Podcast, Cormac, Mars, and Threshold Concepts
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 a small media group to launch a podcast. Yes, I know it seems like everyone is doing a podcast these days. My daughter cynically said something to that effect earlier this week. But I digress. Two seasons of the podcast now completed, we’ve traversed the subjects of hip-hop, innovation, private equity, literature, start-ups, microbiology, market research, film, and more. The second season even had sponsors.
We’ve had some extremely creative, skilled, entrepreneurial, and hard-working people from different fields on the podcast, and if it weren’t for this doctoral program, we would be in the studio recording season three right now. Ha. In 2021, when the producers and I talked about a logo (we had to first come up with a name, which we, with the help of my wife, eventually did after a month or two), there were four words/ideas that came to mind. Anti-establishment (no idea where that came from), adventure, winsome, and Mars. These were four ideas that probably wouldn’t fit in the same sentence. Well, adventure and Mars could I suppose, but who wants to “adventure” to Mars?
My well-tatted creative design friend took those four words and drafted a logo. It stuck. In fact, it stuck so much that he didn’t even attempt a second draft. He didn’t need to. The image was the kind that made no sense yet made all the sense in the world. Plus, it looked a bit retro. Perfect. Tony’s gift of being able to blend concepts from different domains, from different fields of study, was on full display.
With his craft, I would guess that Tony’s modus operandi involves a comfortable willingness to accept a great degree of complexity, throwing “bounded courses”[1] thinking to the wind. In his own life, he has shifted from carpentry to full-time pastor to full-time creative design agency owner, and he has navigated the liminality between those spaces quite well (he actually still leads a church…it’s just that the church meets in a home, and he doesn’t take a salary). Tony has no problem tackling a complex branding process in both the non-profit and for-profit sectors, including the weird and massive world of podcasting.
Speaking of podcasting and “interdisciplinary,” there was a guest in season two of the podcast that I was particularly geeked out about in 2022. Luis Bettencourt. Dr. Bettencourt, an adjunct professor with the Santa Fe Institute (SFI), just so happens to be a theoretical physicist, but he swims in more worlds than “merely” one of theoretical physics. He is also a professor of ecology and evolution at the University of Chicago, AND he directs the Mansueto Institute for Urban Innovation (also at UofC). I met Dr. Bettencourt many years ago while studying at SFI one summer during a one-month work-study project that my employer had granted me.
I first encountered Dr. Bettencourt’s work in a white paper that a friend of mine wrote a decade earlier about cities and the common good. A few years after I read that paper, I learned that Dr. Bettencourt and SFI had received a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation to conduct research about cities. The research was designed to create “an interdisciplinary approach and quantitative synthesis of organizational and dynamical aspects of human social organizations, with an emphasis on cities.”[2] The researchers compared the way biological systems scale with the way cities grow, attract talent, innovate, increase patent numbers, and more. If a threshold concept is something to “be considered as akin to a portal, opening up a new and previously inaccessible way of thinking about something,”[3] SFI’s research is threshold concepts on steroids. Of course, this is how SFI works. After all, they are a well-funded think tank that deals with complexity science. And if complexity science weren’t interdisciplinary enough, SFI even has Pulitzer prize-winning author Cormac McCarthy (author of The Road and No Country for Old Men) on their board of trustees.
Of course, when I saw the chapter on Threshold concepts in Biology, in Meyer’s and Land’s Overcoming Barriers to Student Understanding[4] I nearly geeked out like I did with Bettencourt on my podcast. Well, not really. But sort of. After all, “biological knowledge is the link to the complexity inherent in living systems…”[5] There are so many ways we can better understand any number of “living” systems, just by having a better grasp of how biological systems operate and thrive, even within the smallest of microbiological biofilms. Take the dynamism of an urban place, a “gospel ecosystem”[6] or even the health or lack thereof in a business or workplace environment. The understanding of these and much more can be enhanced with ecological comparisons, if a student is willing to embrace “transformative” and “integrative”[7] threshold concepts. After all, “ecology” deals “with the dynamics of interactions,”[8] and in these subjects there is no shortage of interactions.
