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\n
Land, R., Cousin, G., Meyer, J.H.F., & Davies, P. (2006). Conclusion: Implications of threshold concepts for course design and evaluation. In J.H.F. Meyer & R. Land (Eds.), Overcoming barriers to student understanding: Threshold concepts and troublesome knowledge (pp. 195-206). London: Routledge.\n
\n195 \"It has long been a matter of concern to teachers in higher education why certain students ‘get stuck’ at particular points in the curriculum whilst others grasp concepts with comparative ease. What might account for this variation in student performance and, more importantly, what might teachers do in relation to the design and teaching of their courses that might help students overcome such barriers to their learning?... Why [do] certain concepts within disciplinary fields appear particularly ‘troublesome’ to students. What makes particular areas of knowledge more troublesome than others, and how might we make such areas less so?\"  Their rallying cry, book jacket blurb, symposium description, etc.\n

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195 \"Students who have not yet internalised a threshold concept have little option but to attempt to learn new ideas in a more fragmented fashion.\"
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196 \"We have also seen... that such integration and subsequent transformation, though necessary for progress within the subject, may prove troublesome to certain learners for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that such transformation entails a letting go of earlier, comfortable positions and encountering less familiar and sometimes disconcerting new territory.\"  \"We would seek to create supportive liminal environments to help students through such difficulty... that they might move on and succeed.\"
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198 design environment taking into account \"the processes through which learners re made ready for, approach, recognise, and internalise threshold concepts.\"  Assessment based on recognizing when TCs have been internalized.
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9 considerations:
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1. 198 \"The jewels in the curriculum: A focus on these jewels allows for richer and more complex insights into aspects of the subjects students are studying; it plays a diagnostic role in alerting tutors to areas of the curriculum where students are likely to encounter troublesome knowledge and experience conceptual difficulty... Finally, it discourages a stuffed or congested curriculum in favour of one that focuses on really useful mastery.\"
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2. The importance of engagement - students practice thinking like a practitioner
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3. Listening for understanding 199 \"We can't second guess where students are coming from or what their uncertainties are.\" 200 \"discourage teachers from making hasty judgments about students' abilities and foster appreciation of the tough conceptual and emotional journeys they have to make.\"
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4. Reconstitution of self: pay attention to \"the discomforts of troublesome knowledge,\" shift in identity
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5. Tolerating uncertainty: metacognition, gaining understanding about liminal state and gaining confidence in crossing thresholds. Peer assessment allows students to compare notes on learning process; teachers can reassure students that process is necessary
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6. Recursiveness and excursiveness: 202 \"The need for the learner to grasp threshold concepts in recursive movements means that they cannot be tackled in an over-simplistically linear 'learning outcomes' model where sentences like 'by the end of the course the learner will be able to' undermine, and perhaps do not even explicitly recognise, the complexities of the transformation a learner undergoes.\"
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\"Whereas [a tree-like structure] implies a hierarchical, incremental building-up of understanding, [a rhizomorphic structure] would construct points of entry into the learning from a number of places.  In part this would address variation in states of liminality and in part it would subvert the conventional passage from the 'easy' to the 'difficult' in most curricular models which are predicated on linear or staged notions of intellectual development.\" -- Just recalling that last fall when I first tried to design 1210 course, the difficulty of students needing to know everything at once in order to understand any of the content.
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7. Pre-liminal variation: does the approach to the threshold effect how/whether students are able to negotiate it?
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8. Unintended consequences of generic 'good pedagogy': sometimes impedes acquisition of TCs
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9. The underlying game: 204 \"It would seem advisable for course designers to query whether, in addition to the forms of engagement they may have designed to assist students to cope with identified threshold concepts in a programme, there might remain what Perkins calls the underlying episteme.  This, if not recognised and understood by students, might still render their learning troublesome and lead to further frustration or confusion in their studies.\"
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204-5 \"The significance of the framework provided by threshold concepts lies, we feel, in its explanatory potential to locate troublesome aspects of disciplinary knowledge within transitions across conceptual thresholds and hence to assist teachers in identifying appropriate ways of modifying or redesigning curricula to enable their students to negotiate such transitions more successfully.\"
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Lucas, U., & Mladenovic, R. (2006). Developing new 'world views': Threshold concepts in introductory accounting. In J.H.F. Meyer & R. Land (Eds.), Overcoming barriers to student understanding: Threshold concepts and troublesome knowledge (pp. 148-159). London: Routledge.

