I found Meyers and Land’s book on Overcoming Barriers and Threshold concepts very insightful. It provided language and a framework for understanding different threshold moments in my own learning and education and how I can walk alongside others to support them in their learning and process as well.<\/p>\n
It was a good reminder that learning is supposed to be a challenge. So often in education we want to ease challenge and make things more comfortable and easier, instead of supporting people in working through the challenges of learning. Myer and Land give us pathways to support people on their journey of learning and knowledge.<\/p>\n
As a pastor, professor at a local seminary and parent, I am fascinated by teaching and learning concepts. My wife is also an educator that specializes in reading and math support and development in students, particularly those whose English is not their first language. So the idea of disjunction, or feeling stuck, was of particular interest to me in chapter 11. In this chapter, Maggi Savin-Baden argues that there are different strategies that people will employ when they feel stuck:<\/p>\n
*These include retreating from the difficulty and opting out of any further learning, using strategies to avoid it, temporising and waiting for an event or stimulus that will help them to move on or engaging with it directly in an attempt to relieve their discomfort.” (pg. 21)<\/em><\/p>\n To illustrate, I’d like to share a threshold concept I experienced in my own life; The concept that history is interpretive. In seminary at George Fox 12 years ago, I decided to take a course taught by Dr. Randy Woodley on learning about Native American Spirituality and how it integrates in Christian Spirituality. Dr. Woodley had lectured in my Hebrew Bible courses on indigenous perspectives on the Bible and it had piqued my interest.<\/p>\n But as I began the course, I recognized a bias that had developed in me that I picked up along the way in my Western Education by mostly white teachers from history books written by mostly white men (and a few white women) and had then integrated into my own religious worldview (though no one prompted me to do this in my life) that anything in religious practice that was not overtly “Christian” (which I defined at the time as Western, Dominant Culture Christianity) was heresy or inherently evil.<\/p>\n This created a “disjunction” in me, and I did not know how to deal with what felt like two competing viewpoints; the viewpoint that the professor was espousing and others in the course seemed to have already accepted, and what Savin-Badin calls my “traditional perspective as a learner.” (pg. 190)<\/p>\n However, as I was experiencing the liminality that came with this threshold concept, I now recognize the various postures of Disjunction that Savin-Baden argues about.<\/p>\n First, I wanted to retreat<\/span> in this challenge. My initial response to this challenge or engaging my bias was to simply withdraw from the class. It was an elective and, as such, I could pivot to something else that interests me. However, it was the community of learners around me that encouraged me to continue. A few colleagues that knew me, and who were also in the class, encouraged me to continue in the course and give it a try until the drop deadline occurred. I agreed.<\/p>\n This, I realize now, was temporizing<\/span>. I was delaying the decision. While I thought this was a good course of action then, to gather more data and extend the experience, I now know this was another way of managing the disjunction I was experiencing.<\/p>\n What I did next was avoid<\/span> doing any real deep thinking about this topic and instead simply do the work that was required of me. Savin-Baden calls this Avoidance. I moved into task mode and disengaged the emotive part of my learning so as manage the unsettledness that the disjunction had created. This was easy to do, as I am a performer and achiever by nature, but, as Savin-Baden mentions, *”in the long term, because of the nature of the disjunction, they will still have to engage with it in order to avoid always becoming entrenched in this position.” (pg. 165)<\/p>\n This left me with the final way to manage my disjunction, “engagement”<\/span>. Because of the support of colleagues and some advisors in my life (both educational and spiritual) I was able to engage the traditional learning perspective I had accumulated through a flawed educational system in a supportive environment. When I confessed this bias to the professor and in the class, because of the environment and values of the class, I was shown grace and encouragement to think about these things more deeply and broadly. This freedom to explore helped to expand my perspective and cross over the threshold of this concept that history is interpreted in various ways, usually by the victor. But that there are always sub-variant stories that expand, deepen and even critique the dominant narratives in history that must be explored to get a clearer picture of the truth.<\/p>\n The course, and the instructor, opened my eyes to see that God could be experienced and known in general ways in many different people groups and that I had a lot to learn from my indigenous sisters and brothers in Christ in expanding my view of God and my own anemic spiritual expressions and experiences. This was a ‘threshold’ concept for me that become key in my posture as a pastor.<\/p>\n While I recognize that I still exist within a particular stream and cultural framework of Christianity, I now think and interact appreciatively and curiously with those who express faith and spirituality differently than I do as oppose to judgmentally and with exceptionalism and cultural bias.<\/p>\n This threshold concept was extremely important in my own development as a pastor and person, and I now have some framework and language to identity and empathize with those that are in seasons of liminality.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I found Meyers and Land’s book on Overcoming Barriers and Threshold concepts very insightful. It provided language and a framework for understanding different threshold moments in my own learning and education and how I can walk alongside others to support them in their learning and process as well. 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