The work of Meyer and Land has given me a better vocabulary for some of what I’ve been curious about for many years. Additionally, their Threshold Concepts in Practice[9] has
given greater affirmation to action learning methods I have experimented with in teaching and in leading teams. Lastly, I appreciated Dr. Robert Coven’s emphasis on helping students “produce knowledge, not consume trivia,”[10] which is perhaps the standard way (regurgitating trivia in a talking-head delivery format), unfortunately, so many undergraduate and graduate programs have comfortably operated with for years. However, I do think this is changing. It must.
[1] Ray Land, Jan H.F. Meyer, and Michael T. Flanagan, eds., Threshold Concepts in Practice (Rotterdam: Sense Publishers, 2016), forward.
[2] “Cities, scaling, & sustainability Overview,” Sante Fe Institute, accessed January 25, 2022, https://www.santafe.edu/research/projects/cities-scaling-sustainability.
[3] Jan H.F. Meyer and Ray Land, eds. Overcoming Barriers to Student Understanding: Threshold concepts and troubling knowledge (New York: Routledge, 2006), 3-18.
[4] Charlotte Taylor, “Threshold concepts in Biology: do they fit the definition?,” in Overcoming Barriers to Student Understanding: Threshold concepts and troubling knowledge ed. Jan H.F. Meyer and Ray Land (New York: Routledge, 2006), 87-99.
[5] Taylor, “Threshold concepts in Biology,” 89.
[6] Tim Keller, “Defining a Gospel Movement,” Redeemer City to City, May 9, 2018, https://redeemercitytocity.com/articles-stories/defining-a-gospel-movement.
[7] Meyer and Land, Overcoming Barriers to Student Understanding, 7.
[8] Taylor, “Threshold concepts in Biology,” 89.
[9] Land, Meyer, and Flanagan, Threshold Concepts in Practice.
[10] Robert Coven, “Breaking Through: Threshold Concepts as a Key to Understanding,” TEDx, undated, video of speech, 19:12. https://www.ted.com/talks/robert_coven_breaking_through_threshold_concepts_as_a_key_to_understanding.
About the Author
Travis Vaughn
7 responses to “Podcast, Cormac, Mars, and Threshold Concepts”
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Hi Travis,
I’m glad someone enjoyed a few of the diverse topics explored in this week’s reading (most were not my cup of tea!).
Your last comment related to undergrad and graduate programs typically producing students who regurgitate trivia and don’t increase in knowledge made me think of a statement a co-worker of mine (who had a ‘Doctor of Education’) was fond of saying:
“In undergrad degree programs we TELL students WHAT to think, in graduate degree programs we TEACH them HOW to think.”
Like all pithy statements, it’s likely an unfair generalization (I certainly had to get through some theological thresholds in my undergrad program)…but it also seemed to generally resonate with my experience and observation. What would your take be? Would you make a distinction between the two?
I also agree with your final sentence that the educational system must change. I would agree for many reasons, not least of which is the access to trivia, data, headlines, and information in the digital age is non-stop and overwhelming. Teaching our children how to not just appropriately accumulate information, but categorize it, connect it…and turn some of it into knowledge (and dare I hope for wisdom?!) requires new techniques in school that move beyond the British colonial format of the last few hundred years.
If adult educators can’t make this shift, perhaps AI teachers can!
Scott and Travis,
In looking back over my undergraduate education, I have to agree with you both that we are often told WHAT to think and perhaps that’s not the end goal of higher education. However, I believe it really depends on the area of study/discipline. Don’t we want our future doctors learning the factual demands of the biological sciences? In reading both your responses, I am reminded of my favorite quote from this week’s reading in Overcoming Barriers to Understanding: “To arrive at meaningful knowledge, they [students] must learn through deep enquiry. As the unexamined life is not worth living, so the unexamined fact is not worth believing. . . “(42). One last question: If undergrad is what to think and graduate is how to think –what do we say doctoral work is?
