Ray Land

Durham University | DU · School of Education

Hilary Neve and Linda Martindale, members of the editorial team for this special Issue of the International Journal of Practice-based Learning in Health and Social Care, undertook this interview with Ray Land in June 2018. The interview was transcribed verbatim and subsequently edited for publication. In this, Ray Land considers the impact of thres...

In preparing to face a globalised society characterised by uncertainty, complexity, risk and speed, academics and their students, it will be argued here, need to encounter a certain strangeness, dealing with knowledge that is uncomfortable, challenging and troublesome.

This chapter arises from doctoral research into the threshold concepts required to transform civilians into soldiers, and subsequently into military officers. In addition to identifying the conceptual thresholds involved in a successful transformation, the study also attempts to determine the necessary ontological shifts that such a transformation...

This chapter explores the nature of trouble in professional learning, using the case of research learning in the undergraduate nursing curriculum. It draws on the results of a study that identified threshold concepts in research education for undergraduate nursing students and explored the nature of trouble within these threshold concepts. We will...

A powerful discursive shift has occurred within higher education globally over the last three decades in which higher education teaching is rendered as the facilitation of ‘the student learning experience’, and as a primarily economic rather than educational transaction (Apple, 2000).

"Threshold Concepts in Practice brings together fifty researchers from sixteen countries and a wide variety of disciplines to analyse their teaching practice, and the learning experiences of their students, through the lens of the Threshold Concepts Framework. In any discipline, there are certain concepts – the ‘jewels in the curriculum’ – whose...

However we decide to facilitate the Academy, our deliberations will eventually, inevitably, oblige us to consider the Academy's curriculum, the nature of the knowledge we wish our students to encounter, and the nature of their learning and engagement. We need also to contemplate the kinds of attributes our graduates will need as they enter society...

The threshold concepts approach to student learning and curriculum design now informs an empirical research base comprising over 170 disciplinary and professional contexts. It draws extensively on the notion of troublesomeness in a ‘liminal’ space of learning. The latter is a transformative state in the process of learning in which there is a refor...

It must be remembered that there is nothing more difficult to plan, more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to manage than the creation of a new system. For the initiator has the enmity of all who would profit by the preservation of the old institution and merely lukewarm defenders in those who should gain by the new ones.

In this chapter, the complex and distinctive nature of surgical practice is analysed through applying the conceptual framework of ‘Threshold Concepts and Troublesome Knowledge’ to interview data with practising surgeons. In terms of the characteristic features of threshold concepts, the experience of uncertainty emerges as a strong candidate, as do...

This chapter considers how the nature of academic knowledge is inevitably being transformed in the digital university when the latter’s modes of production and exchange employ technologies that transmit data, through fibre optics, at the speed of light. Whilst remaining aware of arguments that draw too easily on notions of technological determinism...

A sense of disquietude seems ever present when discussing new digital practices. The transformations incurred through these can be profound, troublesome in nature and far-reaching. Moral panics remain readily available. Discussing the manner in which digital culture within education might differ from its ‘analogue’ predecessors incurs the risk of r...

Abstract This paper presents some of the findings from a recent project that conducted a virtual ethnographic study of three formal courses in higher education that use ‘Web 2.0’ or social technologies for learning and teaching. It describes the pedagogies adopted within these courses, and goes on to explore some key themes emerging from the resear...

Using Milton's Paradise Lost as metaphor, this article examines shifting positions of authority, and the role of technology, in higher education practice. As higher education becomes caught up in the performative agendas of globalised market rationalism, technology is mobilised in a specific way which sits uncomfortably with disciplinary culture, m...

The volatile modes of online interaction characterised as 'Web 2.0' often sit uncomfortably within existing higher education practice. The communicative landscapes opened up by social media can be spaces of strangeness and troublesomeness to the academy, both epistemologically and ontologically. They entail a shift toward new and volatile forms of...

The present study builds on earlier work by Meyer and Land (2003) which introduced the generative notion of threshold concepts within (and across) disciplines, in the sense of transforming the internal view of subject matter or part thereof. In this earlier work such concepts were further linked to forms of knowledge that are troublesome, after the...

This paper arises from ongoing research undertaken by the Economics team of the ESRC/ TLRP Project 'Enhancing Teaching and Learning Environments' (ETL) 1 . This forms part of the large scale ESRC Teaching and Learning Research Programme Phase 2. ETL is seeking to identify factors leading to high quality learning environments within five disciplinar...

There has been considerable interest and activity throughout the last decade in the design and implementation of networked learning initiatives in higher education. Many of these initiatives have been evaluated subsequently at institutional or consortial/regional level and the findings disseminated. It is more unusual however to find evaluation of...

The aim of this paper is to provide an overview of what the authors believe to be a useful approach to teaching Information Management concepts and skills at honors (Hons) degree level. With Information Management being a somewhat diverse area, incorporating a number of areas and skills, one of the potential problems is considering how the subject...

This article explores the notions of change that seem to underpin the ways in which academic developers practice within specific organizational contexts and cultures. Drawing on a two-year empirical study across UK institutions it links concepts of change to the different 'orientations' that developers consider appropriate to their strategic terrai...

Group work projects are increasingly used in higher education, but there is little guidance on how best to allocate students to groups. If groups can be engineered to contain compatible people, then the process of group work may be easier and more productive. The Honey and Mumford learning styles questionnaire provides a quick and easy way in which...

This article details the challenges that the authors faced in designing and carrying out two recent large-scale evaluations of programmes designed to foster the use of ICT in UK higher education. Key concerns that have been identified within the evaluation literature are considered and an account is given of how these concerns were addressed within...

The aim of this paper is to provide an overview of what the authors believe to be a useful approach to teaching Information Management concepts and skills at honors (Hons) degree level. With Information Management being a somewhat diverse area, incorporating a number of areas and skills, one of the potential problems is considering how the subject...

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The post-compulsory education sector includes all education beyond the school leaving age, encompassing health care education, higher, further and adult education. The training of teachers for this sector has occurred in two main modes, pre-service and in-service. Pre-service teacher training is aimed at suitably qualified professional and commerci...

Counter positioning virtual learning environments with traditional face to face learning has given rise to comparisons in which cyberspace education is represented as inauthentic, as a relatively impoverished experience. Recent commentaries (for example Dreyfus, 2001) suggest that an explanatory factor in this perceived lack of intensity is the abs...

This paper considers the implications for networked learning of the perspective of dromology (Greek: dromos, 'running'). Theorists such as Virilio (1999; 2000), Adam (1998) and Eriksen (2001) have argued that the defining characteristics of our society, and an increasing source of its hazards, are its relentless acceleration and compression of time...