WP3

Chris Medina

Zack De Piero

Writing 2

4 March 2016

Integrating Threshold Concepts

Summary:

            For my scholarly article, I have chosen “Overcoming Barriers to Student Understanding: Threshold concepts and troublesome knowledge” by Jan H.F. Meyer and Ray Land. The article introduces the idea of “threshold concepts” which are fundamental concepts that when acquired, brings one closer to understanding the subject while triggering different perspectives on the matter. Threshold concepts have five characteristics: transformative, irreversible, integrative, bounded, and troublesome. Learning some of these concepts are problematic, putting them in the category of troublesome. Within the troublesome aspect of TC’s, there are six types of troublesome knowledge: ritual, inert, conceptually difficult, alien, tacit, and troublesome language. Understanding threshold concepts helps teachers understand students’ process of learning, thus enabling them to improve their way of teaching.

Links:

Younger Audience (For full experience open as slideshow)

Older Audience

Analysis:

            The genre I chose for younger audiences – 1^st grade to 4^th grade – is an interactive story using PowerPoint. Throughout the story, I provided choices that kids can make to change the direction of the protagonist by clicking on the choices. This is possible through PowerPoint’s hyperlinking capabilities. I wanted to make it interactive as I thought of how stories are more fun for children especially if they are part of it.

The main theme of the story that I was aiming for was for the protagonist, Alaska, to have a changes in perspective connecting it to the article “Overcoming Barriers to Student Understanding: Threshold concepts and troublesome knowledge”. I intended to make Alaska relatable to the children by letting them make the choices to solve his problems regarding, simple topics such as color, and shapes. Alaska learns and gains new perspectives throughout the story with the help of the children. He is portrayed to have problems that he must solve, but in reality, it is the children who are solving these problems. By allowing children to be in control of Alaska’s successes and failures, I think kids are able to learn with Alaska. I thought threshold concepts was too complicated of a topic for children, so I decided not to explicitly mention it. This constraint, as said in Laura Carroll’s essay in Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing, “limit the way discourse is delivered or communicated” (Carroll). I did however include the main idea of TC’s.

The main idea of TC’s is the change in perspective one gets by learning something new. The story is set up where there are multiple events that lead to Alaska gaining a new perspective after learning something new. For example, Alaska’s favorite color is purple, but after learning that purple sea urchins are dangerous, he realizes that the notion of purple can expand to more than just aesthetics. When kids are first being taught shapes, they have those toys where they put blocks into holes of the same shape. Young kids might think that blocks fit into holes of the same shape and stop there. They might not understand the concept of size where blocks fit in holes because of the smaller size of the blocks or the bigger size of the holes. This is a form of troublesome knowledge known as ritual knowledge, which is knowledge that is routinely learned without getting a grasp of the bigger picture (Meyer). Simple as the topic seem to be, young children may still have a difficult time comprehending.

My decision to pick an animal as the protagonist is because many popular children’s characters are anthropomorphic animals. I think it is fun, cute, and add a little bit of fantasy that child readers enjoy. Since the protagonist is a sea otter, I chose a blue background that is similar to the sea. I used bright backgrounds and fonts to keep children attracted to the story.  Alaska’s and his teacher’s lines were put inside a textbox to imply that the lines are being spoken by them and not being narrated.

My original plan for an older genre is a restaurant menu, but I didn’t know how to put enough textual description that will show my genre’s connection to my scholarly article. So I decided to make a Yelp review of a restaurant. This way, I can describe the food and connect it to threshold concepts. Like, in my interactive story genre, I explicitly left out threshold concepts. I do not think that the average Yelp reviewer is aware of what TC’s are. However, I did include the idea that TC’s represent. In my PowerPoint, the interactive story is used to teach kids about different perspectives through examples, but my Yelp review’s purpose is to just show examples of gaining new perspectives. My main goal was to demonstrate how food is information.

People have different likes and tastes in food and sometimes it’s because of preconceptions they have about the food. After someone tastes a certain type of food for the first time, they get information on what it tastes like and how they feel tasting it. This could lead to them liking the food or hating it. In the second review, Marissa after having a bad experience with shrimp assumes that all types of seafood is bad until she tried her boyfriend’s which she thought was okay. Not bad, but okay. Some people who have never personally tasted food but only heard about how it tastes will gain a new perspective after they taste it themselves. For Choudhury, his inexperience with eating beef, possibly because of religious reasons, led him to be unaware of the hype that is beef. Once he tasted the vegetarian imitation of beef and learns of beef’s taste, he becomes part of the hype. The third reviewer, has his own reasons for eating at “One for All”, which is for the spicy wings. For each level of spiciness that he passes, he gets new information of spiciness and enters a portal that changes his perspective on the spiciness of each level. After reaching the 15^th level, he may think that level 5 was not as bad as he thought when he was in level 4. I gave all these reviewers different purposes of eating in “One for All” to represent the vast perspectives that people have, especially when it comes to food. This allows the readers of the reviews to relate to the reviewers, which builds up their ethos, “the credibility of the rhetor” (Carroll). They are seen as the normal everyday people who have the same appreciation for food as the readers.

Works Cited

Carroll, Laura. Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing. West Lafayette, IN: Parlor, 2010. Print.

Meyer, Jan, and Ray Land. Overcoming Barriers to Student Understanding: Threshold Concepts and Troublesome Knowledge. Print.