Tribes, Territories and Threshold Concepts: Educational materialisms at work in higher education

Abstract

The idea of transformative and troublesome ‘threshold concepts’ has been popular and influential in higher education. This article reports how teachers with different disciplinary affiliations responded to the ‘concept of thresholds’ in the course of a cross‐disciplinary research project. It describes how the idea was territorialised and enacted through established materialising discourses in different disciplinary settings and enacted through pedagogical practice, technology and assessment. This has implications for professional development and pedagogical practice and endeavours to create ‘self‐organising classrooms’ along Deleuzian lines.

Keywords:

• higher education
• pedagogical practice
• threshold concepts
• cross‐disciplinarity
• Deleuze and Guattari