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\n148 \"For those students who are not ultimately going to specialise in accounting, it is usually a compulsory course.  Many of these students possess negative preconceptions of accounting and do not willingly study the subject...  The teaching of introductory accounting has been criticised in recent years for its narrow focus and rules-based procedural approaches...  There are indications that this may have the effect of obscuring any emphasis on conceptual underpinnings or controversial issues that can be explored through discussion and critical analysis.\"  -- Like 1210!

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150 instructors feeling that they should focus on teaching technique over concepts \"particularly because they felt that they had to overcome student preconceptions of accounting as dull and boring.\"
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157 intervention with students to change negative preconceptions of course -- they introduced students to conceptual underpinning.  \"It can be seen that this approach does not seek to make accounting look 'easier' by simplifying it and avoiding 'jargon.'  The latter approach could encourage students to focus on the technique and learn accounting in a ritualistic way and to substitute mimicry for understanding.\"

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150 \"The need for a student to be able and willing to accept uncertainty or subjectivity within accounting\" ie willing to be in a liminal state.  This seems to be a problem that librarian training doesn't touch -- how to get students to entertain uncomfortable, problematic, troublesome, etc, ideas.
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155 \"What emerges from these [student] interviews are alternative views of events and transactions which arise from students' everyday experiences of life and which contrast with the authorised academic view of accounting encountered in their course.  Thus a particularly important threshold conception may be, again, to recognise the difference between authorised and alternative conceptions.\"  For example, troublesome language in IL (AND and OR), or the way that google sets up certain expectations about searching and search results -- students have alternative or everyday understandings that they don't want to relinquish in our class.
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156  \"A focus on technique through a process of ritualisation and mimicry provides a high level of certainty when compared with a discussion of the relevance of different conceptual frameworks.  And yet, as we have discussed, students do possess alternative ways of viewing accounting and are often not aware that they contrast with the authorised view(s) that they are taught.\"  Another threshold: \"the learning of accounting, not solely as a technique, but as a social practice through which organising frameworks come to be generally accepted.\"
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150 Authors led a workshop where they asked acctg instructors to \"identify a threshold concept, identify why it is central to the accounting curriculum and to identify any common misconceptions...  The threshold concept initially identified was usually replaced by a different, underlying concept(s) as the reasons for centrality and misconceptions were considered.\"  This is like our research project!  They say that all 3 steps are necessary for the process of identifying TCs (and we might add more, such as ways TC is troublesome).
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151 they also studied when their students crossed thresholds... step 3 of our research? (after librarians, then disciplinary faculty)
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Meyer, J.H.F, & Land, R. (2006). Threshold concepts and troublesome knowledge: An introduction. In J.H.F. Meyer & R. Land (Eds.), (2006). Overcoming barriers to student understanding: Threshold concepts and troublesome knowledge (pp. 3-18). London: Routledge.

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note, this was another article before it was a chapter here
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\nNotes

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p.3 intro para is great summary of TCs - transformative, necessary to progress, troublesome, \"thinking like a practitioner\" and whether that's a problematic or totalizing prioritization.
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p. 4 \"It increasingly appears that a threshold concept may on its own constitute, or in its application lead to, such troublesome knowledge\" - per Perkins. Or \"epistemological obstacles\"
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p. 6 diff btwn core concepts and TCs.
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p. 7-8 5 characteristics: transformative (affective, performative), irreversible (transformation may feel like a loss, experts have difficulty looking back across thresholds), integrative (examine discourse between practitioners and non-practitioners to distinguish disciplinary practice from common sense), bounded (disciplines), troublesome.
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Types of knowledge per Perkins, see notes referenced above.
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Meyer, J., & Land, R. (2007, August 17). Stop the conveyor belt, I want to get off. Times Higher Education Supplement, 1807, 14. Retrieved September 29, 2008, from LexisNexis database.

