A4/B4 Supplementary notes

 

Doctoral learning journeys: threshold concepts, conceptual threshold crossing and the role of supervisors and research development programmes

Gina Wisker                  CLT University of Brighton

Vitae conference               London 2008

 

This project investigates how doctoral students* across disciplines can be best supported to make ‘learning leaps', to recognise and cross conceptual and skills thresholds in their research. The project responds to current national and international concerns about the nature of the doctorate, its purpose and value for different stakeholders. The research will (a) explore and conceptualise the nature of doctoral students' learning during research and skill development; and (b) examine and enhance the practices of supervisors and examiners in order to support and assess students' learning. Quantitative and qualitative approaches are combined in four research stages: Stage A comprises a large-scale survey of doctoral students, investigating their learning processes, experiences and development; Stage B maps the individual learning journeys of 16-20 doctoral students through narrative interviews and journaling; Stage C involves research interviews with doctoral supervisors, examiners and research programme leaders; Stage D develops theoretical models and resource materials relating to supervisory strategies, e-learning environments and written texts to support doctoral students' learning and scholarly progression. These outcomes will accompany academic presentations and publications that advance conceptual understanding of doctoral processes and student learning.

Background and reference to relevant literature

Research at the doctoral level has critical points when students make ‘learning leaps', moving their work beyond descriptive fact-finding, to conceptual levels of understanding.  These ‘aha' moments represent ‘leaps of faith' beyond their comfort zones when students acquire new ways of seeing their research.  Thus, they experience conceptual paradigm shifts regarding their research and themselves.        Meyer and Land's (2003) notion of ‘threshold concepts' encapsulates such ‘new ways of                seeing.' They identify core learning outcomes with examples from pure maths (complex numbers; limits); literary studies (signification); and economics (opportunity cost). Their evidence shows that a threshold concept will be:

‘transformative' - leading to significant, and probably irreversible, shifts in perception;

‘integrative' - exposing previously hidden interrelatedness of something;

‘bounded' - bordering into new conceptual areas;

‘troublesome' - conceptually difficult, counter-intuitive or alien.

Students passing through the ‘portal' opened by a threshold concept experience change in their use of symbolic language, understanding of their discipline and conceptual appreciation of research issues. Threshold crossing also involves a state of liminality, whereby students ‘strip away' the old and pass into the new. However, they may be stuck in this liminal state between older understandings and new appreciation of concepts (Land et al, 2005). Here, ‘mimicry' may be employed as if they have elevated status within their discipline community (Meyer and Land, 2005). The mimicry displayed when passing through a conceptual threshold is distinguishable from ritualised ‘parrot fashion' learning. Thus, liminality is when students are on the threshold of deeper conceptual understandings, often becoming frustrated, losing confidence or dropping out (Land et al, 2005; Trafford 2007).

Like Meyer and Land we believe that "Gaining clearer insights into why some students find it troublesome both to understand and to express particular threshold concepts, and into why certain students undergo a transformational or even creative experience in what we have termed the liminal space of learning, whilst others clearly get 'stuck', is...a quest well worth pursuing" (Meyer and Land, 2005). Investigations into discipline-based epistemological and pedagogical aspects of ‘threshold concepts' occur within economics, Reimann and Jackson (2003), Shanahan et al (2006); within accounting, Davis and Mangan (2005), Lucas and Mladenovic (2006); within health professions Clouder (2005); and, within geography, GEES colleagues (2006). These studies focus on undergraduate learning rather than doctoral study.

The Project Team (Team) has sought to remedy this imbalance. At the doctoral level we have identified and explored (A) Discipline-specific threshold concepts; (B) Generic conceptual thresholds. We conclude that doctoral conceptual threshold crossing includes:

ontological shifts - security of self is challenged;

epistemological shifts - knowledge is problematised and deepened.

How do doctoral students signify their awareness of working conceptually?

How do students' conceptual grasp and comments display crossing of subject-specific and generic doctoral thresholds?

How do supervisors recognise students' conceptual grasp of research? 

What strategies and activities do supervisors use to encourage conceptual grasp by doctoral students?

How do examiners identify and assess conceptually-robust research outcomes and skills developments?

Cases  to discuss

Students   :   Evidence of the ontological and epistemological shift in the work of students

What is happening here?

1)  B        I think er meeting with supervisors for me is a point on time that I need to er hear myself. It's not to hear myself er. I need some feedbacks anyway but I think that er hearing myself is very important for me. I can talk to myself but I need this, I need to hear it another voice and it happened that after my meetings with X and Y something, there are some breakthroughs in my research but it wasn't at the time of the meeting. It was 1 or 2 days after that so, I had the feeling that I'm, before the meeting I'm I know something that is er good which is a bit er raw material but er after hearing myself saying it, saying that and after meetings I understand that I'm what it really means. So I think that the meeting is a very important phases or point in time but er it doesn't happen in the meeting. It happens just before, after, sorry.

