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Foundational Assumptions In Threshold Concepts And Information Literacy, Patrick K. Morgan

Faculty Presentations

This is a critique of the threshold concepts at the heart of the new ACRL Framework.

Models are only tools, and like all tools, will inevitably perform well in certain contexts and poorly in others. Threshold concepts are exactly and only a model/tool, and far from useless.

In a late-January post on the ACRL blog, Lori Townsend and her colleagues responded to some of the negative press threshold concepts had been receiving; in it, we were reminded how productive threshold concepts-based approaches have been in a variety of learning contexts.

My objections can be roughly corralled into two broad criticisms: …