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Notes

Korey

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Recommended for printing and keeping handy.  Short opinion piece that distills threshold concepts down to the essentials.  It's written in a \"take-back-your-disciplinary-expertise-from-educational-managers- run-amok\" tone and succinctly defines what makes a concept \"threshold\", troublesome knowledge, and liminal states. Favorite lines:

\"Conceptual thresholds are both transformative (both of understanding and of the individual) and integrative (they bring previously unconnected ideas into a new and powerful formation).

\"Academics tend to identify and take possession of threshold concepts quickly, as they have the specialist knowledge and expertise within their disciplinary discourses.  They are not required to bring with them the extra baggage of a separate jargon of education\" (snap!)
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Lori

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I also think this would be a good place to send folks for their first read about threshold concepts - a gentle introduction.

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Amy

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Agreed.  Also like the strike against management-speak (\"outcomes\").  Students are not professors' customers (though they are schools' customers).

\"resolve students' learning problems from within their discipline\"

\"There are no five easy steps to teach threshold concepts.  Rather, they are always analysed and resolved from, and within, specific and situated disciplinary contexts.\"

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Perkins, D. (2006). Constructivism and troublesome knowledge. In J.H.F. Meyer & R. Land (Eds.), Overcoming barriers to student understanding: Threshold concepts and troublesome knowledge (pp. 33-47). London: Routledge. \n

\nNotes

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CONSTRUCTIVISM - sees learning as a dynamic process in which learners construct new ideas or concepts on their current/past knowledge and in response to the instructional situation. Constructivism implies the notion that learners do not passively absorb information but construct it themselves. -- http://www.unesco.org/education/educprog/lwf/doc/portfolio/definitions.htm
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34 Perkins suggests that \"the constructivist toolkit\" can help instructors teach troublesome knowledge.
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34 Types of learner roles in constructivism: active, social (knowledge is socially constructed), creative (students recreate knowledge themselves).
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37 the 5 kinds of knowledge cited in intro - Perkins calls \"five sorts of trouble\" or \"five kinds of troublesome knowledge\": ritual, inert, conceptually difficult, foreign, tacit.
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40 on tacit knowledge: \"We often get the hang of enquiry in a discipline without having a clear reflective conception of what we are doing.  For a personal example, I remember when sometime in the course of my university education I first got around to reading the ideas of Gyorgy Polya... I was truly startled to discover that I was using quite naturally and intuitively most of the problem-solving heuristics Polya profiled.  Without ever labelling or listing them, somehow I had picked them up or cooked them up.\"  Possible that if you've already got an affinity for a discipline (eg library science) you're more likely to pick up the tacit knowledge, or to not be resistant to it... we gravitate towards less troublesome areas, or where trouble is a more positive challenge, and this also widens the gap between instructors who have crossed the threshold and students approaching it.  Could argue that IL matters across disciplines and also outside academia therefore urgency in finding ways to address troublesomeness for students who find it very conceptually difficult, foreign, ritual, etc.
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40 \"Learners' tacit presumptions can miss the target by miles, and teachers' more seasoned tacit presumptions can operate like conceptual submarines that learners never manage to detect or track.\"
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40 \"The idea is not simply to know about the game but to play the game knowingly.\"  This speaks to M&L's issue about possible totalizing effect of TC's privileging one discourse over another.
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41 \"Although some of what is troublesome about knowledge squarely concerns the categorical function of concepts, much concerns the larger conceptual games around them.\"  categorical concepts \"carve up the world we already see,\" give us a new lens; \"associated with clusters of concepts are activity systems or conceptual games that animate them.\"  eg format is a process is the categorical concept; applying this to understanding citations would be the activity system?  authority is constructed; making decisions about where to search based on brainstorming who the interested parties are (eg thinking about gray literature or deciding to use peer-reviewed only).  people organize information; designing a database, applying search strategy.
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42 \"An episteme can be defined as a system of ideas or way of understanding that allows us to establish knowledge... 'Ways of knowing' is another phrase in the same spirit.  As used here, epistemes are manners of justifying, explaining, solving problems, conducting enquiries, and designing and validating various kinds of products or outcomes.\"  Specific to disciplines; epistemes can be troublesome like TCs.  \"Difficulty with particular disciplinary concepts may derive from difficulty with the underlying episteme\" (43).
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43 \"Perhaps tacit knowledge is the most pervasive trouble with epistemes,  Many teachers play the epistemic games of their professional disciplines fluently and automatically, and successful students ultimately need to do so as well.\"
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Rowbottom, D. P. (2007, May). Demystifying threshold concepts. Journal of Philosophy of Education, 41(2), 263-270. Retrieved September 29, 2008, from ERIC database.

