Abstract
At many points over the course of a career in higher education, we all will be asked to exist in times of transition. Whether we are leaving graduate prep programs charged with embarking in our profession as agents of change, tapped by our Dean to lead a department “struggling with transition,” or coaching a student through the ephemeral spaces of learning that takes place between the gaps of the vectors/stages/modes of the current theory du jour, we will all quickly realize that often the only static state of being in our work is that it is ever changing. It’s difficult to locate a single moment in my 20 years in the field when transition hasn’t been at the forefront of my day to day, and yet too often I wonder, when are we working toward change for change sake and when are we taking time to reflect in order to turn times of transition into times of transformation?
We’ve recently wrapped a professional search process on my campus, during which I was struck by how many times candidates were asked, “How do you deal with working in an environment that can be ambiguous?” I cringed a little bit every time worried that our visitors would be concerned about lack of direction, confusion, or that we weren’t operating as the perfectly collaborative team of their dreams. I’d send them to lunch with some students and start thinking about how I would help them process their interview in our wrap up meeting. People hate the feeling of uncertainty; if not managed or addressed properly, it can lead to confusion, frustration, or worse—and that is a bad thing. Equally bad, however, is running from ambiguity, leaping to solution based on assumption, and failing to take the time to explore what is unknown and learning to be comfortable in, and taking the time to reflect, when presented with the opportunities of ambiguity afforded us during times of transition.
In the Fall of 2000, I was in my first year of my master’s program around the time that Susan Komives’s piece “Inhabit the Gap” was published in this journal. In that article, she referenced Lee Burdette Williams’s astute observation that “our job as student educators is to inhabit [the] gap”—the liminal space where individuals move between “knowing something to being able to use that that knowledge to inform their own attitudes and behaviors” (Komives, 2000). I would argue that times of transition are similar “gaps” and opportunities in space and time for professional and institutional growth, but when was the last time you felt the phrase “in the interim” was a charge to investigate and develop best practice instead of a dull holding pattern devoid of activity and thought?
Often we talk about transitions—especially if they involve budget cuts, reduction in force, or crisis—in terms of regrouping, refocusing, and redefining. These times can often be heavily monitored, focused on quality markers that can be quantified, reported on, and translated into consumable data by trustees, donors, and the public. This can limit our ability and our interest in thinking big and taking risks. I wonder what could be accomplished if we focused on times of transition in terms of reflection, challenge, and transformation, and believe if we spent more time immersed in the liminal spaces between transition points we would move our practice and pedagogy across the threshold of an as-yet-unknown boundary. As humans we love the idea of exploring the unknown, yet we struggle with ambiguity and change, which are not bad things. I would argue that is the chance to explore multiple interpretations and outcomes of the problem we’re trying to solve, the humans involved, and to hold off the comfort of a hastily crafted solution in exchange for the time and space to create.
Threshold concept theories can help define transition as a fundamentally transformative experience: Change can be considered “akin to a portal, opening up a new and previously inaccessible way of thinking about something [and] represents a transformed way of understanding, or interpreting, or viewing…without which the learner cannot progress” (Meyer & Land, 2003, p. 1). The threshold concept framework focuses on the identification of what is fundamental to the grasp of a subject and is essentially a transactional inquiry requiring partnership between the relevant subject experts, practitioners, and target audience of learners (Cousin, 2009, 2010). As the theories of threshold concepts have developed, there has been an increasing focus on liminal spaces—the “gaps”—where quantum leaps of learning, meaning, and being can occur. Spaces can be as exciting and anxiety inducing all at the same time. [Liminal space] is when you have left the tried and true, but not yet been able to replace it with anything else. If you are not trained in how to hold anxiety, how to live with ambiguity, how to entrust and wait, you will run…anything to flee this terrible cloud of unknowing. (Richard Rohr, founder of the Centre for Action and Contemplation, as heard at the 2015 Wisdom 2.0 Conference, San Francisco, CA)
Navigating these liminal spaces can be a frustrating experience for leaders and learners alike. We find ourselves fine-tuning our explanations of changes in policy or pedagogy, tinkering with the language in which we deploy them as we attempt to produce the spark that will provide motivation and forward momentum yet often finding ourselves and our ideas stuck in committee. As a colleague so aptly not that long ago said, “When are we going to move past the work group and let this group get to work?” Of course, all change should be informed by time, assessment, and discussion but there comes a time when languishing in the think tank is as misguided as change for change’s sake.
Think about the last time you tried to solve a problem, did you or anyone begin the conversation saying, “I don’t know”? Of course not. Yet every single day we walk onto campuses whose sole purpose is to guide students to knowledge—to teach them what they don’t already know—so why are we so uncomfortable with the unknown in our day-to-day practice? What if we began every transition, approached every challenge, as learners and acknowledged what we don’t know. That we don’t yet know how to solve it. That we might not truly know what the problem actually is. That we don’t know what process to apply, policy to write, or solution to enact. What happens when you approach change this way is you get curious, and curiosity is the most important mindset for learning—a given—but also for tackling ambiguity (Sadlier, 2017).
Proficiency in ambiguity is as fundamental to student learning as it is to professional practice. Students need to know not only static academic concepts and theories but also how to apply and discover the relationships between different disciplines, scholars and practitioners need to collaborate and cross-pollinate in order to build new ways of knowing and doing, and campus leaders need to relax the reigns in times of transition to allow the good people they’ve hired to take risks and carve out new paths in the ever-changing landscape that is higher education. The bottom line is that when we consider times of transition as threshold moments the central question moves from “What should we change? To reflect upon?” to “What can we become?”
True transformation requires an inquiry that seeks to inform and develop future practice. Using a framework that explores the liminal domains of our practice can help the process of transformation be focused, learner centered, and intentionally focused. When scholars, students, and practitioners start examining the relationship between their desire for change and the things that matter to them as individuals and institutions, the results might offer new approaches and outcomes that are innovative, unconventional, and focused on what can be instead of what was.
It’s my hope that the terms “change-management,” “action-oriented,” and similar transition-as-reaction corporate ideologies that have seeped into higher education practice will soon disappear in favor of intentionally designed spaces and processes that recognize the value of reflection and curiosity as catalysts for transformation. I hope we continue our work to inhabit, as well as fill, gaps created by times of change, and that we embrace the opportunity to increase our capacity, and comfort, with the ambiguous nature of seeking knowledge and engaging in critical inquiry. When I welcomed back my bleary eyed candidates at the end of their long day I’d open our conversation by saying, “I’m sure you have a lot of questions, I imagine most of what you heard today feels new and unknown—which I hope is exciting—so tell me how you make the most of ambiguity and transition?” And then I listened to see who got curious.
