Stepping into the Light…at Last!
When I was a boy, my mother consistently told me to take smaller bites when I ate. She would repeat over and over again that I was taking too large of bites to really enjoy my meal. Through Meyer and Land’s book Threshold Concepts in Practice. Educational Futures-Re-thinking Theory and Practice, I constantly felt like I had a wonderful meal in front of me, but when digging into it, it felt like there was just too much there to fully enjoy.
The notion and word threshold have a more limited value than the authors intend. Threshold is an ancient word of Germanic origin from the 9th century to its first recorded use. It becomes a term in English to hold in what has been threshed, think crushed. It held the thresh indoors in their homes, where they would crush the wheat or grain to separate it from the husks. In a more northerly environment, this is how they kept their grains from getting wet and covered in mildew. The threshold was intended to be in the passageway so that the newly threshed grain would remain inside while people came and went, holding it indoors.
My fascination with words and their etymologies causes me to look at how people use them, and it often causes me to question if that is an accurate use of that word. These days, words appear to have very fluid meanings, much like Vasily from Princess Bride, who keeps saying, “inconceivable!” Finally, Inigo Montoya steps in and says, “I do not think that word means what you think it means.” I find myself in this linguistic chess match often. Sorry. Back to Meyer and Land.
There is, perhaps, a more appropriate word, a word they give honorable mention to in Chapter 5. It is the word liminality. In my mind, this would serve as a much better word to describe what Meyer and Land are trying to communicate. It would add some clarity to their argument. Where “threshold” pictures a point of entry and exit, the word “liminality” elicits more of a tunnel. The word liminality is rich in meaning and is used globally to depict various social customs and rituals.
Many of the aha moments I have had in life are really awww moments that do not just leap into my mind but are the result of many years of different experiences, good and bad, coming together into one grand apogee of understanding.
Rarely have my deeper thoughts all come at one time. Having lived throughout the world over the past three and a half decades and having been exposed to people worldwide has led me and many others to new paradigms of thinking, conceptualizations, and learning. It is a dangerous thing to become so singularly focused on a way of thought because when we do, we miss the fact that others from other cultures and societies in the world will look at the same thing we are looking at, the same problem we are considering and the same troublesome realities. They will bring a distinctly different set of perceptions we might never see, mainly because our conceptual processes differ. It is not my intent to impune these different sets of theoretical thinking but to simply point out that the design of these, as Freud would say, unheimlich- unhomely or strange conceptual constructs, are just that. They are dissimilar and disparate, not right or wrong.
Even as I write this, I realize that what I am saying will not be popular, and there is a measure of empirical evidence behind it, and it has become quite a favored theory. I go back to my opening thoughts. Much thought has gone into this, but it surfaces as many questions as it answers, especially when it comes to taking this theoretical approach and applying it globally.
Considering the propositional approach to education versus the revelational approach, a significant amount of data remains to be considered.
I found a few things in their treatise most intriguing and would agree with them wholeheartedly. One is that, as David Perkins stated in chapter five, the birth of knowledge within us can and ought to have a transformational effect; a term he uses is troublesome knowledge. It is usually that friction that causes us to think our hardest, primarily because it is often painful to some extent or another.
In conclusion, it feels important to point out my initial argument. The concept of liminality is a much better word to use than threshold. It paints a much more accurate picture of what is happening when knowledge truly grasps us, and we take on a new sense of awareness and clarity around some new theoretical or practical matter we had not formerly understood. Why? Because it is like exiting a dark tunnel after a difficult journey into a new light that brings with it exuberant understanding!
About the Author
David Weston
6 responses to “Stepping into the Light…at Last!”
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
Thank you, David.
I really appreciate your life experience of rich relationships across different cultures. In the last few months, I have heard you speak a little bit about the nations you love, and I have always felt authentic care, respect and honour for others and their different viewpoints and perspectives.
I recognise that I need to learn to ask better questions to enable myself to learn from your decades of experience in thinking together with people from many different life experiences than mine. I hope I can ask you questions that enable you to help me understand things that, at the moment, I don’t know that I don’t understand.
Thank you for those kind words, Betsy. I so resonate with what Dr Clark said today. The older I get, the more I realize I do not know. I like the way you put it. “I don’t know that I don’t understand.” It goes back to our NPO Workshop exercise; “I don’t even know what I don’t know.” When we were young, I must have been frustrating to so many people because I lived my life as if I had it all figured out.
It is a privilege to be on this journey with you. I, like you, pray that you can help me to think more clearly about what it means to be a leader in a world where so many long to be led, but they would never tell you so.
I enjoyed reading this, David. Your explanation of the origin of ‘threshold’ paints a picture for an otherwise mundane word. I also support your observation that threshold is a line to cross whereas liminality invokes time and distance. I’ll slightly nudge your conclusion to suggest that both a threshold and a tunnel can lead to life-altering understanding. You have articulated the latter. I can give examples of the former but won’t bore you to death with my old man anecdotes. I do agree that the thrill of the ‘awww’ is amplified by the time it took to get there. Some of my threshold moments are more like a Homer Simpson ‘doh’. Both can be life changing.
(Any reference to Mandy Patinkin is welcome. “I know something you don’t know … I am not left-handed.” After spending 45 minutes with him in an airline lounge, I concluded that he’s often not acting but being himself.)
I appreciate your thoughts, as I am often wary of the idea that I might be standing at odds with a presumed expert. Next week, I may even be more at odds. Preciseness in the use of words is a pet peeve. Liminality is a tough concept, but I had a threshold moment when I realized what it meant when I was doing my Masters at the American Military University. By the way, did you see what I did there? I squeezed “threshold” into a sentence just for you.
The concept of in-betweenness is more precise than using a tunnel as a metaphor. Liminality is that space of coming but not-yet-ness. As I think about a concept that I wrestled with, much learning and existential pain were involved. I was on a pathway, but to where I was unsure. Somewhere along my way, I began to understand, almost as if it was the dawn of a new day. Then the sun arose, and all of those things that I had struggled with began to make sense. I can see how some will see that as the threshold moment, but it sure feels to me that there was so much involved that to tie it to a single moment, we might be remiss.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts, David. As I read, I think of cultures with more “circular/spiral” views of progress and forward motion in contrast to linear views common in Euro-origin thinking. As someone who works in and between cultures on a regular basis, how do you think the cultures you are familiar with may view the idea of liminality?
Joff, I really enjoyed this read, as the concepts of threshold and liminality have been a part of my life and vocabulary for almost a decade. I am particularly interested in how it plays out in African cultures. Liminality is a difficult concept to wrap our minds around in Western culture because we have distinct stages of maturation for both sexes. We have infancy, toddling, pre-teen, adolescence, and manhood or womanhood. These are differing stages in development into productive community members, called communitas. In pre-modern cultures, a child could literally go from infancy to manhood overnight. Much of this is in the form of an apprenticeship, but it is also an act of survival for the community. They need the labor of every member of the community. This model exists in many societies globally. It is an extremely fascinating study. So, to make a long story short, liminality is actually the in-betweenness of life. It is that pathway that leads from one point in life, I’ll call it youth, to the next phase, adulthood, where they go through a series of steps or rituals to move into full adulthood, which could be in the early teens if deemed so by the elders.