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Notes

Okay guys, save this one for last or don't bother at all.  It's written by a physicist and is heavy on the philosophical language and dares to question (!) the whole concept of threshold concepts.  The concluding paragraph sort of states it well:

\"The point of noting this is not to drag us down into debilitating relativism, but to highlight the serious difficulties that any empirical exploration of threshold concepts is liable to encounter.  If there is one lesson to take away, it is that so-called 'threshold concepts' are not as easy to spot as anyone has previously thought, even if there are such things.\"

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Taylor, C. (2006). Threshold concepts in biology: Do they fit the definition? In J.H.F. Meyer & R. Land (Eds.), Overcoming barriers to student understanding: Threshold concepts and troublesome knowledge (pp. 87-99). London: Routledge. \n

\nNotes

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-- Lori suggests using this chapter as a model for our research project.

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87-88 Interviewed 7 academics, provided definition of TCs: \"Initially there is an enthusiastic identification with the idea, and all interviewees immediately suggest candidate concepts for the 'troublesome' label.  However, teasing apart these concepts in terms of the reason for the troublesome label and the degree to which such concepts may incorporate learning thresholds proves more challenging.\"
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88 The first ideas about TC are very high level, sophisticated concepts.  Thinking in terms of TCs shifts to the key element that makes the sophisticated, complex understanding possible.
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89 proposed biology TCs seem not to fit the definition, eg concepts are complex and presuppose scientific knowledge. 90 Hypothesis that this is because \"troublesome knowledge appeared to be associated very much with processes in Biology.\" (\"In the end, life is enzymes.\" !!)
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91 \"Taking a more holistic view of the disciplinary knowledge allows us to reflect on a set of more abstract concepts, which are also troublesome but may more specifically involve a threshold transition.\" -- this seems to parallel the course redesign: rather than doing a how-to demo, try to get at the abstract concepts involved, that's where we ID'd TCs.
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92 As [students] see more links and move further into the discipline learning becomes more and more contextualized and motivating.\"  IL student motivation?  Do our students refuse to integrate knowledge in order to avoid moving into the discipline? (is that a fair question?)  Not unfair, but we can't expect them to be motivated (for 1210 anyway) as there's no 'discipline' to progress to.  Another argument for including IL thresholds into discipline-based learning--isn't this more or less what Badke says?
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94 re troublesome language: \"It may be argued that the use of technical terms specific to the discipline is fundamental to a rigorous understanding and to the effective communication of complex concepts and ideas -- a key component of progress in research.\"  94-5 \"In order successfully to work and think within the discipline students must see the advantages in the use of such language and overcome their negative perceptions.\"  This is interesting--I think language is a huge threshold in many disciplines.  I wonder if there's a similar IL threshold somewhere in there.  Is information organization a language 'spoken' by libaries?  Is LC our native tongue?  Letting the metaphor die now...
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Case study (95-97) on whether students better grasped the scientific hypothesis by the end of their course.  If students improved their understanding of the hypothesis then the rest of their work tended to also show that they had integrated the knowledge from the semester. 

I need to re-read this article, but one thing that jumped out at me from Amy's notes: TCs seem not to fit the definition, eg concepts are complex and presuppose scientific knowledge.  From my reading of the Davies article, one of his central points is that students must possess a certain amount of knowledge BEFORE they can acquire a TC.  TCs change the way you view what you have already learned, while also helping you make sense of it.  And if you think of the idea of \"threshold concepts\" themselves as a TC, this makes sense - it transforms the way you view what you already know.  If you hadn't acquired any threshold concepts in life, it would be almost impossible to understand the concept of a TC.

