Fogarty, Matthew and Kerrigan, Páraic and O’Brien, Sarah and Farrell, Alison
(2020)
“I Can’t Go On, I’ll Go On”: Liminality in Undergraduate Writing.
In:
(Re)Considering What We Know: Learning Thresholds in Writing, Composition, Rhetoric, and Literacy.
University Press of Colorado, Utah State University Press, pp. 261-277.
Abstract
According to Jan Meyer and Ray Land (2006), along with being troublesome, integrative, transformative, and probably irreversible, threshold
concepts are characterized as liminal. Their liminal nature is summarized by Linda Adler- Kassner and Elizabeth Wardle (2016): “Threshold
concepts involve what the name implies— thresholds. But the movement
toward and the (hopeful) crossing of those thresholds isn’t straightforward; instead, it happens in a two- steps- forward- one- step- back kind of
way as learners push against troublesome knowledge” (ix). Glynis Cousin
(2006) observes that the idea of liminal states aids “our understanding
of the conceptual transformations students undergo” in challenging
learning situations, like the grasping of threshold concepts (4). And
yet, Ray Land, Julie Rattray, and Peter Vivian (2014) suggest that the
liminal space “has remained relatively ill- defined, something of a ‘black
box’ within the conceptual framework of Threshold Concepts” (201).
This chapter focuses on this liminal space. Specifically, we wanted to
better understand the nature, occurrence, and impact of liminality in
undergraduate writing through the lens of threshold concepts of writing, through which those concepts could in turn provide an effective
theoretical and pedagogical framework for our particular context. Our
setting is a relatively new writing center (established 2011) in an Irish
university that has an undergraduate population of 10,050 students and
a postgraduate enrollment of 1,900. Following a presentation of our
distilled findings, we explore and contextualize one key action- oriented
insight about undergraduates’ experiences with threshold concepts of
writing that emerged from the data, that of the coexistence of apparent liminality, a stage that can be paralyzing for students, and authentic
liminality, a stage that is important for students grappling with threshold
concepts and that is therefore productive and potentially transformative.
In the next section, we review literature that has contributed to these
ideas of liminality; following that review, we describe the research that
led us to these definitions
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