Liminality in higher education – gaps and moments of uncertainty as legitimate learning spaces.

Higher Education, learning and teaching philosophy is beginning to acknowledge that programmes crammed full of top down knowledge (Fox & Radloff 1999) are not the best way for teachers to teach or students to learn. Therefore, academically dense lectures and programmes packed with knowledge and information might not be conducive to student learning in the ‘google’ era, when information is readily available at the click of a button. With ideas such as the flipped classroom (Tucker 2012), we are beginning to consider that students should play a greater role in the teaching and learning process and that they be given new, evolving and appropriate spaces in the curriculum in which to do that. In this chapter, the notion of liminal spaces, gaps and moments of uncertainty within programmes of study, and threshold concepts (Meyer and Land, 2003) will be considered. This is a relatively new idea in Higher Education, which focuses on shifts in thinking and learning within the context of liminal spaces. Pete Scales brings many years of HE experience, whilst Clive Holmwood shares his anthropological understanding of space from a therapist’s perspective. Together they begin to consider the legitimate importance of gaps and spaces in the teaching curriculum; suggesting that these ambiguous spaces are where ‘deep learning’ (Biggs & Tang 2011) can potentially take place.

Higher Education, learning and teaching philosophy is beginning to acknowledge that programmes crammed full of top down knowledge (Fox & Radloff 1999) are not the best way for teachers to teach or students to learn. Therefore, academically dense lectures and programmes packed with knowledge and information might not be conducive to student learning in the ‘google’ era, when information is readily available at the click of a button. With ideas such as the flipped classroom (Tucker 2012), we are beginning to consider that students should play a greater role in the teaching and learning process and that they be given new, evolving and appropriate spaces in the curriculum in which to do that.
In this chapter, the notion of liminal spaces, gaps and moments of uncertainty within programmes of study, and threshold concepts (Meyer and Land, 2003) will be considered. This is a relatively new idea in Higher Education, which focuses on shifts in thinking and learning within the context of liminal spaces. Pete Scales brings many years of HE experience, whilst Clive Holmwood shares his anthropological understanding of space from a therapist’s perspective. Together they begin to consider the legitimate importance of gaps and spaces in the teaching curriculum; suggesting that these ambiguous spaces are where ‘deep learning’ (Biggs & Tang 2011) can potentially take place.