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Yorke-Barber, P., Atkinson, L., Possin, G., & Woodall, L. (2008). Light bulb moments: Identifying information research threshold concepts for fourth year engineering students. Proceedings of the 2008 AaeE Conference. Retrieved from http://espace.library.uq.edu.au/eserv/UQ:159735/aaee08_submission_T1C2.pdf \n
\nSee Rodrigues - similar flaw here. \n
p. 6: \"The stumbling blocks identified by academics, students and librarians are proposed as threshold concepts in information research.\"  Threshold concepts are places where students get stuck, but the stumbling blocks identified in this study are all task-oriented objectives, not threshold concepts as we are using the term.  Identifying stumbling blocks is one step in formulating a TC, not the end point.  Go further: why are students getting stuck here? What do they need to understand in order to get past the stuck place?
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This is probably because of their perspective on IL, per p. 6: \"Information research is not a discipline and does not have discipline-specific threshold concepts... Information research is itself a threshold concept.\"  R says the same thing, IL = TC.  This is where we are adding something unique.
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Davies, P. (2003, August). Threshold concepts: How can we recognize them? Paper presented at the European Association in Learning and Instruction Conference, Padova.  Retrieved October 21, 2008, from http://www.staffs.ac.uk/schools/business/iepr/etc/WorkingPapers/etcworkingpaper1.pdf.

Davies, P. (2006). Threshold concepts: How can we recognise them?  In J.H.F. Meyer and R. Land (Eds.), Overcoming barriers to student understanding: Threshold concepts and troublesome knowledge (pp. 70-84).  New York: Routledge.

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Notes

Another hard one for me to get my head around and it also made me doubt whether IL really does have threshold concepts, largely because I'm wondering if we really want to teach students to think/act like librarians.  Aren't we always saying that we don't want that?   Anyway, let's get on to the summary/notes.

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AH notes in blue

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Re IL as a discipline: 71 \"...reject any idea that a subject community's 'way of thinking and practicing' can be simply reduced to the acquisition of a set of distinct concepts or skills.  It is the way in which such concepts are related, the deep-level structure of the subject which gives it coherence and creates a shared way of perceiving that can be left unspoken.  This shared way of perceiving is the ideology [of?] a subject, 'the invisible structures and beliefs by which we operate and which appear as natural unchallengeable ways of doing things.'\"  Partly explains why presence of TCs makes case for discipline?  Idea of community, changing student identity as they enter community that shares way of thinking.  Per Perkins, need for instructors to reveal the ways of thinking that go without saying to demystify disciplinary knowledge.
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Another clue, 75: \"General equilibrium also helps to define the boundaries of Economics.  Economists who reject the notion of 'closed system' general equilibrium as defined by neo-classical economists nevertheless recognise the interrelatedness of markets.  Moreover, versions of Economics that reject neo-classical general equilibrium are defined at least in part as departures from that notion.\"
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Caring abstract

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This paper explores the ways in which student health professionals undergo a transformation in their sense of identity as they engage with caring discourses that underpin healthcare. I argue that caring is a \"threshold concept\" by virtue of the \"troublesome knowledge\" with which students are confronted on meeting patients in practice. When superimposed on commonsense understandings of caring, medical connotations of care and moral and ethical dilemmas challenge students to develop their own personal framework within which to operate. I suggest a number of ways in which students can be helped to move forward towards or through the threshold to a more cogent understanding of caring. Subsequent positioning in terms of caring discourses forms a facet of the students' developing identities as healthcare professionals and therefore is a fundamental aspect of professional socialization.

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Caring as threshold notes

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Interesting application of threshold concepts to the service realm.  For Clouder, the threshold is passed when a health care student learns, usually via clinical experience, that caring for patients professionally requires a different mindset than general, altruisitc caring for others.  This divide is troublesome because many people who are attracted to these fields consider themselves caring by nature, and yet they are put in circumstances where they are forced to re-examine the nature of care and consequently their self-perceptions are challenged. Good explanation and practical examples of \"troublesome knowledge\" and 'liminal space.'  Clouded culled data from interviews and online discussion postings of occupational therapy and physiotherapy students.

