(Re)Considering What We Know

Learning Thresholds in Writing, Composition, Rhetoric, and Literacy

Linda Adler-Kassner, Elizabeth Wardle, Linda Adler-Kassner, Elizabeth Wardle

• Publisher: Utah State University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781607329329
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Naming What We Know: Threshold Concepts of Writing Studies, published in 2015, contributed to a discussion about the relevance of identifying key concepts and ideas of writing studies. (Re)Considering What We Know continues that conversation while simultaneously raising questions about the ideas around threshold concepts. Contributions introduce new concepts, investigate threshold concepts as a framework, and explore their use within and beyond writing.Part 1 raises questions about the ideologies of consensus that are associated with naming threshold concepts of a discipline. Contributions challenge the idea of consensus and seek to expand both the threshold concepts framework and the concepts themselves. Part 2 focuses on threshold concepts in action and practice, demonstrating the innovative ways threshold concepts and a threshold concepts framework have been used in writing courses and programs. Part 3 shows how a threshold concepts framework can help us engage in conversations beyond writing studies. ( R e) C onsidering W hat We K now raises new questions and offers new ideas that can help to advance the discussion and use of threshold concepts in the field of writing studies. It will be of great interest to scholars and graduate students in writing studies, especially those who have previously engaged with Naming What We Know.Contributors:
Marianne Ahokas, Jonathan Alexander, Chris M. Anson, Ian G. Anson, Sarah Ben-Zvi, Jami Blaauw-Hara, Mark Blaauw-Hara, Maggie Black, Dominic Borowiak, Chris Castillo, Chen Chen, Sandra Descourtis, Norbert Elliot, Heidi Estrem, Alison Farrell, Matthew Fogarty, Joanne Baird Giordano, James Hammond, Holly Hassel, Lauren Heap, Jennifer Heinert, Doug Hesse, Jonathan Isaac, Katie Kalish, Páraic Kerrigan, Ann Meejung Kim, Kassia Krzus-Shaw, Saul Lopez, Jennifer Helane Maher, Aishah Mahmood, Aimee Mapes, Kerry Marsden, Susan Miller-Cochran, Deborah Mutnick, Rebecca Nowacek, Sarah O'Brien, ?lá ?ládip??, Peggy O'Neill, Cassandra Phillips, Mya Poe, Patricia Ratanapraphart, Jacqueline Rhodes, Samitha Senanayake, Susan E. Shadle, Dawn Shepherd, Katherine Stein, Patrick Sullivan, Brenna Swift, Carrie Strand Tebeau, Matt Thul, Nikhil Tiwari, Lisa Tremain, Lisa Velarde, Kate Vieira, Gordon Blaine West, Anne-Marie Womack, Kathleen Blake Yancey, Xiaopei Yang, Madylan Yarc

Part 1

Challenges, Critiques, and New Conceptions

1

Recognizing the Limits of Threshold Concept Theory

Elizabeth Wardle, Linda Adler-Kassner, Jonathan Alexander, Norbert Elliot, J.W. Hammond, Mya Poe, Jacqueline Rhodes, and Anne-Marie Womack

DOI: 10.7330/9781607329329.c001

Editors’ note: Unless otherwise indicated, the we in this chapter refers to Linda and Elizabeth. Other coauthors’ contributions are noted in the text.

Threshold Concepts: Background and Purposes

In “Threshold Concepts and Troublesome Knowledge,” Jan Meyer and Ray Land (2006) explain that “interviews and wider discussions with practitioners in a range of disciplines and institutions” (6) led them to identify the characteristics associated with threshold concepts that have become familiar to researchers who have adopted or adapted this framework for thinking about learning and teaching. That is, threshold concepts are transformative, probably irreversible, integrative, potentially troublesome, and bounded. It’s this latter idea that is significant for this chapter. Specifically, as Meyer and Land explain, threshold concepts are “possibly often (though not necessarily always) bounded in that any conceptual space will have terminal frontiers, bordering with thresholds into new conceptual areas. It might be that such boundedness in certain instances serves to constitute the demarcation between disciplinary areas, to define academic territories” (6). They follow this with two illustrations: one from a faculty member in cultural studies and one from veterinary sciences, both of whom explain the consequences for students of seeing through or seeing with threshold concepts from other disciplines, or of invoking ways of thinking and practicing (Hounsell and Anderson 2009) associated with operationalization of threshold concepts inconsistent with the threshold concepts of the discipline.

