Threshold Concepts on the Edge


Book Description

Threshold Concepts on the Edge explores new directions in threshold concept research and practice and is of relevance to teachers, learners, educational researchers and academic developers.




Naming What We Know


Book Description

Naming What We Know examines the core principles of knowledge in the discipline of writing studies using the lens of “threshold concepts”—concepts that are critical for epistemological participation in a discipline. The first part of the book defines and describes thirty-seven threshold concepts of the discipline in entries written by some of the field’s most active researchers and teachers, all of whom participated in a collaborative wiki discussion guided by the editors. These entries are clear and accessible, written for an audience of writing scholars, students, and colleagues in other disciplines and policy makers outside the academy. Contributors describe the conceptual background of the field and the principles that run throughout practice, whether in research, teaching, assessment, or public work around writing. Chapters in the second part of the book describe the benefits and challenges of using threshold concepts in specific sites—first-year writing programs, WAC/WID programs, writing centers, writing majors—and for professional development to present this framework in action. Naming What We Know opens a dialogue about the concepts that writing scholars and teachers agree are critical and about why those concepts should and do matter to people outside the field.




Overcoming Barriers to Student Understanding


Book Description

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 accounts for this variation in student performance and, more importantly, how can teachers change their teaching and courses to help students overcome such barriers? This book examines the difficulties of student learning and offers advice on how to overcome them through course design, assessment practice and teaching methods. It also provides innovative case material from a wide range of institutions and disciplines, including the social sciences, the humanities, the sciences and economics.




Threshold Concepts in Practice


Book Description

"Threshold Concepts in Practice brings together fifty researchers from sixteen countries and a wide variety of disciplines to analyse their teaching practice, and the learning experiences of their students, through the lens of the Threshold Concepts Framework. In any discipline, there are certain concepts – the ‘jewels in the curriculum’ – whose acquisition is akin to passing through a portal. Learners enter new conceptual (and often affective) territory. Previously inaccessible ways of thinking or practising come into view, without which they cannot progress, and which offer a transformed internal view of subject landscape, or even world view. These conceptual gateways are integrative, exposing the previously hidden interrelatedness of ideas, and are irreversible. However they frequently present troublesome knowledge and are often points at which students become stuck. Difficulty in understanding may leave the learner in a ‘liminal’ state of transition, a ‘betwixt and between’ space of knowing and not knowing, where understanding can approximate to a form of mimicry. Learners navigating such spaces report a sense of uncertainty, ambiguity, paradox, anxiety, even chaos. The liminal space may equally be one of awe and wonderment. Thresholds research identifies these spaces as key transformational points, crucial to the learner’s development but where they can oscillate and remain for considerable periods. These spaces require not only conceptual but ontological and discursive shifts. This volume, the fourth in a tetralogy on Threshold Concepts, discusses student experiences, and the curriculum interventions of their teachers, in a range of disciplines and professional practices including medicine, law, engineering, architecture and military education. Cover image: Detail from ‘Eve offering the apple to Adam in the Garden of Eden and the serpent’ c.1520–25. Lucas Cranach the Elder (1472–1553). Bridgeman Images. All rights reserved.




Ecocriticism on the Edge


Book Description

The twenty-first century has seen an increased awareness of the forms of environmental destruction that cannot immediately be seen, localised or, by some, even acknowledged. Ecocriticism on the Edge explores the possibility of a new mode of critical practice, one fully engaged with the destructive force of the planetary environmental crisis. Timothy Clark argues that, in literary and cultural criticism, the “Anthropocene”, which names the epoch in which human impacts on the planet's ecological systems reach a dangerous limit, also represents a threshold at which modes of interpretation that once seemed sufficient or progressive become, in this new counterintuitive context, inadequate or even latently destructive. The book includes analyses of literary works, including texts by Paule Marshall, Gary Snyder, Ben Okri, Henry Lawson, Lorrie Moore and Raymond Carver.




The Fun of Motivation


Book Description

This work is organized into two parts. Part I examines the theories behind motivation and fun in the classroom, and offers three instructional techniques that highlight their benefits. Part II is the application of the theories explored in Part I, and its six chapters each address one of the threshold concepts provided in ACRL's Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education. Each chapter contains three lesson plans addressing the threshold concept, one for each of the three fun instructional techniques. Assessment opportunities are provided.




