Threshold concepts: a new tool for learning law?

In this article from the Autumn 2008 issue of Directions Julian Webb (UKCLE Director and Professor of Legal Education at Warwick School of Law) explored the potential of ‘threshold concepts’ to provide a new access to deeper learning in law.

Julian is taking this work forward and with colleagues presented a workshop on Developing threshold concepts in legal education at Learning in Law Annual Conference 10.

One of the most rewarding, but sometimes most challenging, aspects of being a teacher is finding a better way to enable students to really understand a subject. What is it that generates those ‘eureka’ moments, when suddenly, or sometimes after a long struggle, our students come to a deep understanding of a new problem or concept? This is one of the questions that underlies a growing body of work on threshold concepts.

In educational theory a threshold concept is a ‘portal’ or gateway to a new understanding of a subject (Meyer & Land, 2003). Threshold concepts are not the same as the traditional core concepts of a subject. While core concepts (like consideration in contract) are the building blocks of the curriculum, things that have to be understood to progress knowledge and understanding of the subject, they do not necessarily create a qualitative shift in the student’s perspective on the subject. They are not necessarily transformative for the learner.

Threshold concepts, by contrast, are transformative. According to Meyer & Land they are also:

• integrative – they uncover previously hidden connections between phenomena
• potentially irreversible – once acquired they are likely to change the student’s perspective once and for all
• likely to constitute, or lead to what Perkins (1999) calls ‘troublesome knowledge’ – knowledge that is counter-intuitive, strange, or just prima facie wrong, and which, for that reason, is both challenging and ultimately enriching (see Meyer & Land, 2003; Meyer, Land & Davies, 2006)

Threshold concepts can be best understood as tacit constructs that often sit behind explicit domain knowledge, and may therefore operate as unrecognised, or at least unacknowledged, assumptions in a tutor’s teaching. Critically, however, if Meyer & Land are correct, it is these threshold concepts that are the real drivers for the core concepts and discourses within a discipline, and things that must be made explicit to students if they are to think effectively in the ways of that discipline.

Looked at in this light it is easy to see why the work on threshold concepts is generating a lot of interest in higher education. The notion of a threshold concept serves to turn our attention to aspects of the hidden curriculum which we know exists in every discipline. It offers a construct for re-examining the building blocks around which we design our curricula. But it also encourages us to think about how we teach, and how we can use the classroom itself as a space in which students can engage with and reflect on what Meyer & Land call liminality – the actual process and experience of crossing a threshold, through which transformative learning happens.

The explicit use of threshold concepts may thus help us achieve three things. First, it may provide a counter-balance to the tendency to overload the curriculum with substantive legal rules. This has often served to restrict students’ learning to a ritualised use of formal knowledge, at the expense of a deeper, more personalised, understanding of the law. Secondly, it may also help us provide students with greater opportunities to acquire independence in using legal concepts, since abstract knowledge is more likely to become personalised and transformative through use. Thirdly, it follows that a focus on threshold concepts also holds out perhaps greater potential for moving students beyond their established ways of thinking and problem solving.

The idea of threshold concepts could – and should – provide fertile ground for legal educationalists, however it has to be acknowledged that our understanding is at a relatively early stage, and that the construct itself is still contested within educational theory and practice (see for example Rowbottom, 2007). Although quite a lot of work has been done to identify threshold concepts in a number of fields (notably economics, Meyer & Land’s own discipline) there is still relatively little research into their application and development in other social science and humanities disciplines, including law. There are thus a number of key questions that require answers:

• to what extent are threshold concepts subject specific, so that, for example, the key threshold concepts for tort will differ from those in contract?
• is it plausible that there is a network of legal threshold concepts that are discipline wide and fundamental to making sense of the discipline? (Davies & Mangan (2007) have argued that this is the case for economics)
• if so, what are these concepts?

So far, I am not aware of any published work examining legal threshold concepts in any depth, but I suggest, intuitively, that some potential examples of the latter could include constructs such as analogy, materiality, responsibility, allocation of risk, and the like. These are, in most cases, quite big, relatively abstract (but also highly practical) concepts. If these are plausible options, we can certainly begin to see how a stronger focus on such concepts could open up some very different ways of organising and conceptualising the undergraduate curriculum, particularly in the first year, when so much of our students’ way of knowing and learning becomes established.

References

• Davies P & Mangan J (2007) ‘Recognising threshold concepts: an exploration of different approaches’ Studies in Higher Education 32(6):711-26
• Meyer J & Land R (2003) ‘Threshold concepts and troublesome knowledge: linkages to thinking and practising within the disciplines’ in C Rust (ed) Improving student learning: ten years on Oxford: Centre for Staff and Learning Development
• Meyer J, Land R & Davies P (2006) ‘Implications of threshold concepts for course design and evaluation’ in Meyer & Land (eds) Overcoming barriers to student understanding: threshold concepts and troublesome knowledge London: Routledge
• Perkins D (1999) ‘The many faces of constructivism’ Educational Leadership 57(3): 6-11
• Rowbottom D (2007) ‘Demystifying threshold concepts’ Journal of Philosophy of Education 41(2):263-270

Last Modified: 9 July 2010