Threshold Concepts in Religious Education: the portals to understanding!

I am very gratefully to Dawn ‘Missy’ Cox for the stimulus she has provided to explore the idea of Threshold concepts in RE. https://missdcoxblog.wordpress.com/2015/05/09/threshold-concepts-in-re-or-the-bits-that-hurt-the-brain/

When the 2013 Framework for RE was being developed we discussed using ‘threshold concepts’ as a key to unlock the content of our subject. At risk of endlessly repeating myself, we were searching for Tim Oates’ goal of doing: fewer things in greater depth so students really master the central concepts and ideas in the subject. And crucially Oates argues that assessment which should be focused on whether children have understood these key concepts, these key areas of knowledge and skills rather than whether they have reached a particular level’

I fear that two years ago we were not successful and the issue of core subject content was never properly addressed in the 2013 Framework.

As so often, I am grateful to Dawn and Mary Myatt for pointing me to a recent blog from David Didau in which he discusses threshold concepts. You can read his full piece here:

http://www.learningspy.co.uk/english-gcse/using-threshold-concepts-to-design-a-ks4-english-curriculum/

I am going to shamelessly quote from his blog and then think in terms of RE.

Didau begins by offering an explanation of threshold concepts:

“What makes a Threshold Concept different from, say, a ‘key concept’? Well, it appears that the areas of a subject at which students get stuck seem to be the most important bits. Further, more advanced ideas depend on the understanding of certain important fundamentals. In all subject domains and disciplines there are points which lead us into “previously inaccessible ways of thinking”. If a concept is a way of organising and making sense of what is known in a particular field, a threshold concept organises the knowledge and experience which makes an epiphany or ‘eureka moment’ possible.”

Didau goes on to say that a threshold concept will possess certain important qualities:

• Integrative: Once learned, they are likely to bring together different parts of the subject which you hadn’t previously seen as connected.
• Transformative: Once understood, they change the way you see the subject and yourself.
• Irreversible: They are difficult to unlearn – once you’ve passed through it’s difficult to see how it was possible not to have understood before.
• Reconstitutive: They may shift your sense of self over time. This is initially more likely to be noticed by others, usually teachers.
• Troublesome: They are likely to present you with a degree of difficulty and may sometimes seem incoherent or counter-intuitive.
• Discursive: The student’s ability to use the language associated with that subject changes as they change. It’s the change from using scientific keywords in everyday language to being able to fluently communicate in the academic language of science.

Jan Meyer and Ray Land, “Threshold Concepts and Troublesome Knowledge: Linkages to Ways of Thinking and Practising within the Disciplines”, ETL Project, Occasional Report 4, May 2003

If you want to explore further, this talk by Ray Land is excellent: https://vimeo.com/91920616 Thanks to Dawn for this link.

So how can we identify the threshold concepts of RE? Didau suggests they will be: “most obviously, the places students commonly get stuck”. He asks:

“What are the knots of your subject? The bits that give you the most trouble in communicating to classes? Often, these areas are the points at which many, seemingly unrelated, pieces of knowledge coalesce into meaning. With this as our starting point we can start to map out what these concepts might be for a particular subject area.”

SO, what might they be in RE? I would invite further thoughts on this.

I assume that they will be expressed differently at different stages of a child’s education – but the level of mastery at each stage will be the key to assessment!!!

For RE, some of the threshold concepts might be:

• Understanding the core ideas which lie at the heart of any religious or non-religious traidtion: sin/incarnation/ resurrection; tawhid/ummah/shariah; etc. etc.
• Understanding that human experience throws up questions of meaning and purpose
• Understanding the relationship between experience, belief, practice and values
• Understanding the dynamic between religion and spirituality
• Understanding the contested nature of religion and belief
• Understanding the diversity of interpretation within and across religions and beliefs
• Understanding the way religious or belief commitment affects people’s lives
• Understanding the metaphorical/ symbolic nature of religious/belief language

The argument would be that whenever pupils are engaging in any work in RE the learning needs to lead towards extending and deepening their grasp of one or more of these threshold concepts.