Abstract

This essay argues that description of student learning goals as various “skills” presents a conceptual threshold lying between and connecting routinely dichotomized characterizations of student learning—most notably, “concrete” versus “abstract.” Qualitative analysis of instructor interviews shows that “skills” language tends to conceal abstract (i.e. affective) learning goals behind more concrete (i.e. cognitive) ones. Ultimately, this essay proposes that cognitive and affective student learning goals might be more clearly articulated using threshold concepts within and across disciplines, and that the recognition of “skills” as both affective and cognitive is itself a threshold concept in educational development.

Keywords: teaching & learning, faculty development, assessment, threshold concepts

Introduction

Whether at the course, program, or institution level, I would wager phrases such as “critical thinking skills” and “writing skills” make their way into descriptions of learning goals at your college or university.[1] While these skills based goals undoubtedly provide instructors, administrators, and academic staff a common language with which to align instructional endeavors and to articulate educative purpose, this study suggests that talking about skills tends to broach uncommon and even incompatible models of how learning happens and what learning is most valuable in higher education. My qualitative analysis of interviews with English literature instructors at a large public research university suggests that the concept and language of “skills” presents a threshold lying between and connecting the dual conceptualizations of student learning as both the acquisition of concrete “tools” and the development of abstract “ways of thinking”—which is to say, talking about learning goals as sets of “skills” both enabled the instructors in this study to elaborate on the complexities of their most abstract learning goals (i.e. “ways of thinking”) and undercut that elaboration by introducing reductively concrete terminology (i.e. “tools”).

These findings have broad implications for the higher education community. Instructors, educational developers, and administrators alike share responsibility for communicating the purpose and value of higher education to students, and all should be aware of how the language they use can influence the ways in which that purpose and value are perceived. It may seem inconsequential for the same skills based learning goal to be described differently—say, students will acquire tools for critical thinking versus students will become critical thinkers—but the divergent constructs of “skills” as either concrete or abstract create a false dichotomy that implicitly pits these constructs against one another. In other words, the concept and terminology of “skills” reveal profound interconnections between concrete and abstract learning goals, while simultaneously dislocating the concrete and the abstract into two different models of how learning works—the former into an accretive model (i.e. the acquisition of “tools”) and the latter into a transformative model (i.e. the adoption of different “ways of thinking”). It is important that practitioners recognize how their own use of “skills” language can shape stakeholders’ perceptions of how learning works so that they can use it (or other language) in more deliberate alignment with their program or institution’s educative mission.

In this essay, I propose that “skills” as a goal for student learning might comprise a threshold concept (TC) in educational development. TCs are core ideas within disciplines that are initially difficult to comprehend but, once grasped, radically transform the learner’s perception of the subject (Meyer & Land, 2003). As the term “threshold” suggests, TCs present a conceptual entryway into a clearer and more comfortable understanding of the subject; at the same time, however, TCs pose a barrier to entry in that they often challenge or outright contradict the learner’s previous understanding. Far from a rapid and simple movement from one way of thinking to another, crossing the conceptual “threshold” often involves inhabiting a state of uncertainty, ambiguity, or partial understanding, while in the process of making the epistemological shift required to fully comprehend the concept. TCs are thus characterized as liminal experiences as well as troublesome and transformative ones (Meyer & Land, 2005). Because the instructors participating in my study negotiate such a troublesome, liminal space while discussing “skills” as learning goals, I propose that “skills” might be viewed as a TC. As such, “skills” poses a barrier as well as an entryway to understanding learning as a process for all stakeholders in higher education. This suggests that instructors and educational developers may need to explicate for themselves and each other what abstract ways of thinking and feeling underlie the apparently concrete skills they routinely identify as learning goals. Alternatively, instructors and educational developers might strive to obviate the troublesomeness of “skills” altogether by using disciplinary and inter disciplinary TCs as learning goals instead.

In what follows, I provide a review of literature that illustrates how the concept and language of “skills” is troublingly dichotomized in both academic and professional discourse. With this backdrop of large scale conversation about “skills,” I then analyze two specific “skills” conversations from my interview data—one with a graduate teaching assistant (GTA) and the other with a faculty instructor. I return to the prospect of taking a TC approach to “skills” in the conclusion of this essay.