The idea that threshold concepts serve as portals into disciplinary participation has become an important one for teachers, learners, and researchers working with the idea. A number of researchers describe how faculty have incorporated threshold concepts into teaching (e.g., Baillie and Johnson 2008; Berg, Erichsen, and Hokstad 2016; Martindale et al. 2016; McGowan 2016; Sibbett and Thompson 2008) or considered learners’ movements around these concepts (e.g., Cousin 2006; Rattray 2016; Timmermans 2016), or how individuals and groups have attempted to explore and describe the threshold concepts of their disciplines (e.g., Reimann and Jackson 2006; Taylor 2006; Wearn, O’Callaghan, and Barrow 2016). Underscoring these uses of threshold concepts is the idea that making them more explicit enables learners greater access to elements associated with knowledge-making practices and ways of seeing in a discipline through expertise. Naming What We Know (Adler-Kassner and Wardle 2015) is one illustration of how threshold concepts within a discipline can be identified, as twenty-nine teacher-researchers in writing studies attempted to name and define some of the threshold concepts of writing studies. In doing so, this group—which we facilitated, and to which we also contributed—was attempting to look back at the research and practice of those within writing studies and affiliated disciplines like English education, sociolinguistics, and educational psychology and to articulate some of the ideas that were (1) threshold to writing studies as an academic discipline; (2) threshold to writing in/and learning; and/or (3) threshold to teaching writing.

Since its publication, Naming What We Know and this attempt to describe some of the threshold concepts of writing studies has taken on a life of its own, as texts are wont to do. It has become widely used in classrooms, which was somewhat surprising as the book was not written as a textbook per se (though now it can be purchased in a classroom edition that only includes the threshold concepts section, at the request of readers). It has generated numerous conference panels and informed other studies, including theses and dissertations. Critiques have also been leveled or implied, and concerns have been voiced (e.g., Alexander 2017). While the two of us have generatively expanded our work with threshold concepts in professional development (primarily working with faculty from other disciplines, as we discuss in chapters 15 and 16), we have also had some time to consider the limitations of the threshold concepts framework.

Drawing on these developments, in this chapter we first consider several critiques of and complications related to threshold concepts theory. Then, our chapter coauthors look at some ideas that do not get named and included when threshold concepts are the organizing principle.

Threshold Concepts: Critiques, Concerns, and Limitations

Here we outline four critiques, concerns, and limitations of the threshold concepts framework and discuss how those critiques apply to the Naming What We Know project in rhetoric and composition.

Critique 1: Threshold Concept Theory Focuses on Boundedness between Disciplines Rather Than Connections and Interdisciplinarity.

One of the characteristics of threshold concepts, according to Meyer and Land (2006), is their boundedness: “Any conceptual space will have terminal frontiers, bordering with thresholds into new conceptual areas” (6). Thus, it is easy to critique a threshold concepts framework for potentially sustaining disciplinary divisions rather than helping foster interdisciplinary connections: “Sharing a way of thinking with others allows access to communities, but it may also reduce acceptance or capacity to participate in another community” (Meyer, Land, and Davies 2008, 67). As we discuss further below, naming threshold concepts can easily reify them and contribute to a sense that boundaries between disciplines are rigid and impermeable.

At the same time, naming threshold concepts can be useful precisely because they help shed light on boundaries that are often invisible, or at least difficult to see. Threshold concepts “stand in distinct relationship to each other. . . . They may complement each other, forming a web of interrelated threshold concepts . . . , [or] define distinct contrasting schools of thought” (Meyer, Land and Davies 2008, 67). Making these concepts explicit, say Meyer, Land and Jason Davies, “opens up new sources of variation that do not come into view until the concept of learning is seen as a relationship between the individual, the phenomenon, and others,” sources of variation within and among threshold concepts and their disciplinary boundaries (67).

The relevance of the threshold concepts framework for interdisciplinary work has also been taken up by a number of scholars. For example, Aminul Huq, Marcia D. Nichols, and Bijaya Aryal (2016) have examined correlations among threshold concepts in various disciplines. Jason Davies (2016) has argued that careful consideration of threshold concepts and their similarities and differences across disciplines might actually assist learners and scholars attempting to engage in interdisciplinary work. Davies points out that the incommensurability so common to interdisciplinary endeavors can not only be explained but “emphatically predicted by threshold concepts . . . given their ‘transformative,’ ‘irreversible,’ ‘integrative,’ ‘bounded,’ and ‘troublesome’ nature” (122). Members of an interdisciplinary group, he says, can “approach the same task and materials very differently” (123). If the underlying differences are not understood and examined, “much time can pass with a truce rather than genuine engagement” (124). This observation helps explain the difficulty students can often face when their faculty are “literally arguing from different premises, with the implication that meaning-making construction and intellectual reference points are as different as the physical buildings” (121). Threshold concepts offer “a way to begin the task of understanding why disciplinary differences can run so deep” (121). At the same time, Davies says, making these disagreements explicit can stop threshold concepts “from becom[ing] ‘threshold guardians,’” defenders of walls surrounding disciplines (125). The process of identifying threshold concepts, then, can become a starting point and help offer vocabulary to interdisciplinary groups: what all members of an interdisciplinary team “have in common is that . . . they all operate with threshold concepts . . . [these concepts] are thus potentially a great leveler, and their articulation at some point . . . is usually a necessary part of collaboration” (131).

