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
One response to “Stepping into the Light…at Last!”
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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.