“Skills” Literature in Review: Negotiating Cognitive/Affective Dichotomies

Ongoing conversations about “skills” as a kind of learning goal span multiple academic and professional fields: education research, cognitive psychology, curriculum theory, instructional design, and even economics. While these conversations seem only recently to interact purposefully across fields, they share a tendency to navigate through and around “skills” as an imprecise term, one that ostensibly denotes the capacity to perform physical or cognitive action at a demonstrable and measurable standard of effectiveness (e.g., “argumentative skills” as the capacity to construct, in oral or written language, a sequence of claims and evidence that effectively influences an audience’s perception of the subject), but that ultimately straddles a dubious line drawn between the action itself and the prerequisite affective or epistemological dispositions that motivate and guide the action.

Colleges and universities across the U.S. have adopted and adapted the taxonomy of learning familiarly known as “Bloom’s Taxonomy” for their articulation of learning goals at the institution, program, and course levels, making the Taxonomy a crucial point of entry for any conversation about “skills” as learning goals in higher education. The original Taxonomy categorizes and describes three domains of learning—cognitive (knowledge based), affective (emotive based), and psychomotor (action based)—and develops subcategories for the cognitive and affective domains (Bloom, 1956; Krathwohl, 1964). The cognitive domain and its subcategories—knowledge and various cognitive skills—have been the most widely influential of Bloom’s taxonomies in postsecondary education.

Anderson and Krathwohl (2001) revised the taxonomy in A Taxonomy for Learning, Teaching, and Assessing, which, significantly, focuses exclusively on the cognitive domain. In their preface to the revised taxonomy, the authors note that educators’ “struggle with problems associated with the design and implementation of accountability programs, standards based curriculums, and authentic assessments” was a major impetus for the revision, alongside the need to “incorporate new knowledge and thought into the framework” (pg. xxi–ii). Why it is that the cognitive domain alone is wielded in answer to those pressures is not addressed in the Revision, but the original Taxonomy suggests that categorizing affective development simply posed too difficult a challenge. Krathwohl and Bloom (1964) report that K 12 and postsecondary educators tended to shy away from evaluating affective learning goals—even where they were clearly articulated, as in the phrase “Finds pleasure in reading for recreation” (pg. 132)—because of their implicit assumptions that teaching and assessing affective development comes closer to indoctrination than education; that affective development takes longer than cognitive development, and therefore cannot be evaluated at the course level; and that the development of cognitive skills implies development of appropriate affective behaviors (pg. 18–20). Krathwohl and Bloom (1964) cite education research countering these assumptions and make the case that the difficulty and complexity of the affective domain warrants more, not less, attention. Despite this, the authors of the Revision remain largely silent about learning, teaching, and assessing affective skills. The fading of affective learning goals behind cognitive ones is a pattern throughout conversations about student learning and “skills.”

Despite (or perhaps because of) its exclusive focus on the cognitive domain of learning, the Revised Taxonomy has proved profoundly influential in educational development. One of its major revisions—which many postsecondary instructors, assessment professionals, and educational developers reflect in their practice—is its proposed use of verbs and gerunds rather than static nouns to capture more adequately the enactment of cognitive skills. For instance, the six major categories of learning became remember (originally “knowledge”), understand (originally “comprehension”), apply (originally “application”), analyze (originally “analysis”), synthesize (originally “synthesis”), and evaluate (originally “evaluation”). The use of verb forms, according to the authors, better captures contemporary theories of learning, including the (still) widely held belief that learned skills gradually increase in complexity within an observable hierarchy—i.e. you must remember before you can understand, you must understand before you can apply, and so on (pg. 214–15).

Descriptions and instructions on how to use the Revised Taxonomy are readily available on many university websites, especially at those institutions with robust centers for teaching and learning. Vanderbilt University’s CTL, for instance, has produced a visualization of Bloom’s (Revised) Taxonomy for use in faculty development and instructional design initiatives (see Figure 1 below).

Figure 1. Diagram of Bloom’s Taxonomy (Armstrong, 2010)Figure 1. Diagram of Bloom’s Taxonomy (Armstrong, 2010)

The influence of Bloom’s Taxonomy on postsecondary institutions’ articulation of and training around student learning goals is apparent even implicitly. For instance, the University of Wisconsin Madison’s Office of the Provost advises faculty to use “action verbs” at the start of learning outcomes and to distinguish between different “levels of learning” with verbs such as remember, apply, and evaluate (see Figure 2 below).