\"Considerable time is spent within the university of ensuring that students have the basic interpersonal and practical skills to meet patient needs.  However, having to make difficult decisions and balancing conflicting needs creates dilemmas, which can be overwhelming for novice OT and physiotherapy students.\"  (liminality) (509)

\"Defining boundaries and negotiating distance in the context of a caring relationship is another example of 'troublesome knowledge.\" (510)

\"...the notion of the 'threshold concept', and 'troublesome knowledge' providing a means of exploring the complexities of caring are (sic) a less tangible aspect of learning to be a heath(care) professional

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Badke article notes

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1. Determining the need

Reviews a few studies/surveys showing the importance of information literacy in the workplace - the whole information society/knowledge worker thing.  Reviews information illiterate student literature - various studies showing that students over-estimate their research abilities and are not prepared to enter the workplace/graduate school (from an IL perspective). 

--Alludes to the Canadian Association of Research Libraries' policy statement on IL.  We may want to check out CARL's position when reviewing dominant IL models.

p. 5 \"in many universities worldwide, while information literacy may be on the agenda of the institution, the actual practice tends to be at the level of short, optional instruction rather than training that rests solidly within the university curriculum (Corrall, 2007; Owusu-Ansah, 2007).\"

II. Existing initiatives
Review of worldwide (U.S., Canadian, Australian/NZ, UK, Europe) IL standards, competencies, statements, initiatives, etc.  Lots of them, often inadequately implemented.

III. The Perceived Inadequacies in Information Literacy
\"...there are few institutional, let alone national, strategies that are actually succeeding at the level of comprehensive instruction.\"

\"Part of the difficulty is that many initiatives tend to see information literacy as a series of skill sets, with the implication that a corresponding series of training opportunities will make students literate with information.\"

He asked our question!  \"What is the difference between a scholarly journal article and a webpage (or is that even a legitimate question, considering the confluence of formats available for information today)?\" -- we should look at all of his questions and see how/whether our TCs can answer them

\"Teachers of information literacy all too often concentrate on skill sets while the overarching framework of understanding the nature and proper use of various information sources (the philosophy of information) is simply not taught, though it is clearly delineated in standards like those of ACRL.\"

\"As a result of tentative and abortive efforts to make information a viable part of higher education, the movement, even as it is growing, is beginning to run out of energy.\"  Yes!

\"This paper will argue that, the real failure of information literacy to this point is that it is simply not robust enough.\"

IV. The Discipline Called \"Information Literacy\"
1) akin to \"ethics\" - would be found in different parts of the curriculum in a variety of subjects
2) \"three elements in concentric circles\" outer to inner: philosophy, method/strategy, application, we often start and end IL in the application circle, but it \"is the most changeable and thus the least likely to be valued in long term of the student's academic studies and workplace experience.\"

\"What is more, teaching application without teaching method and  philosophy is akin to showing someone how to steer and use the brakes on a car  without teaching overall driving technique and the rules of the road\"

V. Epistemology of Information - framework for a philosophy of information literacy

Information is not \"sufficiently objective and values-neutral to make the acquiring and use of information a task for skill development alone.\" 

So the whole Politics of Research/kfs approach - Kaptizke arguing for hyperliteracy, where \"the contextualizing of the information process within the worlds of the producer and user so that a constant critique of assumptions with the whole process is maintained.\" - sound fairly exhausting.  -- example, how TV commercials are knowing and ironic about how skeptical their audience is now, are responding to an audience that's gotten too good at reading irony.  To me this sounds like the whole postmodern reader/text craziness - and an almost complete rejection of authority - but Bill comes to the rescue with a qualified yes to subjective, BUT:

