Oreilly Research Identity Threshold Concepts
O’Reilly, J., 2023. “See you on the other side”: researcher identity, threshold concepts and making a ritual of confirmation. Spark: UAL Creative Teaching and Learning Journal, 6(1), pp.10-22.
I found this a difficult read in some ways as it references lots of aspects of the PhD experience that I have yet to undertake (reading this in the early 2024 at the beginning of the PhD process), so I lack some contextual understanding, but there remained some really interesting aspects that resonated for me.
Firstly, an emphasis on the importance of a ‘hands on’ approach to Arts education, which O’Reilly states is more adjacent to medical school pedagogy than humanities (O’Reilly, 2023). I particularly like this quote:
In her book A Sensory Education, Anna Harris, Associate Professor of the Social Studies of Medicine at Maastricht University writes, “Sensory lessons demand the cultivation of a particular ‘art of noticing’. All learning is sensory. Lessons in life and at school are bodily, sensory engagements with others and things and places whereby transformations, ideally, occur. It is these everyday and expert sensory lessons that I refer to when I talk of sensory education” (Harris, 2020, p.2)’
O’Reilly, 2023, p14
Secondly, I am intrigued by the presentation of the idea that the PhD process is more than just an academic endeavour, but actually a way of creating agency through an ‘ecology of learning’. This ecology being an assemblage of different parts of life, including personal practice, pedagogy, academic and professional aspects – and as such, is considered a ‘life practice’ that encourages individuals to forge their own paths and futures, contributing to personal and professional development (O’Reilly, 2023, p17). This idea of learning is interesting to me as it’s distinctly different to most learning experiences I have had so far in my life (in educational institutions) and is in large part very autodidactic. As my research is focused around speculating on learning in the future (assuming drastic shifts due to AI / other potential technological developments), reading this made me wonder if this ‘ecology of learning’ approach might be more utilised in other learning environments outside of postgraduate research. For example, if we imagined a future where LLM’s and the development of AI assistants meant that the traditional role of teacher/lecturer became more obsolete (or at the very least distinctly different) would education more broadly modelled on this ‘ecology-of-learning’ be more feasible? It’s the beginning of an idea, I will keep ruminating on…