{"id":28997,"date":"2022-10-06T18:53:59","date_gmt":"2022-10-07T01:53:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/?p=28997"},"modified":"2022-10-10T10:35:50","modified_gmt":"2022-10-10T17:35:50","slug":"28997-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/28997-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Words for the moment"},"content":{"rendered":"

Giving words to the moment is the thought that comes to mind when I consider this week’s readings from Jan H. F. Meyer and Ray Land’s works Overcoming Barriers to Student Understanding: Threshold concepts and troublesome knowledge: Linkages to ways of thinking and practicing within the disciplines, and Threshold concepts in practice. For the past few years, I have been going through a process of deconstruction. This word, deconstruction, has become a word that is loaded and often considered as someone to define walking away from their faith, but I am not deconstructing in the sense that I am trying to deconstruct from my faith but rather going through the process of deconstructing those things that have attached themselves to my faith that are not part of it. It is as if I am going through the process of cleaning my lens for the first time to see what I can see for myself instead of what I have been told is out there. I am doing this in order to reconstruct something more beautiful in its place. Something more pure, honest, hopeful and imaginative. I have been searching for words to describe what it feels like to go through this process. Then in this week’s readings, I came across these words “As a consequence of comprehending a threshold concept there may thus be a transformed internal view of subject matter, subject landscape, or even world view. This transformation may be sudden or it may be protracted over a considerable period, with the transition to understanding proving troublesome. Such a transformed view or landscape may represent how people’ think’ in a particular discipline, or how they perceive, apprehend, or experience particular phenomena within that discipline (or more generally).<\/span>[1]<\/span><\/a>” and it was like a lightbulb went off. What I have been trying to find words for is this idea of threshold concepts. These past few years, I have felt as if I have hit a wall whenever I come up against something that I have questioned about what I believe. Why has it been hard to cross this wall? Then I realized this week that it isn’t a wall; it is in fact, a threshold. As Jan H. F. Meyer and Ray Land put it in their works, I have been faced with what they call a “threshold concept.” A threshold concept is something that is<\/span><\/p>\n