Pausing at the Threshold

Portal

Volumn 15, Issue 1, 2015, Pages 183-195

  Morgan, Patrick K ^a  

^a HOPE COLLEGE   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 84922112199     PISSN: 15312542     EISSN: 15307131     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/pla.2015.0002     Document Type: Article

References (36)

1. Arnold Van Gennep, The Rites of Passage, trans. Monika B. Vizedom and Gabrielle L. Caffee (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), first published 1909.
2. Roy A. Rappaport, Ecology, Meaning, and Religion (Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 1979), 184.
3. The bibliography of which is fast becoming flooded. See, perhaps most fruitfully, Ray Land, Jan H. F. Meyer, and Jan Smith, eds., Threshold Concepts Within the Disciplines (Rotterdam, Neth.: Sense, 2008), though the editors have written on the subject for over a decade.
4. Similarly, Van Gennep wrote that a threshold ceremony unites a participant "with a new world" in The Rites of Passage, 20.
5. Paul Davies and Jean Mangan, "Embedding Threshold Concepts: From Theory to Pedagogical Principles to Learning Activities," in Threshold Concepts Within the Disciplines, ed. Land, Meyer, and Smith, 38.
6. Successive drafts have been published since this paper was first conceived. At the time of writing, the most recent version is available at http://www.acrl.ala.org/ilstandards/wpcontent/ uploads/2014/02/Framework-for-IL-for-HE-Draft-2.pdf.
7. Available at http://www.ala.org/acrl/standards/informationliteracycompetency.
8. ACRL, Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education (June 17, 2014), 25, http://www.acrl.ala.org/ilstandards/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Framework-for-ILfor- HE-Draft-2.pdf.
9. Guy Walker, "A Cognitive Approach to Threshold Concepts," Higher Education 65, 2 (2013): 247-63. Walker finds it odd that none of the other available studies has addressed the significant overlap of threshold concepts with the much older Schema Theory, which investigates the creation of "mental templates" from past experiences in interaction with those in the present. In his view, "Whilst threshold concepts can undoubtedly be represented as schema, not all schemas (sic) are likely to be threshold concepts," 251. This attention to different learning or information use contexts, reminiscent of Gestalt psychology, is one interesting avenue for future investigations of threshold concepts in information literacy learning.
10. Since the original version of this manuscript was written, the discussion surrounding threshold concepts has intensified, though much of this remains limited to conversations, conferences, and various social media (including blogs).
11. Lori Townsend, Korey Brunetti, and Amy R. Hofer, "Threshold Concepts and Information Literacy," portal: Libraries and the Academy 11, 3 (2011): 853-69.
12. Amy R. Hofer, Lori Townsend, and Korey Brunetti, "Troublesome Concepts and Information Literacy: Investigating Threshold Concepts for IL Instruction," portal: Libraries and the Academy 12, 4 (2012): 387-405.
13. There are interesting ways to keep tabs on the evolving Framework and the role of threshold concepts within it. Troy Swanson's reliably updated Twitter feed (@T_Swanson) is a great hub for news and discussion related to threshold concepts and the Framework, and he is routinely insightful. Swanson also offers candid discussions of the Framework's development in his recurring guest column at Michael Stephen's tametheweb.com. Additionally, some readers might be interested in browsing the "Team TC" Web site at http://www.ilthresholdconcepts.com/.
14. Two critiques of the threshold concept craze are especially notable. One of these is by Maura Seale, "Marketing Information Literacy," Communications in Information Literacy 7, 2 (2013): 155-60. While her criticism is focused on a different set of ramifications entirely than those addressed here, she raises important questions about another, more socially oriented domain of librarians' assumptions. More recently, Lane Wilkinson wrote an important blog post raising some difficult questions for the emerging threshold concepts-based Framework. It is available at http://senseandreference.wordpress.com/2014/06/19/theproblem- with-threshold-concepts/.
