Threshold, Portals and Liminality

Li-min –al. What a lovely word. I’d never heard of it before the University’s Creativity Day when Professor Ray Land of the Centre for Academic Practice & Learning Enhancement at Strathclyde University presented his theories. Liminality, he said was the space in which you could try out a new way of thinking before being spat out the other side, transformed forever. It was the rite of passage, the Office Christmas Party after which nothing will ever be the same again, the time out of time where anything is allowed.

It’s so much nicer a concept to chew on than the mathematical equations he and co-writer, Jan Meyers use to illustrate much the same idea in their article Threshold Concepts and Troublesome Knowledge: Linkages to Ways of Thinking and Practising within the Disciplines. Don’t you think?

It seems to me to be much the same idea as Land and Meyer’s ‘threshold concept’ (2003) (which they also discuss in the Higher Education article, Threshold concepts and troublesome knowledge (2): Epistemological considerations and a conceptual framework for teaching and learning.) Applied to my teaching, it’s the two hours a week my students commit to diving head first into the ‘conceptually difficult, counter-intuitive or alien’, a step into the portal, that dark space of ‘troublesome knowledge’ that Land and Meyer refer to in their article.

Passing on knowledge to our students is what most of us do during our working week, although I see it more as cutting a slice into the sky, a Pullman-inspired leap of faith into somewhere new. Lyra and Will may pop in and out of their parallel universe but they never go back to where they started. It’s the same with deconstructing a radio or TV programme; you can watch the news all you like but once you’ve taken it apart, you’ll never see it the same way again. Those absences that Land and Meyer refer to in their discussion on deconstruction are precisely what we’re looking for.

That leap is what I think creativity is all about. Ok, so it’s not exactly hang-gliding, but by providing students with a formula for deconstructing stories over and over and over again, encouraging them to pick them up and try them out in different forms (the magazine show item, the news item, the documentary, the film), the baby steps do slowly but surely turn into confident strides towards the edge. Once they’re there, anything is possible.

If creativity is to be the most important tool of the 21st century student as Land argued on that University Creativity Day, we, the lecturers need to know exactly what it means, what it’s for and what we need to do to find our own. Its paradoxical elements mean that it’s about tension and release, about letting go and being lost, a big deal for 19 year old students who have yet to find themselves in the first place. Unless, that is, we use words to give them a soft landing. Words like ‘liminal’ and ‘space’. And with words come the pictures, and with pictures comes the context, and with the context come the boundaries.

The rite of passage and the threshold concept are inextricably linked, and although university is where our students dive into it, it’s everywhere. I crossed a threshold myself with Professor Land that day. Suddenly my terrifying maiden paper at a conference the next day found form. Jamie Oliver, the culinary crusader of British food culture who was my presentation subject, became Odysseus ploughing through waves of complacency and cynicism towards his dream of a new discourse. Jools was the faithful Penelope with Daisy Boo, Poppy Honey and whatever the new one’s called, a composite Telemachus, sharpening their kiddy slings and arrows against whatever outrageous fortune might throw at their dad. Television was his trusty vessel and that mountain top above the Amalfi Coast where he sat with his (ship) mates sipping beer on the eve of his 30th birthday, his liminal space. The letting go of the ego, the lapse into chaos, the ‘what’s it all for?’ moment before rising again, this time to enter a new dawn in TV food. Transformed, radically changed, he was ready to fight a new fight. The question is whether TV is ready to offer the new discourse.

But what we witnessed was true creativity. According to Land, it necessarily involves the risk of failure, the exposure of weakness and instability, and from that baptism of fire emerges the true hero. Without wanting to burst into song, therein lies the point. It’s in all of us. And it’s up to us as lecturers to offer the winkle pickers. And the tissues.

My workshop on automatic writing with my fellow lecturers which followed Professor Land’s morning session, offered a pink flip flop, a bottle of black nail polish and a marble among a myriad of story-nudgers I had brought from home. Picking one each, we grabbed our ten minutes and dived into liminality, pen glued to paper and arms aching as thoughts we didn’t recognise as our own coursed through to the page.

After our ten minutes of writing, we all emerged refreshed, changed in some way, slightly shocked and more than a little embarrassed at finding that someone we hadn’t known had been camping deep inside us. And in that perfectly British way, the welcome was immediate as we offered it a helping hand, and a place further up our consciousness. I think Professor Land would call it a 'new conceptual terrain'.