Liminality: "We are all conceptual artists"

individual

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INTERPERSONAL : SCIENCES

humanistic ----------------------------------------------- mechanistic

SOCIOLOGY : POLITICAL

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group

Liminal states: This space is likened to that which adolescents inhabit: - not yet adults; not quite children. It is an unstable space in which the learner may oscillate between old and emergent understandings just as adolescents often move between adult-like and child-like responses to their transitional status. But once a learner enters this liminal space, she is engaged with the project of mastery unlike the learner who remains in a state of pre-liminality in which understandings are at best vague. The idea that learners enter into a liminal state in their attempts to grasp certain concepts in their subjects presents a powerful way of remembering that learning is both affective and cognitive and that it involves identity shifts which can entail troublesome, unsafe journeys. Often students construct their own conditions of safety through the practice of mimicry. In our research, we came across teachers who lamented this tendency among students to substitute mimicry for mastery (Cousin, 2006b, p.139). Cousin (2006a) http://www.ee.ucl.ac.uk/~mflanaga/popupLiminality.html

This space, behind-around, reveals... Leo Villareal’s ‘Liminal Gradient for (RED)’ (2018) ... that we are all 'conceptual artists'.

My source: Spence, R. (2018) Seeing Red, Collecting, FT Weekend, 3-4 November, pp.1-2.