Figure 2. Bloom Inspired Tips to Help Departments Translate Learning Goals into Outcomes (Office of the Provost, 2017)Figure 2. Bloom Inspired Tips to Help Departments Translate Learning Goals into Outcomes (Office of the Provost, 2017)

In addition to echoing Bloom’s (Revised) Taxonomy, positioning students and their abilities at the forefront of institution, program, and course level goals also aligns with the assessment movement’s major initiative to push institutions to shift from reporting what they do to inquiring whether and how students are learning. The process of making this institutional shift and the revision of Bloom’s Taxonomy took place within the same decade, indicating a widespread shift in thinking about promoting and assessing student learning.

By adopting the verb forward language of the assessment movement and Bloom’s (Revised) Taxonomy of the cognitive domain, American colleges and universities broadly posit that higher learning is cognitive learning. If educational developers and faculty accept the Taxonomy as a reliable guide for understanding and promoting student learning (which, by its near ubiquitous use seems to be the case), then we ought to consider the implications of focusing on only one third of the “whole student,” so to speak—especially when, despite our best efforts to extricate it, that cognitive third repeatedly proves bound to the affective.

One contributing factor to this widespread focus on cognitive skills—which Krathwohl and Bloom (1964) recognized—is undoubtedly the external pressure placed on educational institutions from state and federal legislatures to prioritize accountability via measurable student learning outcomes. These pressures were intensified by the U.S Department of Education’s2006 report (commonly referred to as the “Spellings Report”), which draws attention to a growing “skills gap” in the United States. The report cites surveys in which “employers complain that many college graduates are not prepared for the workplace and lack the new set of skills necessary for successful employment and continuous career development” (pg. 12). This “new set of skills,” however, remains undefined in the Spellings Report—it could just as well refer to cognitive skills such as analyzing as it could to affective skills like appreciating. Without any firm definition, “skills” becomes a tabula rasa most readily inscribed with the abilities and capacities that employers, legislators, and/or instructors can observe and assess relatively easily.

In their (what appears to be the only) book length study investigating this emphasis on “skills” in higher education, Beyond the Skills Gap: Preparing College Students for Life and Work, Hora, Ross, and Oleson (2016) probe the veracity of just such a “skills gap narrative” as proposed in the Spellings Report. They state early on just how difficult it is even to define the “skills gap” because of the unhelpful vagueness of the term “skills”:

[T]he specific types of skills or competencies desired by employers are often left unstated by policy makers and analysts. Instead, it is assumed that these expectations pertain primarily, if not solely, to technical expertise needed in specific occupations. […] When specific skills are described in greater detail, the popular but highly ambiguous categories of “hard” (i.e. technical) and “soft” (i.e. nontechnical) skills are sometimes used. […] Thus, a key aspect of the skills gap narrative—the notion of “skills”—is often ill defined and generally assumed to be the technical knowledge linked to an occupation if not the occupation itself. (page 40)

In professional as well as academic parlance, it seems, “skills” language tends to teeter at the border between two senses of the word, one more concrete (“hard,” “technical,” and “cognitive”) and the other more abstract (“soft,” “nontechnical,” and “affective”). Unless clearly stated otherwise, the concrete elides the abstract.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Hora et al.’s (2016) extensive survey and interview data reveal that the kinds of skills (“hard” or “soft”) that employers and college instructors value actually align much more closely than the “skills gap narrative” alleges. Their analysis shows unequivocally that business owners, plant supervisors, and human resources directors across the state of Wisconsin view the ideal employee as “a hardworking individual with technical training, solid problem solving skills, and the ability to communicate well, work in a team, and continually learn new things” (pg. 88). That is, they want to hire someone who has developed particular habits of mind (i.e. “soft” skills) as well as technical training (i.e. “hard” skills). These skills align with those most highly valued and frequently taught by Wisconsin college instructors specializing in the same industries as the business owners, plant supervisors, and HR directors interviewed in the study (pg. 93). What is more, the skills that employers find lacking in new and potential hires tend not to be technical skills (though this does happen occasionally), but rather the nontechnical “soft” skills such as effective communication and strong work ethic. Academics have known this intuitively for a long time, although empirical evidence began to be collected only recently. In its debut of the Essential Learning Outcomes, the Association of American Colleges and Universities (2007) explicitly and repeatedly points out where educators and employers agree on the skills college students must learn: critical thinking, effective communication, and working well with diverse groups of people. Regardless, the skills “gap”—rather than any kind of skills “alignment”—has remained the dominant narrative in public and political spheres. As I found in working with my own interview data, the troublesome concept of “skills” led Hora et al. (2016) to counter the skills gap narrative by making explicit an implicit valuation of “abstract” skills (“habits of mind”/“ways of thinking”) over “concrete” skills (“technical training”/“tools”).