- information has to be \"evaluated by criteria that are more or less universally acceptable\"
- \"Unless our epistemology makes a god of subjectivity, any philosophy of knowledge has to ask questions like 'Who wrote this?  Does she have the required knowledge base to make her writing reliable?  What presuppositions have set the direction for her approach to this topic?  What value will this piece of information ultimately have to my quest?'\" -- Badke revives the author/authority (Barthes declared the author is dead -- he was talking about the literary author, though, and I wonder what he would say about critics? or other academics)
- academic information lives in a discipline - which produces information according to certain rules (sometimes indirectly expressed or unwritten) -- learning these rules relates to TCs?  Interesting that Martin warns against canonizing political bias within disciplines, vs Badke saying let's accept that danger to \"make it\" into the academy.  This is like the compromise between learning to become a practitioner at the cost of learning to think like the oppressor.  Revisit cultural studies article that complicates this either/or.
- IL as a discipline looks at the knowledge in a discipline from the perspective of epistemology: \"the factors that the discipline values in its search for knowledge, the norms it recognizes and the research and communication processes it uses.\"  - researchers in the discipline are more concerned with the subject content, rather than the \"topography\" of the \"discipline-related knowledge\" - so I think he's saying that this is where we do our work, our research - what we concern ourselves with.  But this seems to require fairly extensive knowledge of the subject discipline.  Ja: \"A relevant model might be that of a core information literacy course within each major, where it can be informed by the discipline involved (Badke, 2003, 2005).\"

This section was difficult for me to \"get.\"

VI. The Methodology of the Information Question

- \"the idea of a guiding method that show students how to move from point A to B to C is often lost in the rush to move from philosophy to application.\"
- leaves us with \"architectural model of instruction\" - tour of tools, here's this and this - here's how you use them
- research model or method needed - \"strategies-based approach\"  - probably cannot develop just one, \"But the alternative is simply to explain to our students how information works within the discipline and then turn them loose on the tools without giving them any process to follow\"
- use the scientific method: \"brings together the main features of most problem-solving in the human enterprise – development of a working knowledge of the issue, creation of a statement that crystallizes the nature of the to be addressed at hand (hypothesis or research question), a review of what is currently known about the issue (including a delineation of the various points of view that are held), an exercise to compile and/or evaluate evidence, and a conclusion that weighs all that has been discovered and takes a position on it\"  -- can we use TCs to make claims about methodology? 
- research process cyclical not linear - duh - I think we all teach it this way

p. 15 \"University students, lacking a knowledge base and, indeed, any coherent sense of the purposes and techniques of the research process, flounder in their research, often rejecting whatever method they have been taught but substituting nothing better... The best way to instill a research methodology is to build assignments around a research process, providing examples that indicate when, and in what manner, the researcher will need to deviate from the normal pattern.  In this way, students do not just have a set of tools and some skills to use them, but they also have a process by which use of the tools can lead to understanding and problem-solving.\"


VII. Instruction in Application Skills
\"the application of research is like a tradesperson’s skill with his/her tools. Proper use of the tools is problematic if the tradesperson has not been educated in the engineering and regulatory aspects of the trade and has not developed expertise in using the right tool to accomplish each stage of the task.\"

VIII. Conclusions
- IL is best taught within discipline-specific context - not as a generic -- would be interesting to think about IL in business school, there is a bit of writing about \"data literacy\"
- But with a generic philosophy?  \"Such a philosophy would recognize that not all information is created equal, that subjectivity and politics and economics and legalities all shape the information we receive as well as the way we use it, and that understanding the nature of the information we deal with is foundational to using it well.\"
- \"strong process element\"

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Booth, J. (2006).  On the mastery of philosophical concepts: Socratic discourse and the unexpected 'affect.' In J.H.F. Meyer & R. Land (Eds.), Overcoming barriers to student understanding: Threshold concepts and troublesome knowledge (pp. 173-181). London: Routledge.

Booth posits that the study of philosophy is especially suited to teaching with threshold concepts.  This is largely because the study of philosophical concepts for 'thinking philosophically' results in challenges to student preconceptions and assumed knowledge.

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175 \"Threshold concepts are, in a sense, epistemological floodgates; once opened they cannot simply be 'udone.' Moreover, not only does mastering a threshold concept provide the student with a 'new' perspective on material, it is supposed to provide them with a 'better' one.  The material should appear cohesive in a ways that it did not prior to the student's grasp of the concepts, affording the student more insightful and integrated understanding of that material.\"
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175 Booth's example of a threshold concept in philosophy is the notion of perception, and \"the question of whether a subject can know from the content of what he experiences that he is being presented with an objective or mind-independent reality.\"  The idea that representation is open to question presents a necessary platform for further philosophical exploration.

