘unstuck’ and move on with a new sense of confidence and appreciation of themselves as learners and researchers.

Keywords:

• postgraduate
• doctoral
• threshold concepts

Acknowledgements

I thank Karan Day‐Kahl for discussions on liminality and rites of passage and the two anonymous referees for their very helpful comments. Earlier versions of this article have been presented at the 2007 conference of the European Association for Research in Learning and Instruction, the 2008 American Educational Research Association Annual Meeting, and the 2008 Quality in Postgraduate Research conference.