Threshold concepts and troublesome knowledge in the GEES disciplines

This article raises some critical issues for GEES colleagues about teaching and learning in their subject areas - these will be one focus of the GEES Subject Centre residential conference in June 2006.

In a recent and most stimulating paper, Erik Meyer and Ray Land (Meyer and Land 2005) discuss the notion that disciplines have threshold concepts and that the knowledge of these concepts is troublesome both to students, who frequently fail to understand them, and to teachers who find that their carefully crafted explanations are totally misunderstood by their students. In this short piece I simply want to bring the ideas of threshold concepts and troublesome knowledge to the attention of my colleagues in the GEES disciplines and to invite them to suggest just what are the threshold concepts and troublesome knowledge in their disciplines.

Meyer and Land offer this view of a threshold concept. It is a conceptual gateway that leads to previously inaccessible understanding and links a known knowledge space to the unknown. Until one has grasped a given threshold concept a whole range of new factual and conceptual material will defy understanding. They go on to suggest that a threshold concept has two key characteristics:

• it is transformative, leading to a significant shift in perception or a new world view; and

• it is irreversible, unlikely to be forgotten and more or less impossible to unlearn.

Approaching and passing through the threshold is also troublesome and troubling. It requires significant intellectual effort and the growing new understanding may be personally challenging. Meyer and Land suggest that threshold concepts are sometimes encountered and grasped in a sort of eureka moment, but also frequently are sighted and rejected on several occasions and only gradually accepted, if at all.

Passage through the liminal space of a threshold concept will probably also be characterised by an expansion of vocabulary and a newer and more confident form of disciplinary discourse. Meyer and Land also argue that the notions of threshold concepts and learner identities are linked in complex ways. Grasping the threshold concepts not only gives the learner greater confidence but also confirms learners in their identities as geographers, earth scientists or environmental scientists. Equally, failure to grasp these threshold concepts undermines a student’s identity as a “good learner” and could lead to rejection of the chosen discipline.

Meyer and Land suggest that there are some general threshold concepts in specific disciplines that all students find difficult and that many teachers equally recognise, both from their own experience as learners and from their teaching. Failing and then grasping these threshold concepts almost becomes a rite of passage into the discipline. It is equally possible that other concepts prove to be thresholds for individual students, a point not elaborated by Meyer and Land. Teachers will tend to try to scaffold student learning in these areas of general threshold concepts. They will present partial or simplified knowledge, using heuristics and other devices to help get students through the threshold. The intention is that this simplification will be replaced by deeper and fuller understanding in due course, but the simulated or simplistic knowledge (the faking of understanding of the threshold concept) will often persist and students will see this as an acceptable substitute for genuine understanding. It is often said that the most difficult thing in teaching is to understand the nature of our students’ misunderstandings. Threshold concepts may well be at the heart of this.

So my questions to colleagues in the GEES disciplines are:

• Do you think that your discipline (or sub-discipline) has threshold concepts?

• What are they?

• Do they form an ordered hierarchy?

• How can you distinguish between genuine understanding of these threshold concepts and a fake or simulated understanding?

• What sorts of teaching and learning experiences are most likely to lead to students properly grasping such threshold concepts?