The authors of Beyond the Skills Gap are quick to concede that these results merely contribute to an already robust body of research, spread across multiple disciplines, debunking the skills gap narrative and its attendant “silver bullet” solution of increased technical training (Hora et al., 2016 pg. 94). Nobel Prize winning economist James Heckman and his research team, for example, have brought together insights and methods from economics, developmental psychology, and neuroscience in several studies demonstrating that not “hard” but “soft” skills are more reliable predictors of success in work and life. Significantly, “hard” and “soft” skills in this research do not denote the same technical/nontechnical divide as articulated in Hora et al. (2016), but rather a narrower cognitive/noncognitive divide in which it is implied that the “hard” quality of cognitive skills is attributable not to their inherent measurability but to the simple fact that they tend to be measured (Heckman & Kautz, 2012). Heckman and Kautz (2013) present extensive empirical evidence suggesting that noncognitive skills (which align with affective capacities such as attentiveness, self esteem, and empathy) are not only measurable but are significantly more reliable predictors of academic achievement and life satisfaction than cognitive skills (like logic and quantitative reasoning) alone. Here, as in other ongoing conversations about learning goals, the term “skills” lies between and connects two differently valued kinds of learning: cognitive and affective. Although affective learning is found repeatedly to be just as if not more valuable to student growth and achievement, it tends to be obscured by the apparently more concrete cognitive learning.

Despite this, a growing number of professionals in higher education are paying attention to what lies beyond or behind cognitive learning. Like Heckman and Kautz in economics, experts in educational development have reached similar conclusions about the importance of fostering affective skills and are now hard at work determining how best to cultivate them. Fink (2013), for instance, registers this shift in priorities in his instructional design handbook, Creating Significant Learning Experiences: An Integrated Approach to Designing College Courses. In the handbook, Fink proposes yet another revision of Bloom’s Taxonomy, one that addresses higher education’s “need for new kinds of learning, kinds that go well beyond the cognitive domain of Bloom’s taxonomy and even beyond cognitive learning itself” (pg. 34). In his taxonomy, Fink creates space for affective or “non cognitive” kinds of learning by incorporating “caring,” “learning how to learn,” and “human dimension” in his six categories of learning (see Figure 3).

Figure 3. Fink’s Taxonomy of Significant Learning (2013, p. 35)Figure 3. Fink’s Taxonomy of Significant Learning (2013, p. 35)

Fink not only redefines the categories of learning in his taxonomy but posits an interactive rather than hierarchical relationship among them (see Figure 4). His emphasis on the synergy of these different kinds of learning contrasts significantly with Bloom’s Taxonomy in that it repositions affective skills (e.g., “caring”) as a facet of student learning on par with cognitive skills in its capacity to promote complex and measurable learning. In Fink’s model, one learns to “apply” and “evaluate” not only by successfully “remembering” but by feeling excited about or invested in what is to be remembered, applied, and evaluated—and, likewise, one learns to feel invested in what is to be remembered by applying and evaluating it, and so on (pg. 37).

Figure 4. Fink’s Diagram of the Interactive Nature of Significant Learning (2013, p. 37)Figure 4. Fink’s Diagram of the Interactive Nature of Significant Learning (2013, p. 37)

From the initial separation of knowledge and emotive based learning in Bloom’s (Revised) Taxonomy to Fink’s reintegration of them in his Taxonomy of Significant Learning, the project of taxonomizing learning routinely dichotomizes the “skills” by which that learning is recognizable: cognitive/affective, measurable/nonmeasurable, employable/nonemployable, technical/nontechnical, hard/soft, cognitive/noncognitive (see Figure 5).

