A Nonlinear and Phenomenographic Approach

 

University learning unfolds as a nonlinear, dynamic, and often erratic process, challenging conventional epistemological models that assume linear progression and stable cognition, and instead demanding new frameworks capable of capturing its fluid and transformative nature, such as the notion of liminality and the ontoepistemological perspective proposed in this thesis, which reconceptualizes the learning space not as a passive transition but as an active zone of ontological and epistemic transformation where students encounter threshold concepts—critical ideas that restructure understanding and identity—within a liminal space that is inherently unstable, oscillatory, and charged with affective and cognitive turbulence, as evidenced by phenomena such as ontological obstacles, cognitive regression, and hybrid transformations, which resist clear categorization and instead suggest recursive and unpredictable learning trajectories, further articulated through a phenomenographic methodology that in two phases explores how both students and teachers perceive and navigate these conceptual thresholds, drawing on interviews, reflective journals, and observational data to identify not only twelve first-order threshold concepts in educational research but also four meta-concepts—the meaning of educational research, EMIC/ETIC duality, the role of subjectivity, and paradigm awareness—that function as second-order thresholds, reshaping the learner’s epistemic stance and ontological positioning, thereby advancing a vision of higher education as a transformative space where knowledge is not merely acquired but inhabited, negotiated, and reconfigured through situated, embodied, and relational practices that acknowledge the epistemologies of the South, feminist knowledge frameworks, and the cognitive specificities of each learner, offering thus a redefinition of academic formation as a complex journey through ambiguity, breakdown, and reconstitution