‘Tell Me the Landscapes in Which You Live and I Will Tell You Who You Are’ – Online Theology Students Crossing Thresholds in Religious Education and Spirituality Against an Australian Desert Context

Abstract

This article proposes that in the crossing of learning thresholds, it is possible to identify a number of significant intersections between three key areas – (1) stories about teaching challenges provided by an initial survey of 60 selected online adults studying religious education (RE), spirituality and theology; (2) the crossing of the Australian bush, frontier, or desert landscape; and (3) threshold concept (TC) theory. This survey of online teacher views revealed five specific teacher learning challenges that could be compared with five selected features of the Australian bush or desert landscape. Narratives of teacher learning challenges were extracted from a range of online discussion scripts, while certain features of the Australian landscape emerged from a later, unplanned literature analysis of that topic. This article examines two of these thematic clusters, related to liminality and to ‘stretching’ of teachers, in relation to desert literature and TC theory. The article closes with a series of conclusions and discussion points emerging from the research.

KEYWORDS:

• Australian bush
• frontier
• teacher narratives
• online learning
• religious education
• spirituality
• theology
• threshold concepts

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Peter Mudge

Peter Mudge is Senior Lecturer in Religious Education and Spirituality at The Broken Bay Institute, Diocese of Broken Bay, and Conjoint Lecturer, School of Humanities and Social Science, The University of Newcastle, both in NSW, Australia. His areas of interest and research include: RE, spirituality, TCs, connected knowing, transformative, critical and subversive pedagogies, studies of religion, interfaith/interbelief dialogue, philosophy in the classroom, and the role of the arts and spirituality in RE. He has received formal training in drawing and painting which he pursues in his art studio.