Contrary to popular opinion, learning is a messy, complicated business.
Imagine yourself standing before a dark, ominous tunnel. Through it you can glimpse something previously unimagined, but entering and crossing through entails a risk – anything might happen. Not passing through, while safe, means you will never know what’s on the other side.
It can sometimes seem that the distance between knowing and not knowing is negligible: we teach students something they didn’t know and then, just like that, they know it.
But this is, usually, just the first tentative steps on the way to embedding new concepts in long-term memory. The gap – the liminal space – between knowing and not knowing is mysterious and largely hidden from us. Liminality is a transitional, transformational state where we are in the initial stages of a process, or occupying a position at, or on, both sides of a boundary; what the anthropologist Victor Turner described as “betwixt and between” who used it to capture the am…