Threshold Concepts in Women's and Gender Studies


Book Description

"Threshold Concepts in Women's and Gender Studies: Ways of Seeing, Thinking, and Knowing is a textbook designed primarily for introduction to Women's and Gender Studies courses with the intent of providing both a skill- and concept-based foundation in the field. The third edition includes fully revised and expanded case studies and updated statistics; in addition, the content has been updated throughout to reflect significant news stories and cultural developments. The text is driven by a single key question: "What are the ways of thinking, seeing, and knowing that characterize Women's and Gender Studies and are valued by its practitioners?". This book illustrates four of the most critical concepts in Women's and Gender Studies-the social construction of gender, privilege and oppression, intersectionality, and feminist praxis-and grounds these concepts in multiple illustrations. Threshold Concepts develops the key concepts and ways of thinking that students need to develop a deep understanding and to approach material like feminist scholars do, across disciplines"--




Disciplinary Applications of Information Literacy Threshold Concepts


Book Description

In 25 chapters divided into sections mirroring ACRL's Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education--Authority is Constructed and Contextual, Information Creation as a Process, Information has Value, Research as Inquiry, Scholarship as Conversation, and Searching as Strategic Exploration--Disciplinary Applications of Information Literacy Threshold Concepts explores threshold concepts as an idea and the specifics of what the concepts contained in the Framework look like in disciplinary contexts. The chapters cover many disciplines, including the humanities, social sciences, life sciences, and physical sciences, and a range of students, from first-year undergraduates to doctoral students.




Threshold Concepts Within the Disciplines


Book Description

Threshold Concepts within the Disciplines brings together leading writers from various disciplines and national contexts in an important and readable volume for all those concerned with teaching and learning in higher education. The foundational principle of threshold concepts is that there are, in each discipline, 'conceptual gateways' or 'portals' that must be negotiated to arrive at important new understandings. In crossing the portal, transformation occurs, both in knowledge and subjectivity. Such transformation involves troublesome knowledge, a key concern for contributors to this book, who identify threshold concepts in their own fields and suggest how to deal with them. Part One extends and enhances the threshold concept framework, containing chapters that articulate its qualities, its links to other social theories of learning and other traditions in educational research. Part Two encompasses the disciplinary heart of the book with contributions from a diversity of areas including computing, engineering, biology, design, modern languages, education and economics. In the many empirical case studies educators show how they have used the threshold concept framework to inform and evaluate their teaching contexts. Other chapters emphasise the equally important 'being and becoming' dimension of learning. Part Three suggests pedagogic directions for those at the centre of the education project with contributions focusing on the socialisation of academics and their continuing quest to be effective teachers. The book will be of interest to disciplinary teachers, educational researchers and educational developers. It also is of relevance to issues in quality assurance and professional accreditation.




Fundamentals of Brain Network Analysis


Book Description

Fundamentals of Brain Network Analysis is a comprehensive and accessible introduction to methods for unraveling the extraordinary complexity of neuronal connectivity. From the perspective of graph theory and network science, this book introduces, motivates and explains techniques for modeling brain networks as graphs of nodes connected by edges, and covers a diverse array of measures for quantifying their topological and spatial organization. It builds intuition for key concepts and methods by illustrating how they can be practically applied in diverse areas of neuroscience, ranging from the analysis of synaptic networks in the nematode worm to the characterization of large-scale human brain networks constructed with magnetic resonance imaging. This text is ideally suited to neuroscientists wanting to develop expertise in the rapidly developing field of neural connectomics, and to physical and computational scientists wanting to understand how these quantitative methods can be used to understand brain organization. Winner of the 2017 PROSE Award in Biomedicine & Neuroscience and the 2017 British Medical Association (BMA) Award in Neurology Extensively illustrated throughout by graphical representations of key mathematical concepts and their practical applications to analyses of nervous systems Comprehensively covers graph theoretical analyses of structural and functional brain networks, from microscopic to macroscopic scales, using examples based on a wide variety of experimental methods in neuroscience Designed to inform and empower scientists at all levels of experience, and from any specialist background, wanting to use modern methods of network science to understand the organization of the brain