As a former English teacher, I love words, especially those interesting sounding ones that live in the shadows of our everyday usage.
“Liminal” is one of those words that I’ve seen popping up more and more lately, it’s easy to see why. The second definition in the Merriam-Webster dictionary reads: “of, relating to, or being an intermediate state, phase, or condition: in-between, transitional.”
Yeah. That.
We’re no doubt in a “liminal state” right now when it comes to so many aspects of our lives and of our stories. We’re moving from one world to some other, yet unknown, when it comes to the environment, politics, the way we do business, and, yes, education. One of the metaphors we use in our work at the BIG Questions Institute comes from the Indian activist Arundhati Roy, who writes that the pandemic “is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.” We’re in the portal right now.
Last week in the Harvard Business Review, Laura Empson and Jennifer Howard-Grenville took a deep dive into the anthropological aspects of liminal and found three core characteristics. I want to read these with an education lens.
First,
“it involves a forced and prolonged separation from normal ways of being and doing — a physically and emotionally challenging dislocation from familiar roles and structures.”
Educators can certainly check that box, and I’ve already argued that we may not want to go back to those “normal ways” in schools any time soon if ever.
Second,
“although a liminal experience involves a prolonged break from the familiar, it does not fully replace it. It is both disturbingly different and confusingly similar.”
How hard did we try to recreate the familiar, time-worn practices and rhythms of school in the online delivery space? I think many would characterize “remote learning” as different and similar all at once.
And finally,
“when the liminal experience comes to an end, those who have survived return transformed. When we finally emerge from our time of trial, we will have been changed in lasting ways we may not yet fully understand.”
And this is where it gets interesting, at least for me.
I’m wondering how many of us in education are beginning to reflect on how we have been transformed by this moment, not necessarily as institutions (yet), but…
