Threshold Concepts in History

A few years ago campus was abuzz about something called “threshold concepts.” While we no longer talk much about these things (and instead have refocused our attention on “high impact practices,” the idea returned to my head this week as I finished grading my undergraduate history methods class. The idea of a threshold concept, if I understand it completely, is that certain concepts form barriers to students moving from one level of understanding to the next. These threshold tend to represent irreversible developments in student understanding and serve as stepping stones that allow students to move from simple to more complex disciplinary tasks. 

As our historical methods class is required for our majors and is designed to introduce and help students come to terms with both a number of related threshold concepts in history as well as basic narrative of our discipline. More specifically, the course does three things. First, it introduces majors to the history of our discipline from Herodotus to the 21st century and the rise of digital practices. Second, it works with students on disciplinary writing practices that range from niggling issues of style to organization and argument. Finally, it works with our majors to develop practical research skills from bibliography building to problematizing a historical question. To my mind, the key threshold concepts are (1) the ability to recognize the complex grey area between primary and secondary sources, (2) the ability to move beyond facile claims of “bias” toward recognizing that all sources offer distinct perspectives on the past, and (3) to develop an ability to recognize the debates that motivate scholars in academic writing.

The final paper in this class asks students to write a prospectus for an undergraduate capstone paper. The goal of the paper is for students to problematize a historical issue using historiography. To do so, they need to use skills that they’ve developed to research in an efficient and focused way. More importantly, however, the have to recognize the conversations between scholars that motivate their research. This means that they need to be able to read for not only content and detail (or “facts”) – something that students already tend to do well – but also for argument. To introduce students to this kind of reading, I not only have them write papers where they make their arguments explicit, but we also read examples of well-made historical arguments. The hope is that by watching and by doing, students become familiar with the disciplinary dance described by Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein as “they say, I say.“

What is really interesting is that consistently about 60% of the class clears this conceptual threshold and offers a prospectus that frames an ongoing (broadly construed) debate across multiple sources in the discipline and then offers some perspective on this debate whether it is a nuanced addition or a new direction for research. The paper design itself is quite formal so that the students could focus more on content than the structure of the paper. They still had to organize the ideas and debates surrounding their topic into a compelling and useful way, however. What surprised and gratified me the most was that the students who were successful in producing a thoughtful paper correlated quite strongly with students who came to class regularly and did well on various other indicators of classroom engagement.

I don’t say this to pat myself on the back (after all, my class is not particular unique or distinctive), but to say that such a clearly defined threshold concept really brought this idea home to me. In other words, it was a threshold experience for this threshold concept.