2)  Y) 'I have difficulties to write - for me to start writing it takes a day.'  'I was collecting, collecting, collecting - I took a place and sat in a good library for one month, it was my good time to produce'.

'I have to put all the pieces into one work - then I had the problem with the computer and with the .....'there's a minute when you have to stop' 

3)             Well, actually, I wasn't talking about the thinking right, I was talking about er I think more about the er I have the word, it is [?]. To be more attuned to my task when I am coming here. So, I am kind of collecting from the basket all the skills that I need to the task. So, that is one thing. Er in the way of thinking er again, I feel that I er, I tell you, I give you an example er yesterday night er I was going with in the car, we went to X , we were invited to X and suddenly I heard, I saw the matrix that I want of the variables. I said, yes, give me the paper, I have everything, you know. Like from this side and this side, I have everything written and it can be also at home but if you are doing this brainstorming in this atmosphere, I think that this thing can happen especially in times like that and this is something in the thinking in terms of er, er joining variables and understanding like the er like the triangulation which was much more clearer to me this time and then I kind of said, ok triangulation this and this and this, you know, so er I don't know if that answers more about the thinking er process, ok.

Do these students seem to have crossed conceptual thresholds in their work making it:

Conceptual

Critical

Creative enough                                                      How and where?

 

Supervisors

(4  ) F 1  One of the things that you get an idea that the students have actually crossed that threshold is when they start to ask you higher level questions. And all of a sudden they are not asking any more if this is red or if this is blue but all of a sudden their level of questioning is on a whole different plane and its very exciting

(5)   I: You hear that they have switched and shifted. The question is how do you get them there? Through our questioning like that they learn to produce

Female voice 8: Yes and I think that is a very exciting part

I : An exciting moment. This ownership is what we are talking about quite a lot. Other things .....? To do with how you recognise it and how you nudge it.

Male voice 1: I think we spent more time talking about how to help students to think about a particular conceptual framework and we thought of using metaphors and symbols and proverbs and using Jamaican proverbs...so you get the person thinking, you want to think of the whole project, in that there are steps, step by step....

(6)   Male voice 2: One of the things we said here was that the students who have established that conceptual framework, that he or she is go to work within might be working conceptually when he or she is able to relate a lot of the theories that undergirded that conceptual framework, relate them to his or her work, its design, to the findings and to the interpretations that he or she is making of the research.

Female voice 3: When you are inside the forest you can see the individual trees and the sun and the forest doesn't have the same conceptual framework until you can see from outside and so it is almost an attachment between the thing, and we talk about the thing the forest, and then there was the elephant here!

Nudging students across the thresholds: In  supervisors' words 

(1) And usually their first drafts are hardly ever very good. They just don't know where to start. But you can help them a lot by a couple of helpful things like what does this concept mean?. And they will often write to the wrong audience that needs to be very self evident what it means to a broader audience rather than informed people. If they start using very technical terms, like hybridity, they will lose people that read it, so you have to help them with that.

(2) When they are writing that's when I work really hard with the students. They send me each chapter sometimes several chapters. It's me that goes through the threshold.

That's why prompting of this student. If I hadn't realised I couldn't have answered the question. We have to go through their threshold before we know which questions to ask. We can't tell them.

(3)   Male voice 3: Well we were talking a little bit about post modernism and aspects of truth and we thought that the student might be like one of those 5 blind men, surrounding an elephant, one is describing the nose or the mouth, another describing the side, another describing the foot and they all have different concepts, what truth is about but they are all talking about parts of truth and one of us would be able to take a view of the whole subject from afar and not those others because they are already telling me what they are thinking or what they understand about a particular thing.

I : So what do you do to get the students...if we what them to get them to stand back and see that something stands for something else and something is bigger than the sum of its parts what do you do with them?

Female voice 3: Take them to the forest

I: And get them to go back out again. You mean metaphorically?

Female voice and Another Male voice: Yes

I : Let them plunge into all this mess and then step back.

(4)  Science voice: In the science base, we look at our results, preliminary results and that we just to know we are getting the conceptual framework on the right path, so from our preliminary results we know that we can move ahead or we need to go back to the baseline. It is our preliminary results that will lead us to move onwards to hope we are getting to our conceptual theories.

5)(artist) In terms of 'helping students through conceptual thresholds'. In my experience the student has identified a blockage, the nature of the blockage has been discovered through supervisory dialogue and the conceptual threshold has been crossed when a deeper and usually more conceptual understanding has been reached. These have been moments of 'insight' and connected to being able to identify the particular threshold concept that has enabled the making of new connections from what was previously a 'collection' thus removing the 'blockage'.

(6)  Literature and education

In discussion with students about their theses there's moments which I can visualise a kind of matrix of interlocking ideas and images which represent the unique contribution of their work and the step up they're making. This emerges out of a grey blank left space - and then if I can articulate it, they have to work to understand those nudges through statement questioning e.g. Can you see it? What does it mean? How do these things connect to you?

When you realise it you can steer the discussion to enable the student to clarify, arrange, challenge, destruct and reconstruct and create a way to move forward as mini  thresholds