Sites of Memory: Positioning thresholds of artistic identity

Through an education the individual learner can affect changes as he or she achieves a set of skills and knowledge that will provide opportunities to operate within a chosen discipline or context pushing beyond the known. As learners make their way in the world assuming and reframing their identities they create and recreate life stories within personally constructed spaces and places. As the concept of a self forms and reforms, what has existed becomes transformed and assimilated into a changed identity. This transformation of self also involves challenges that confront conceptual beliefs and understandings not only within an educational context, but also within other facets of life. This paper will discuss Thresholds Concepts in relation to artistic identity and will argue that preoccupation with the ways we might influence learners in terms of knowledge acquisition can distract from other important notions of learning and self. While concentrating on the external drivers such as discipline content we can easily ignore or conveniently forget that there may be other drivers that are internalised and adopted as a motivating force in the desire for authorising an identity or identities. Such drivers may well be the most important elements in the acquisition of knowledge and the successful crossing of life’s thresholds.