Given the concerns about the ways threshold concepts could impede interdisciplinary efforts, the Naming What We Know (NWWK) project could be understood as solidifying disciplinary boundaries. Certainly, as we note above, discipline-specific knowledge has in some ways been defined to be exclusive in order to distinguish one field from other fields (Bender 1993). While fields like writing studies have been informed by a number of other disciplines, there are beliefs, orientations, and research findings from our field that set it apart from other fields. Not recognizing this expertise, as we argue in NWWK, has many implications. Some of these are associated with institutional decisions. For instance, funding for faculty lines in many institutions is associated, at least in part, with the disciplines to which faculty belong. Other implications can be associated with writers, writing instructors, and/or the ways writing is taught and learned. As we and others have noted elsewhere, many feel free to define “good writing,” create definitions of “good writers,” and create assessments to sort writers and writing. The threshold concepts of our discipline can help inform these discussions—if they are named and if the project of naming continues to take into consideration the changing nature of the field’s knowledge and understandings. Too, as both of us have experienced in work with faculty across disciplines on defining and describing threshold concepts, the differences experts often point to in conjunction with inter- or cross-disciplinary work are associated with learning by those well beyond novice status—that is, advanced undergraduates or graduate students. At the novice level, which is to say the level of introductory coursework, recognizing the existence of disciplinary boundaries via threshold concepts can itself be a threshold concept. It is our hope, then, that given Davies’s (2016) argument as outlined above, explicitly naming what we understand about writing can actually foster cross-disciplinary work with stakeholders from other communities of practice.

Critique 2: Threshold Concepts Imposes a Particular Kind of Order That Shapes Epistemic Contexts (Whether We Name Them or Not)

Threshold concepts are, by definition, retrospective. They represent snapshots of disciplinary communities, descriptions of what is taken as established within a discipline at a particular moment. There is, then, a critique to be leveled regarding the method by which those of us involved in the initial process of NWWK went about our work: it could be seen as attempting to impose a particular kind of stability and order that privileges the past. To complicate this possibility even more, it could be said that naming threshold concepts may also suggest an objective social reality at odds with constructivist perspectives that view reality as constantly in production and created by practices and beliefs. These perspectives, in fact, are foundational to many of the threshold concepts named in NWWK.

Literature from feminist, decolonial, and poststructuralist methodologies highlights these concerns. Underscoring them is an essential tension between positivist and constructivist assumptions about what knowledge is and about how it is created. A positivist perspective “[assumes] an objective external reality and [emphasizes] the need for inquirers to be objective in accessing that reality, and focuses on generalization and cause-effect linkages” (Baxter Magolda 2004, 32). Sociologist John Law (2004), critiquing positivist methods of social science research, argues that this perspective stabilizes existing processes and practices. This stabilization begins from questions designed to explore what is extant and extends through the “framing assumption” of methodologies: “that there are definite processes out there waiting to be discovered.” Law goes on to say, “Arguments and debates about the character of social reality then take place within this arena” (6).

In a constructivist perspective, however, methods and the process of exploration look quite different: “Realities are multiple, context-bound, and mutually shaped by interaction of the knower and known” (Baxter Magolda 2004, 35). From this perspective, Law (2004) argues, “the argument is no longer that methods discover and depict realities. Instead, it is that they participate in the enactment of those realities” (45). As Annemarie Mol explains, “Realities are not explained by practices and beliefs but are instead produced in them” (quoted in Law 2004, 59). Thus, Law argues, “if we are interested in multiplicity then we also need to attend to the craftwork implied in practice,” including the practice that simultaneously constructs and reifies realities (59). Ultimately, then, Law says Mol is issuin...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Editors’ Introduction: Threshold Concepts, Naming What We Know, and Reconsidering our Shared Conceptions
• Part 1: Challenges, Critiques, and New Conceptions
• Part 2: Using Threshold Concepts to Engage with Writing Teachers and Students
• Part 3: Threshold Concepts and Writing: Beyond the Discipline
• About the Authors