15. Hofer, Townsend, and Brunetti, "Troublesome Concepts and Information Literacy," 401.
16. Wendi Holliday and Jim Rogers, "Talking About Information Literacy: The Mediating Role of Discourse in a College Writing Classroom," portal: Libraries and the Academy 13, 3 (2013): 257-71.
17. On pages 5 and 8 of the draft Framework, for example, the authors refer to the ongoing and eventual "identification of" the information literacy threshold concepts.
18. Lest I leave myself open to my own criticism, it should be understood that these critiques are intended to be neither exhaustive nor definitive. Rather, they are presented in the interest of offering as broad and thorough an assessment as feasible within the space of an article.
19. The authors note, "The data collected [in the 2012 study] confirmed the ubiquity of the trouble spots that sparked our original threshold concepts," 393.
20. ACRL, Framework, 6.
21. "Metonymical" in that closely related but essentially different things are brought to bear on one another, or, as it has been technically phrased, the comparisons share a domain.
22. see Javier Herrero Ruiz, "The Role of Metonymy in Complex Tropes," in Réka Benczes, Antonio Barcelona, and Francisco José Ruiz de Mendoza Ibáñez, eds., Defining Metonymy in Cognitive Linguistics: Towards a Consensus View, vol. 28 (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2011), 167-93. These comparisons oversimplify and ultimately constrain.
23. I follow Roland Barthes's view, more or less, as articulated in his 1975 appendix to his classic book Mythologies, "Myth Today." Here, myth's distinctive characteristic is how it becomes "frozen into something natural" and can confuse interpretative reasons with motivations. The same seems to be happening with the sweeping appeal of threshold concepts' presentation of teaching and learning. See Mythologies (New York: Hill and Wang, 2012), 217-74.
24. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 10.
25. I am aware of Jaron Lanier's now famous reversal, but this, too, seems ultimately a pragmatic concession.
26. Note, too, that such ideas assume conversation has an unproblematically clear meaning, functionally identical, for all students.
27. See, for an interesting discussion of this burgeoning problem, Stephen Ramsay's essay "The Hermeneutics of Screwing Around," available at www.playingwithhistory.com/wpcontent/ uploads/.../hermeneutics.pdf.
28. Hofer, Townsend, and Brunetti, "Troublesome Concepts and Information Literacy," 391.
29. That is, in the sense that threshold concepts in general and those proposed for information literacy in particular are negotiated, interpretative phenomena (see arguments under the earlier heading "Foundational Assumptions.") As in the previously discussed assumptions of their independent existence, it is dubious practice to ascribe to threshold concepts an independent, "natural" reality.
30. Additionally, this assumes, suggests, or both that different individuals will make pivotal intellectual adjustments in more or less the same ways (or at least, in ways conforming to a predictive, yet artificial, model) and on more or less the same terms, something hard to imagine.
31. Paul Feyerabend's arguments repeatedly stress the necessity of violating the assumed incontrovertibles within currently understood models, noting that major progress has always challenged prevailing ideas and expectations. We cannot predict what the information landscape will look like in five years, and the shift from standards to a supposedly more flexible framework will likely fail to keep pace with emergent developments just the same.
32. Paul Feyerabend, Against Method (London: Verso, 1980), 295.
33. Hofer, Townsend, and Brunetti, "Troublesome Concepts and Information Literacy," 393.
34. ACRL, Framework, 24.
35. See, among many others, William Badke, "Why Information Literacy Is Invisible," Communications in Information Literacy 4, 2 (2010): 129-41.
36. Although some studies claim real and demonstrable benefit from such sessions-for example, Ma Li Hsieh and Hugh A. Holden, "The Effectiveness of a University's Single- Session Information Literacy Instruction," Reference Services Review 38, 3 (2010): 458-73, adequately assessing the fundamental theoretical shifts thought to accompany threshold concepts presents a much more complex scenario.