Katie King, associate director of CATL and associate professor of Psychology, and Peter Felten, Assistant Provost, director of CATL, and associate professor of History, edited a special issue of the Journal of Faculty Development focused on threshold concepts.
The threshold concepts framework (Meyer & Land, 2003) helps educators focus on essential aspects of disciplinary knowledge. Threshold concepts are, by definition, challenging to learn. When a threshold concept is mastered, however, other significant disciplinary learning follows. This kind of knowledge is akin to a portal or doorway; once a learner has crossed the threshold, she is able to see and learn significant new things. Without crossing the threshold, that new learning is impossible.
Considering higher education pedagogy as a discipline, the special issue (26:3, September 2012) invited contributions from scholars focused on variations in learners, scholarly teaching, teaching with technology, teaching with community members in service learning, and listening to student voices as threshold concepts in faculty development. Jan Meyer, one of the originators of the threshold concepts framework and a professor at the University of Queensland (Australia), wrote the first article in this issue. Jessie Moore, associate professor of English at Elon, contributed an article on teaching for transfer, drawing on her work as a researcher and director of an international group of 40 scholars participating in the three-year Elon Research Seminar on Critical Transitions: Writing and the Question of Transfer.
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