All Ireland Society for Higher Education
| Name: | Terry Barrett |
|---|---|
| Email: | terry.barrett@ucd.ie |
| Institution: | University College Dublin |
This paper focuses on how PBL students talked about problems in PBL as provokers of liminal spaces, threshold, betwixt and between spaces, and the practical implications for maximising these liminal space for learning.
Two teams of lecturers were completing a module on problem-based learning that was part of a Postgraduate Diploma in Learning and Teaching in Higher Education, in a higher education institution in Ireland. The lecturers were problem-based learning students for the module. The research question for this paper is 'How did lecturers as problem -based learners talk about problems? This research is part of a wider doctoral study that investigated how the two teams talked about four of the key characteristics of PBL, namely the problem, the PBL tutorial, the PBL process and learning.
Critical discourse analysis (CDA) was used to analyse the talk of these PBL students. This is one of the first studies to use a CDA approach to analysing students' talk in PBL tutorials. From analysing the talk of these PBL students, I explore three dimensions of liminality a knowledge dimension, an identity dimension and a professional action dimension. The main argument of this paper is that by conceptualising problems as provokers of liminal spaces, educators will be encouraged and enabled to maximise their potential for learning. Recommendations for problem-design are discussed.