Figure 5. Various “Skills” Dichotomies from the LiteratureFigure 5. Various “Skills” Dichotomies from the Literature

This process of dichotomizing unavoidably leads to a culturally informed difference in valuation between the opposing parts of the binary pair: the early years of the assessment movement and its attendant culture of accountability contributed to the overwhelming valuation of cognitive over affective skills as the gold standard for pursuing measurable learning goals. Counter to that assumed dominance, however, recent research across multiple disciplines suggests that fostering cognitive skills alone fails to achieve the learning necessary for success in school, work, and life. The pendulum of valuation—within institutions of higher education, at least—is poised to swing back toward affect, and the persistent ambiguity of “skills” poses a conceptual threshold which instructors, educational developers, and students alike must broach in order to fully grasp the interdependence of cognitive ability and affective disposition.

Broaching the “Skills” Threshold: Tools and Ways of Thinking in Instructor Interviews

In this section, I discuss excerpts from two interviews that offer illustrative examples of how participants in my aggregate interview data tended to navigate the troublesome and liminal space of “skills” language while describing learning goals for their courses. These semistructured interviews were conducted at a public research university in the fall of 2016 as part of an ongoing, ethics board approved SoTL project on perceptions of assessment among literature instructors. I asked 18 participants (10 GTAs and 8 faculty) to talk about what they see as the purpose of literary study broadly, of general education (GE) literature courses specifically, and then to describe what learning they expect their students to achieve and how they can see that learning happening. Interviews were transcribed and coded using in vivo and process coding methods before being further analyzed through close reading practices characteristic of literary studies scholarship (Bass & Linkon, 2008). In each of the example cases to follow, instructors identify the adoption of a constructivist “way of thinking” about the world as one of their most important course learning goals, but ultimately obscure the primacy of that goal by relying either explicitly or implicitly on the convenience and ostensible “concreteness” of skills as tools language. While these instructors talk exclusively about teaching and learning in literary studies, the ways in which they locate learning goals through and around “skills” are recognizable across disciplines and institutions.

Talking “Skills” With Marion, GTA

Marion (a pseudonym, to protect the confidentiality of this participant) is an advanced graduate student who has taught discussion sections for three different literature lecture courses. She exudes confidence as she talks about her experiences teaching literature and the kinds of learning she expects of her students. Marion consciously frames her teaching and learning goals according to her position as a GTA: she distinguishes the purposes of lecture from those of discussion, and she points out how the instructional practices in each align (more or less) with those differing purposes.

When asked what she perceives to be the goals for undergraduate education in Literature, Marion immediately calls up the hard skills/soft skills framework, positing an alignment between that framework and the lecture/discussion format of high enrollment Literature courses:

I feel like there’s always two components to it: there’s the hard skills and the soft skills. The hard skills are sort of the practicalities of crafting a good argument, becoming a good analytical reader, learning how to do research, and then learning how to synthesize all of that into an essay with specific features of structure. And those are really important, valuable things. That’s the most concrete thing that I spend most of my time on as a TA. […] I think a lot of arguments are made that those are transferable skills, right? In essence, they’re communication skills, and they’re thinking skills. And that’s one side of it.

But then I also feel like there is this undercurrent of the soft skills that they are learning, like how to be a good listener when other students are talking, and how to be interested in a wide variety of topics, and how to be a responsible citizen with a set of morals that you have developed for yourself. I feel like a lot of the lectures were often about those more abstract learning of soft skills, like how do you develop an ethics, how do you treat other people according to your own ethics, how do you deal with someone who has different ethics than you? […] We definitely discussed them a lot and practiced them in the way we practiced discussion, but I do not think it is one of those things that as a TA I set aside time to do the way I did writing exercises, for example.

The “hard skills” of writing, analysis, and synthesis that Marion describes here echo the “concrete” measurability attributed to the cognitive skills extolled in Bloom’s (Revised) Taxonomy and the technical skills extolled in the dubious skills gap narrative. In contrast, the “soft skills” that Marion describes separately and as separate from those “concrete things” laid out first echo the abstract and internal qualities of “affective” learning and its concomitant transformations of the student’s sense of self—being interested, being responsible, being comfortable with diversity. In Marion’s formulation, “soft” skills like listening to others attentively and behaving ethically toward them become wholly separable from “hard” skills like synthesizing multiple sources of research into an essay. Setting these two goals side by side, though, and considering the significant ambiguity and overlap between cognitive and affective learning (as demonstrated in the literature review), we can see that learning even ostensibly “concrete” skills assumes a transformation of self or shift in perspective—after all, we expect that students will treat their research sources ethically while paraphrasing and analyzing them, right? We (Marion included) want our students to feel respect for others’ ideas as well as to analyze them.

