By: Tim Clark on January 30, 2023
According to Time Magazine, Joseph Campbell wrote one of the 100 most influential books of the 20th century in “The Hero With A Thousand Faces.”[1] I had been exposed to Campbell’s work through a Psychology course I took as an undergraduate; we were assigned to watch “The Power of Myth”, the 1988 series of PBS…
By: Noel Liemam on January 30, 2023
Threshold Concept “…that knowledge should indeed be ‘troubling’ in order for it to be transformative, this book provides new perspectives on helping students through such conceptual difficulty in order to enhance learning and teaching environments (Meyer and land, 2006).” The barriers to understanding exits when intellectual and practical comprehension is absent. Basically, one can crosses…
By: Russell Chun on January 30, 2023
I have two things in common with Joseph Campbell, we both grew up as Catholic/Animists. As a reminder, “Animism is the belief that everything has a soul or spirit, an anima in Latin, including animals, plants, rocks, mountains, rivers, and stars. Animists believe each anima is a powerful spirit that can help or hurt them…
By: Kim Sanford on January 30, 2023
Joseph Campbell’s seminal work points to an underlying reality that myth and story speak to the human heart (or as Campbell would call it, the psyche). Through story we instruct, we connect, we inspire and persuade, and we even rejoice. It’s also how we deal with our imperfection, our brokenness. As Campbell says, “Modern literature…
By: Kally Elliott on January 29, 2023
(Note: I have no idea why the font changes from a light black to a bolded black. I played with all the options to change font and boldness, etc and nothing would work.) Most of us have probably read the quote by Joseph Campbell, “Follow your bliss.” I’m pretty sure I’ve seen it on many…
By: Cathy Glei on January 29, 2023
First Stage of the Journey: Call to Adventure It is a scary place to be. . . the moment you leave the status quo and pursue a call to adventure. It was March 23, 2021 for me. I was an elementary school teacher, Kindergarten, to be exact. School was supposed to be closed for two…
By: Kally Elliott on January 28, 2023
For the next eight weeks I get to teach a Family to Family Course for NAMI (National Alliance on Mental Illness). The Family to Family Class is an education program for family members and caregivers of individuals living with mental illness. The program is designed to provide family members and caregivers with the tools and…
By: Dinka Utomo on January 27, 2023
A year ago, my son and daughter (9 and 7 years old) asked me, daddy is there any portal in this world for us to go to another dimension? Then the next question that surprised me quite a bit was, daddy, is there any portal in the world for us to go to heaven and meet…
By: Jana Dluehosh on January 26, 2023
Mitchell Airport in Milwaukee, WI is known as one of the “happier” airports in the USA. Why you ask? Well Barry Bateman the former airport director who retired in 2020, Bateman made up the word and suggested the signage in order to add some comic relief to what can be a tense aspect of air travel. …
By: Jonita Fair-Payton on January 26, 2023
I was not looking forward to preparing for this week’s blog. I didn’t know why but I suspect it was because I elected not to purchase the book but to download it. I knew that it probably was not a good decision because I have never been a fan of e-books, I am old school.…
By: Adam Harris on January 26, 2023
After reading this week’s material and watching Robert Coven’s TED talk on threshold concepts, I can’t help but share my personal journey of struggling through certain thresholds regarding my faith, and in particular Scripture in higher education. I have a deep love and respect for the Bible. I couldn’t always say this, but I appreciate…
By: Todd E Henley on January 25, 2023
One week ago I started my inspectional reading of Threshold Concepts and Troublesome Knowledge by Jan H. F. Meyer and Ray Land. After 46 pages I was negatively asking, “What in the world is this book about?” In discouragement I placed the book down and was not looking forward to this post. I even thought,…
By: Travis Vaughn on January 25, 2023
I am often amazed at how creative designers can take abstract ideas from multiple domains and produce digital/non-digital products that nail a concept. It’s as if tacit “interdisciplinary” knowledge and creative designers go hand-in-hand. My friend, Tony, who owns a creative design agency, illustrates this ability to a T. Two years ago, I partnered with…
By: Pam Lau on January 25, 2023
The key to learning new concepts in any discipline is the realization that communication consists of confident competency. It is the orientation of all effort of what we give our lives to that builds not only our knowledge, but our competency. As I listened to the TED Talk by Robert Devon as he asked the…
By: Jenny Dooley on January 25, 2023
I’m not a trekkie! I’ve never been a Star Trek fan. I don’t particularly like science fiction. Back to the Future is as far as I go. To the trekkies out there, please don’t take offense. My family is full of Star Trek lovers. Believe me, I have viewed all iterations of Star Trek dating…
By: Cathy Glei on January 25, 2023
When I think about threshold concepts and the idea of moving through a threshold like a portal, I imagine teleportation, you know like in Doctor Who, Back to the Future . . . not sure why. When I think about portals, I think about a tardis maybe? When my three daughters were teenagers, they loved…
By: Scott Dickie on January 24, 2023
The challenge with this week’s reading—beyond the hard work of engaging in areas of study that are well outside of my understanding—is narrowing down the numerous thoughts I had while reading these papers (some of that reading more ‘inspectional’ than others!). Here are a few places my thoughts went to as I read: First, while…
By: Tim Clark on January 23, 2023
Recently I watched the 2016 film “The Arrival” in which 12 extraterrestrial spacecraft visit Earth. Mild spoiler alert: It turns out that how people engage with the aliens leads to a major threshold moment for humanity and alters the course of history. Last week I read the story of Jacob in Genesis. Jacob sent everything…
By: John Fehlen on January 23, 2023
I considered titling this blog post “Threshold Concepts for Dummies” because after reading these two extensive and comprehensive books I felt like, well…a dummy. I’m not being self-deprecating; I honestly felt dumb. I’ve been reading, thinking, studying, and pontificating large biblical/theological concepts for many, many years, and yet I have not been exposed to this…
By: Kim Sanford on January 23, 2023
The term threshold concepts inherently speaks of movement and flow from one place to another. Learners have a “transformative” experience where they understand previously “troublesome” knowledge, often by “integrating” concepts from multiple disciplines. The result of this experience is an “irreversible” clarity that is nonetheless “bounded”[i]. If that definition was a bit opaque at first,…