177-78 Booth argues for using  the socratic method--a practice that \"traditionally involves a learned fellow, namely the 'teacher', guiding the flow of questioning whilst engaging the student in an interactive search for defensible positions in logical space.\"  She proposes using this method to shake students out of their comfort zones and breaking down their assumptions about what they know, and later to 'reconstruct' them (yes, she uses this term).

179-80  Discussion of student's emotional states as related to choosing a pedagogical style.  Bullet point version:  employ the socratic method carefully so as not to damage or scare those little learners!

Overall impression:  Useful for her example of threshold concept in philosophy, but the socratic method discussion doesn't really work for our context.

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Cousin, G. (2006). Threshold concepts, troublesome knowledge and emotional capital: An exploration into learning about others. In J.H.F. Meyer & R. Land (Eds.), Overcoming barriers to student understanding: Threshold concepts and troublesome knowledge (pp. 134-147). London: Routledge.

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TCs and troublesome knowledge in re learning about \"Otherness\" in cultural studies

134-5 \"At first glance, [Communication, Culture and Media Studies] looks like a disciplinary area which is likely to resist the construcitno of a taxonomy of stable threshold concepts; the sweep of CCM is too broad, too internally disputed and theoretically unfriendly to anything that looks like essentialist classification.  However, we did receive agreement from the universtiy teachers with whom we shared our notion of a threshold concept that this might provide a basis for thinking about curriculum design, particularly in relation to issues of difference, representation and identity -- all of which require a grasp of the concept of Otherness... There is no settled view about the meanings of Otherness.  The instability of the concept is part of its broad territory.  Indeed it would undermine the teaching and learning of Otherness were it to be treated as a truth to be unpacked since mastery includes a grasp of the debate about its explanatory scope and limitations.\" -- Aha, I've been wondering about this, eg that poststructuralist thinking has moved from the margins of academia as critique to become a new \"center\" with a new canon.  So, in this case, the TC is about resisting the essentialization (concern brought up by M&L).

135 Transformative aspect of TCs (affective shift, see p 7 M&L) is explicitly sought in cultural studies teaching; 136 integrative approach to understanding identity helps resist essentialization or superficial political correctness 145 \"centrality of affective factors for the mastery of [the concept of Otherness]\"

137 Otherness is troublesome knowledge: difficult language, alien concepts. \"Perhaps troubling knowledge is a more apt term to use for the learning of Otherness because everyone, teacher and learners, has an internal relation to it\" -- \"subject positioning\" affects learning this concept, and how troublesome it will be.  Her disciplinary perspective foregrounds the emotional/social aspect of crossing a threshold \"Arguably, grasping any threshold concept is never exclusively to do with its inherent complexity or with activities of the mind.\"

138 emotional capital: quote from teacher that \"some students can get [cultural studies concept] without really caring about it at all\" -- Cousin: \"There is a hint that the students have wilfully decided to dismiss the importance of the subject to them.  In offering the idea of emotional capital, I am attempting to locate this kind of problem... in social circumstances rather than in learner pathologies.\" 

139 Mimicry as strategy of liminal or pre-liminal state; four types of liminal student positions.  Spectator, defended, victim-identified, self-reflexive.

140 Spectator or voyeur (\"bypass interrogation of their own... positioning\").  Quotes Butler: \"Becoming critical could be seen as a matter of learning to reproduce the terminology and discourse structures of particular kinds of conventional critical writing\" -- Cousin: \"THis can also be interpreted as a problem of domestication wherein the radical, transformative capacity of a concept is tamed by traditional academic assessment requirements.\"

141 the defended learner, resistant, hostile. \"Integral to the concept of Otherness is the attribution of power to some and of powerlessness to others.  If students match the concept's formal definitions of where power lies, they may feel over-determined by the categories under discussion\"

142 the victim-identified learner \"Drawn towards the 'glamour of oppression' (Rushdie, 1988)... fatalistic and angry about the inevitability of oppression and domination.\"

143 self-reflexive learner - students who actually cross the threshold, gain new understanding of self by mastering concept

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