As with her distinction between “hard skills” and “soft skills,” Marion identifies “two sides” to the value of college literary study when asked to describe what she perceives that value to be—concrete, employable skills on one side, and a personally empowering way of “making sense of the world” on the other. She says,

Obviously, the communication skills and the writing skills are all incredibly important. [English majors] are some of the most employable people ever because we all use language and being good at it helps. So, none of that is not the point of an English major, but once you actually are taking the classes [pause]— In a Literature class, you’re never explicitly told “this is how you would use this in your day to day job.” […] I think that the very fact that you’re not told exactly what all these skills are, you’re just told you’re learning them, automatically makes a lot of English majors feel like they have to be imaginative and flexible and adaptable. They just have to trust that “I have a set of skills that I have to apply to a lot of different things and that’s just what I know about myself.” No one has told them this is what you use them for.

And then I think the other side of it [pause]— We talked about how a lot of professors have a distinct agenda of like “Let’s make you into a well rounded citizen of the world with a set of moral ethics.” […] I think in English the different way that we learn that is that we’re taught that things are texts, which means that they’re created structures, and that thinking through them helps you understand the world because everything is in a sense a text, right? […] It’s a set of skills that you learn to think about why things are the way they are, because you’re thinking about the abstract structure of them rather than the concrete causes and effects of things. And I’ve always found that a very valuable and powerful way of making sense of the world.

Marion’s use of the word “skills” throughout this response teeters on the boundary she’s erected between the “concrete”/“hard” skills of writing, argumentation, and communication and the “abstract”/“soft” skills of personal affect and social behavior. Even while fleshing out what she means by the value of those employable skills (writing skills and communication skills), Marion ends up pointing to the very affective personal dispositions of being “imaginative,” “flexible,” and “adaptable” as the real employable skills. But Marion does not indicate that these affective skills are taught and assessed through student writing; rather, it is in the absence of direct instruction that English majors “just trust that [they] have a set of skills that [they] have to apply to a lot of different things.” In the absence of any direct instruction or assessment of it, Marion similarly has to “just trust” that students are picking up this ambiguous “set of skills.”

Toward the end of the interview, Marion singles out a “way of thinking”—not the concrete “tools” of communication skills—as the most important thing her students might learn. Specifically, Marion recalls the “way of thinking” in which “everything is in a sense a text”:

I think of [GE literature courses] as our last chance to really get to some of these business and engineering majors before they go off into a world where they’re never asked to think this way again. So, it’s like this is our chance to cram in as many of these techniques and skills and ideas as we can and hope some of it sticks before they go off and do a completely different kind of thinking. Which is no more or less valid but is very different. That’s often how I’m thinking about it, especially as a TA, where I’m trying to get a student to be invested and like, yeah, I really want you to come away with at least one thing that’s going to stay with you as you go on to learn about macroeconomics.

Ultimately, but apparently inadvertently, Marion broaches a conceptual threshold by displacing the more concrete sense of skills as “tools” identified earlier with the more abstract sense of skills as “ways of thinking.” In doing so, Marion exposes the liminal and troublesome quality of skills: the term both yokes together and divides the affective and cognitive facets of literary learning, obscuring the former in the obviousness of the latter.

Talking “Skills” With Jaime, Faculty

Jamie is a Professor of English who teaches high enrollment lectures as well as small seminar courses in Literature. In responding to my questions about the goals and values of undergraduate literary study, Jaime emphasizes repeatedly that the “main goal” of all their courses is “getting [students] to be interpreters.” (I use the singular “they” in combination with a pseudonym in my analysis of this interview to maintain the confidentiality of faculty participants, who volunteered out of a much smaller pool than participating GTAs.)