Hi Pam,
Totally agree with you that part of education is teaching others what to think (as opposed to how to think). Your last quote speaks to the primary point that I was seeking to make in regards to the education system needing to change. By my observation, today’s teenagers (in particular) are rapidly acquiring unexamined facts through the extraordinary access they have to information, AI, snapchat, etc… and they don’t seem to be truly learning–neither WHAT to think or HOW to think; Rather, they seem to figuring out how to quickly/easily find an answer/fact and relay that to their teacher. I believe education needs to change to accommodate the world our kids now inhabit.
As to the Doctorate: perhaps we learn WHAT to think (undergrad), HOW to think (graduate), and now we take a crack at ACTUALLY thinking! (doctorate).
Insert laughing emoji here…
Your ending quote “I appreciated Dr. Robert Coven’s emphasis on helping students ‘produce knowledge, not consume trivia,'” caused me to think again about how one actually produces knowledge and the varying degrees of knowledge. This would affect how one teaches in a given field. Duncan Pritchard in his book “What is this Thing Called Knowledge?” makes a distinction between ” ability knowledge” (know how) and “propostional knowledge” (linked with proposing something as truth)[1]. This all gets quite philosophical but is interesting to ponder. Furthermore,I have often wrestled with the difference between knowledge, wisdom and understanding and how they interact with one another because Biblically, knowledge does not stand alone but is often paired with the fear of God, discernment, wisdom, and undersanding. My question personally and to all is “How do all these link together for greater threshold learning?” “How can the fear of God be foundational in our quest for knowledge and understanding?”
Pritchard, Duncan. What Is This Thing Called Knowledge? Third edition. London ;: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2013, p.5.
I have a “Mars” question later, but first, I enjoyed your comments on undergraduate and graduate work. Once upon a time, in a land far away (Stuttgart, Germany actually). I had a British professor walk into my second class in international studies. He smiled and asked, what are your questions? No powerpoint, no “spoon feeding.” His assumption, we had read the books and had formulated questions about the international environment. He told us later that he wanted us to look at the theories that the books presented and proposed applications/thoughts to the current situation at hand (the Soviet Union was disintegrating at the time). There was an uncomfortable silence. He did not budge and we quickly learned to start THINKING before we came into class.
FLASH FORWARD to 2022. My students in the International Peace and Conflict course (a Master’s course at Dallas Baptist University) have no problem coming into class with no clue about the readings. They are unapologetic and can barely hold an intelligent conversation.
Sigh. I suppose I could have failed all of them, but there must be “grace.” So I tried to meet them where they were and tried to use all the tricks of addressing the styles of learning (visual, auditory, kinesthetic, reader/writer). Eventually, some achieved an AHA moment. Others got a “B.” They were unhappy.
Thanks for your comments…Shalom…Russ
Now for my “Mars” question. As part of my research I want to create a telephone app that will help the refugee to the U.S. integrate into the community. There are about 20-50 things to do (get a SSN, get a drivers license, etc) The app will be downloadable (is that a word?) to their phones. This will empower both the refugee AND his volunteer support team. I need a name! A road map? an integration road map? US integration list? Sigh…pretty boring stuff. Looking for creative genius here! thoughts…..Russ
Okay, I first need to comment on your podcast launch. There is a reason a lot of people are launching a podcast: it’s because a lot of people are listening to podcasts! The hard part is keeping it up, podcasting is a lot of work.
Okay, loved your post. Very interesting and I love your first person voice.
But speaking of your blog content: how do you think your expanded vocabulary will help you with your NPO journey? I ask because I think it has also offered you some greater clarity especially around what you might describe as complex ideas. I think it’s really exciting what you have come to realize and I’d be interested in reading your reflection here.