Presented by Sheila Webber and Bill Johnston at the European Conference on Information Literacy, held in Prague, 11 October 2016

1. Information Literacy,
Threshold Concepts, and
Disciplinarity
Sheila Webber, Information School, University of Sheffield
Bill Johnston, University of Strathclyde
ECIL, Prague, October 2016

2. Threshold Concepts
• Transformative concepts within disciplines
• Identified by experienced teachers in their discipline
• Enable learners to conceive the subject in a new way &
experience possibilities for deeper disciplinary thinking
and practice
• Mayer & Land (2005: 386) identify ways for educators to
use TCs to facilitate “epistemological transitions, and
ontological transformations”
• They note danger of structuring teaching mechanistically,
which might encourage mimicry rather than understanding
Sheila Webber & Bill Johnston, 2016

3. Threshold
Concepts
Thinking &
Practising in the
disciplines
Variation Theory
Phenomenographic
Research
Part of wider landscape of pedagogical research
on disciplines’ teaching and learning
Approaches to
Learning Entwistle &
Tomlinson
(2007)Marton,
Hounsell
and
Entwistle
(1984)
Meyer &
Land
(2003)
Teaching-
Learning
Environment
Akerlind,
McKenzie,
Lupton, and
Trigwell
(2010)
Constructive
alignment
Biggs & Tang (4th ed.) (2011)
Sheila Webber & Bill Johnston, 2016
Key strands

4. Weaving the strands of
pedagogical research
• “threshold concepts are used to
determine areas of the curriculum that
require focused design attention;
• “phenomenographic action research
is used to identify what it is about
these concepts that students find
difficult to understand and
• “variation theory is used to guide the
design of teaching and learning
activities to address these difficulties.”
(Akerlind, McKenzie & Lupton 2014:
228)

5. TCs disconnected:
consequences & anomalies of
separation
Sheila Webber & Bill Johnston, 2016

6. • Sidestepping the question of disciplinarity: focus on
librarians teaching IL to learners of other disciplines
• No study of TCs in IL for people studying IL as a
discipline in its own right
• TCs fixed within the ACRL Framework project, not
acknowledging that IL is experienced differently in
different disciplines (though note that librarians are
exhorted to develop framework in own context)
• ACRL Framework has been criticised, but often seen
as issue with TCs, rather than issue of not
approaching TCs in way originally intended
Some anomalies
Sheila Webber & Bill Johnston, 2016

7. Consequences of transplantation
• Issues arising from appropriating TCs to a
situation constrained by the barriers which
librarians face in developing IL education
• Evidence that there is pressure to incorporate TCs
in reductive ways (e.g, Oakleaf, 2014)
• This can negate transformative possibilities and
lead to mimicry and surface learning
Sheila Webber & Bill Johnston, 2016

8. Reconnecting with the
pedagogical research
for the IL discipline
Sheila Webber & Bill Johnston, 2016

9. Applied pedagogical research:
the case of IL
• Teaching IL to those learning IL as a discipline –
currently, mainly trainee librarians
• Akerlind et al. 3-strand approach plausible and
productive
• Constraints
– Problem of discipline-denial within the LIS community
– Epistemology of the discipline vs. body of knowledge of
the profession
Sheila Webber & Bill Johnston, 2016

10. TCs in the discipline of IL
• ACRL provides an experiment in the application of TC theory
to IL
• Also need to reflect on context from which pedagogic
theories arise & and the context in which you are going to
use them
• Given that librarians are central to teaching IL, it is important
that trainee librarians engage with the complexity of the
discipline of IL
• You discover the TCs by asking those who are teaching IL to
people who are studying IL
• This has yet to be done: need investigation of IL as a
discipline, to inform the next generation of librarians and
educators
Sheila Webber & Bill Johnston, 2016

11. Sheila Webber
Information School
University of Sheffield
s.webber@shef.ac.uk
Twitter & SL: Sheila Yoshikawa
http://information-literacy.blogspot.com/
http://www.slideshare.net/sheilawebber/
Orcid ID 0000-0002-2280-9519
Pictures by Sheila Webber
taken in Second Life (a trademark
of Linden Lab)
Bill Johnston
Honorary Research Fellow
University of Strathclyde
b.johnston@strath.ac.uk

12. • Åkerlind , G., McKenzie , J. and Lupton, M. (2014). The potential of combining phenomenography,
variation theory and threshold concepts to inform curriculum design in higher education. In J.
Huisman and M. Tight (eds.) Theory and method in Higher Education research II . (pp.227-247)
Bingley, England: Emerald Group Publishing Limited.
• Åkerlind, G., McKenzie, J., Lupton, M., Trigwell, K. (2010) Threshold Concepts and Variation
Theory. http://thresholdvariation.edu.au/
• Biggs, J. and Tang, C. (2011). Teaching for quality learning at university. 4th ed. Milton Keynes,
England: Open University Press.
• Entwistle, N. and Tomlinson, P. (Eds.) (2007). Student learning and university teaching. (pp. 73-
90). Leicester, England: British Psychological Society.
• Marton, F., Hounsell, D. and Entwistle, N. (Eds.) (1984) The experience of learning. Edinburgh,
Scotland: Scottish Academic Press.
• Meyer, J. and Land, R. (2005). Threshold concepts and troublesome knowledge (2):
epistemological considerations and a conceptual framework for teaching and learning. Higher
Education, 49, 373–388
• Meyer, J. and Land, R. (2003). Threshold concepts and troublesome knowledge: linkages to ways
of thinking and practicing within the disciplines. http://www.etl.tla.ed.ac.uk/docs/ETLreport4.pdf
• Oakleaf, M. (2014). A roadmap for assessing student learning using the new framework for
information literacy for higher education. The Journal of Academic Librarianship, 40(5), 510-514.
Sheila Webber & Bill Johnston, 2016