Unlike Marion, who immediately drew a line between “hard skills” and “soft skills” and ultimately blurred the boundary in valuating them, Jaime talks about the cognitive and affective work of interpretation interchangeably, without attempting to demarcate clear boundaries or assign specific properties to the “skills” involved. Also different, rather than merely implying that literature students might pick up a different “way of thinking” about the world, Jaime overtly desires to change the way students understand the world and their place in it by reorienting their epistemologies to the perspective that people—including the students themselves—can construct meaning in consequential ways. Jaime explains,

My goal in [GE literature courses] is to get students to see themselves as agents of history. That’s a really broad goal, I know, but what I mean when I say that is that I want them to see that they have the analytical faculties and skills to actually have an effect on the world by interpreting it differently, and by looking at it critically. So, I want them to see that they have strength and power, that they can exercise power over the world in exciting, ethical, thoughtful ways by being able to interpret it. And, so, I’m trying to impart the skill to do that.

Jaime’s repeated use of “seeing” language (“I want them to see that…”) draws on both cognitive and affective dimensions of the stated learning goal—“getting [students] to be interpreters”—by prodding a shift in disposition as well as understanding, by not only making visible to students how to interpret but sparking the belief that they can and that it matters that they do so responsibly. The fruitful ambiguity of Jaime’s concluding statement—“I’m trying to impart the skill to do that”—similarly captures the dual nature of this kind of cognitive and affective learning: Is Jaime trying to impart the skill to “see” oneself differently or to “interpret” effectively? Certainly, the answer is both.

As in my conversation with Marion, though, the term “skills” will come to lie between and connect a model of learning as transformation (i.e. adopting new “ways of thinking”) and a model of learning as accretion (i.e. the acquisition of “tools”). The direction from which these two instructors approach this “skills” threshold differs, though, in a way I think is significant in how it demonstrates just how easily the term can conceal as well as reveal the affective learning goals intertwined within cognitive ones. Where Marion begins with the separation of abstract and concrete goals and inadvertently joins them, Jaime begins with the nesting of abstract and concrete goals and inadvertently separates them. Put another way, for Marion, talking about skills led to the unwrapping of abstract goals from ostensibly concrete ones, whereas, for Jaime, talking about skills leads to the wrapping of abstract goals into ostensibly concrete ones.

We can see this at a point in the conversation when I ask Jaime about what they see as the relationship between GE literature and the English major. They expressed a desire that the major be more explicitly sequenced, with introductory literature positioned as the first step along the path of majoring in English. (As it is currently designed, the literature program at the center of this study makes no explicit curricular connection between GE literature and the major.) Jaime described their preferred sequence of course goals as follows:

I think the ideal in my mind is that we start by developing a critical vocabulary, writing skills, argumentative skills, etcetera, and what we should be advancing towards in those senior level courses is an extremely high, thick level of conceptual complexity and synthesis of ideas so that we can achieve knowledge production.

This sequencing of course goals so that the skills being taught/learned increase in difficulty and complexity from lower to upper level should be familiar—Bloom’s Taxonomy of cognitive learning similarly sequences creating and synthesizing (which Jaime locates in senior level courses) after more basic skills like remembering, applying, and evaluating (which Jaime locates in the “critical vocabulary,” “writing skills,” and “argumentative skills” practiced in intro level courses). Given how passionate and overt Jaime was about getting students to “see themselves as agents of history,” though, we should expect that those affective goals of shifting disposition remain nested within their “skills” language. Indeed, when reminded that most students enrolled in GE literature are not English majors, Jaime elaborates on the skills they want those nonmajors to acquire:

I want them to be able to know how to be able ask good questions about the world and how it works. I want them to be able to formulate educated and well thought opinions and arguments about how the world works so that they can make interventions in everyday life. I want them to be able to debate with people that surround them why they believe what they believe; I want them to be able to make a stand and support that idea; I want them to tell the difference between truth and falsity, and to recognize that truth is a social construction but not without meaning. You know, like, basic capacity to be an informed citizen in the world who uses interpretive skills to be able to decide how they want to engage in collective life.

