Virna Rossi
One of the main issues in designing creative courses is ‘measurability’: in creative education important outcomes involve the development of intuition, inventiveness, imagination, visualisation, risk-taking, which are not easily measured. Another issue is to do with the ‘spiral nature’ of learning in creative courses: outcomes are not achieved/addressed once and for all. Rather, they are regularly returned to within and beyond levels.
Threshold Concepts (TC) After reading Pace’s work on ‘Decoding the disciplines’ and Land and Meyer work on ‘Threshold concepts – implications for curriculum design’, it became apparent that TC lend themselves much better to describing and decoding creative disciplines. They can both be seen as gateways into the disciplines and help identify typical bottlenecks where students can get stuck. This presentation discusses the development of a learning design tool using TC as one of three frameworks to support academics (re-)designing creative curricula.
The curriculum design workshop revolves around identifying perceived TC for the curriculum to be (re-)designed. This is a more useful starting point than formulating LOs. Where necessary, TC can eventually be used to formulate LOs for course documentation and QA purposes. The pilot was highly successful. Many participants said that using TC was a real eye opener to the way students learn. One said that thanks to using TC for the first time she truly understood her discipline. Other findings following the pilot are suggestions for further uses of TC, such as for end-of Unit revision and consolidation of learning. This could be both from the teacher and the student perspectives.
The presentation will be of particular interest to academics and educational developers in Creative Education. It is also useful to those who would like to combine TC with other frameworks in learning (curriculum) design.
Threshold Concepts 