reflections from a threshold concept in business?
Business strategy conforms the definition of a threshold concept as the jewel of the
curriculum knowledge by which the lack of its mastery (Meyer & Land, 2003; Meyer
& Land, 2005), business students could not progress to be effective leaders. The term
strategy is ingrained in the world of management as a building block whereby once a firm
strategic orientation has been crafted, other departments of a firm such as human resources,
marketing and finance will align their goals respectively. I thereby choose to reflect on my
experience of teaching business strategy to non-business students, not only for its
predominance to the landscape of business studies, but because its characterized by being
troublesome as well (Meyer & Land, 2003). After offering my students an empathetic
third ear of listening to their perception of the term (Meyer & Land, 2005), I found out
that the definition of strategy left most of them overwhelmed and confused as it was defined
by their textbook in highly complex 4 sentences-long? I then preferred to save my students
the hassle of such stress and confusion by breaking down the complexity of strategy into
simpler constituting-words of; long-term vision and established at top-management category
whilst using a mind-mapping tool as simple as having each word written with a difference
colour. This technique stemmed from my belief that cognitive maps aid in the absorption of
complex and abstract concepts.
Additionally, to facilitate the learner understanding of strategy, I used to play the devil-role
and ask my students why is strategy NOT short-term? And what’s the difference between it
and a goal, then? Indeed, most students get perplexed with the latter question, so I used to
draw an analogy of a firm-strategy to a football team vision which aims to be crowned the
world cup champion, while goals are subsets such as assigning roles to the players of the
team set forth by their coach. As a result, I did find out that students effectively understand an
abstract concept after a familiar representation of their realities has been drawn
metaphorically to the concept at hand. Additionally, I utilized strategy as a tool of self-
reconstitution (Meyer & Land, 2005) when I urged students to reflect on how strategy
can be employed as a life-planning tool beyond the liminal paradigms of business. This was
exemplified when I delivered the case of the singer Madonna and how her strategy in her
career “was to maintain her youth forever” and so I evidenced how she employed various
tools in her life such as eating healthy to maintain her overarching strategy. As a result,
students’ engagement level soared when each volunteered in sharing his/her strategy for life
and how they work towards its execution.
A final method to facilitate the learning process of strategy was through conducing a business
simulation. Accordingly, I divided my class of 10-15 students into two teams of human
resources (HR) and production teams who should execute the L’Oréal strategy of inclusion
and diversity. The deep understanding of such a threshold concept was strongly evidenced
when the HR team stated that they will recruit a diversified workforce in terms of sexual
orientations and ethnicities, while the production team stated that they will create more than
20 shades of foundations to suit the wide spectrum of skin-colours from deep tanned to
vanilla fair; both teams, excitedly, showing that they are now fully aware of the meaning of
strategy and its execution in the business world. I thereby concluded that threshold concepts
in the field of social sciences could be understood by various shapes of knowledge-attainment
such as business-simulation and student engagement in the form of team-work (Meyer &
Land, 2005), besides, invoking critical thinking drills in learners whilst the tutor challenges
them by playing the devil role and/or breaking down a complex concept into smaller and
simpler themes using a mind-mapping tool. Also using a real-life analogy to facilitate the
students’ learning process has proven effective in seizing tutorials as portals to master a
threshold concept including the adoption of an extended discourse in the form of personal
reflections to infuse a depth of meaning to the concept. Months later, I felt certain of the
effectiveness of those pedagogical tools when my students interestingly reiterated those
specific examples when we were revising the concepts before their final exam. It was clear
for myself as a tutor in hindsight that strategy as a concept has been instilled in their
cognition, hopefully for years to come.
References:
Meyer , J.H.F. and Land, R. (2003) “Threshold concepts and troublesome knowledge:
linkages to ways of thinking and practising”. In: Rust, C. (ed.), Improving Student
Learning - Theory and Practice Ten Years On. Oxford: Oxford Centre for Staff and
Learning Development (OCSLD), pp 412-424.
Meyer, Jan H. F., and Ray Land. (2005) “Threshold Concepts and Troublesome Knowledge
(2):
Epistemological Considerations and a Conceptual Framework for Teaching and
Learning.” Higher Education, vol. 49, no. 3, pp. 373–88. Springer