It seems significant that here, within this reiteration of what being an “agent of history” entails, Jaime does not emphasize what it is students will learn to “see” about themselves as before, but rather emphasizes what students ought to be able to do. Like the verb forward language typical of goals statements after the Revised Taxonomy and assessment movement, the performance of specific observable tasks comes to represent not only the knowledge and ability required to complete them but also the affective disposition and epistemological stance that motivate their performance. It was a prevalent assumption among the participants in my study that any affective or epistemological learning goals they may have (e.g., empathy) are communicated to students implicitly through the concrete or cognitive goals that they explicitly address in their classes (e.g., writing and argumentation). While Jaime overtly and repeatedly emphasizes the importance of abstract learning goals in their courses, use of “skills” language as a shorthand for those goals ultimately evacuates some of the important nuance from their descriptions. What of the confidence and sense of responsibility that Jaime mentioned earlier (“I want them to see that they have strength and power”)? In addition to being able to do these things, does Jaime not also want students to believe that they can and/or should? does Jaime not want them to want to do these things and/or to enjoy them?

Of course Jaime does. It is far subtler in their case than in Marion’s, but here, too, is a broaching of the “skills” threshold without quite breaching it: Jaime’s early articulation of the abstract goals for their course maintained a clear and explicit framework of “ways of thinking,” helping their use of “skills” to indicate both “seeing” oneself differently and “interpreting” effectively. However, when Jaime’s focus expanded to a programmatic level—to the curriculum of the English major—that explicit “ways of thinking” framework became supplanted by the implicit framework of “tools” or, to use Marion’s phrase, “concrete things” that might be acquired one at a time, starting with the basic building blocks of “writing skills, argumentative skills, etcetera.” It seems that such a shift in focus from course goals to program curriculum exposes if not expands the liminal space of the skills conceptual threshold. It’s clear, in Jaime’s case, that their values have not shifted (as Marion’s seem to do) throughout their navigation of “skills” language, but the way in which they conceptualize and construct a model of learning did shift, and that slippage between abstract and concrete, between transformative and accretive models of learning, echo in Jaime’s shift from course to program level descriptions of goals.

Conclusion: Broaching Threshold Concepts

I stated at the top of this essay that “skills” as a learning goal might comprise a TC in educational development. By identifying “skills” as a TC, I propose that a full understanding of the term pushes beyond the received knowledge of the skills gap narrative into a broader view wherein “skills” refers to both cognitive performance and affective disposition. As my interview data suggests, this shift in understanding is a troublesome, liminal, and potentially transformative process: “troublesome” in that the duality of the concept appears counter intuitive to interviewees; “liminal” in that interviewees tend to navigate through and around “skills” as a sticking point between “concrete” and “abstract” understandings of the term; and “transformative” in that finally breaching the threshold can fundamentally inform how these instructors (and other stakeholders) understand learning as a process.

Because doing so foregrounds the troublesome duality of the concept, approaching “skills” as a TC has immediate implications for course design, assessment, and faculty development. It compels instructors and educational developers to explicate affective disposition as well as cognitive performance in their goals statements rather than rely on “skills” to implicitly communicate both. It also suggests that significant conversation or training around the multivalence of “skills” would likely be necessary for that explication to be meaningful.

Instructors and educational developers might also consider obviating the troublesomeness of “skills” altogether by using TCs as a framework for articulating student learning goals instead. TCs developed within a specific discipline like Writing Studies, for instance, can articulate more specific and nuanced goals statements than any phrasing of “writing skills” could (Estrem, 2015). Consider these two articulations of the same overarching goal: Students will develop skills in using disciplinary writing conventions, and Students will recognize how disciplinary and professional identities are constructed through writing. The latter, a Writing Studies TC, foregrounds students’ progression through a disciplinary “threshold” of understanding and anticipates affective as well as cognitive challenges (i.e. interrogating sense of self and performing analytic comparison, respectively). Because a TC approach contends directly with affective dimensions of learning (Meyer & Land, 2005; Rattray, 2016), the identification of specific TCs rather than generalized “skills” might help to collapse the false divide between “concrete” and “abstract” learning and contribute to a more balanced valuation of cognitive and affective learning in higher education.

Of course, such a TC approach requires further research and sustained collaboration among instructors and educational developers—this essay merely broaches the possibility.

Endnote

1. I recognize there are important distinctions between “goals,” “objectives,” and “outcomes” in educational development; however, given the inconsistent use of these terms among the instructors I interviewed and in the literature I review, I use “goals” throughout this essay to establish some consistency.return to text

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