Debriefing sessions play a crucial role in enhancing the effectiveness of simulations for learning in professional education and training. In this paper, we focus on post-game debriefing sessions in military officer education, where wargames are used with the goal of enhancing students’ understanding of military tactics. The central focus of this article is how the concept of tactics is used in the debriefings. The study was undertaken at the Swedish Defence University, where video data were collected from a variety of wargaming-based tactics courses for navy and marine cadets (officer students). Using a microethnographic approach, we analyze a set of video-recorded post-wargaming debriefing sessions. In the examination of the practical reasoning present in the discussions, we find that participants engage with the concept of tactics in three main ways: (1) Delineating it from other forms of related but separate areas of military knowledge (such as team communication and leadership); (2) as part of “tactical reflections” on specific events in the game, by both students and teachers; and (3) as a generalizable and transferable military skill. The adversarial nature of wargaming plays a significant role, where the goal of creating dilemmas for the opponent is important throughout. Knowledge of tactics is found to not be transparently communicated through participation in the wargame, but to require unpacking in reflective discussions. The analyses show how the concept of tactics is articulated by teachers and appropriated in students’ post-game reasoning. We discuss these findings in terms of conceptual socialization.

This study investigates the role of laughter in video-recorded interactions between instructors and students during post-simulation debriefing in maritime education, focusing on how the sensitive nature of negative feedback is managed in interaction. The study demonstrates how laughter is used as an interactional resource in potentially delicate situations where student mistakes are exposed, and how serious and non-serious orientations are balanced in such a way that participants are able to raise and discuss substantive issues whilst treating student mistakes in a light-hearted way. It is demonstrated how laughter and non-seriousness tend to be reserved for talk about specific student actions and simulator events, whereas participants adopt a serious orientation to generalised conclusions regarding professional conduct. A further finding concerns a dilemma created by non-serious orientations in the description of student actions: while jokes and laughter are effective means of emphasising light-heartedness in relation to student mistakes, substantive matters are often left unspecified, which makes relevant subsequent reformulations marked by shifting back to a serious orientation. The analyses illustrate the interactional work whereby seriousness and non-seriousness, as well as receptiveness and resistiveness, are managed as interrelated and simultaneous orientations.

In this article we review studies of interaction in post-simulation debriefing. The focus is on research that takes an interest in the sequential unfolding of debriefing conversations, using recordings of naturally occurring interaction as data. While a growing number of studies have examined learning outcomes in debriefing using quantitative methodologies, relatively little is known about the details of debriefing interaction. We take our point of departure in prior meta-analyses of post-simulation debriefing, and discuss this research in relation to the burgeoning field of research that employs a video-ethnographic perspective, broadly informed by conversation analysis and ethnomethodology. We identify two prominent themes in the existing interaction analytic research: facilitator guidance, and the use of performance review media. In both these areas, we discuss how studies of interaction contribute to new conceptualizations of debriefing through a complementary perspective on simulation-based learning. We also identify a set of promising areas of future research into the interactional accomplishment of post-simulation debriefing: self-led debriefing; debriefing structure; the disciplinary shaping of debriefing interaction; and the sensitive nature of feedback.

In this article, recordings of academic supervision interactions are examined to inform a discussion of how 'texts' and 'practices' have been conceptualized in Academic Literacies (AL) research. AL perspectives have contributed to a shift in focus, from texts as linguistic objects to the practices in which texts are embedded. With a starting point in ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, we demonstrate the relevance of proximal textual practices as an intermediary between texts and the more abstract dimensions of practice targeted by AL, such as ideology, power, and institutional processes. Thereby we extend initiatives in AL to highlight direct interaction between learners and tutors as central to academic literacies pedagogy, and demonstrate the potential of detailed conversation analytic and ethnomethodological analysis for shedding light on the practices within which texts are embedded in the learning and teaching of academic writing.

The overarching interest of this chapter is in the description of embodied courses of action. More specifically, we focus on the instructional descriptions of what sometimes is referred to as manual or instrumental action. The examples that we use are taken from an introductory course in endodontics and a YouTube tutorial on how to crochet. These examples show distinct relationships between descriptions and embodied courses of action. Although the instructional descriptions are all occasioned by manual actions, they vary in the extent to which the sense of the descriptions relies on the details of the displayed actions, and while instrumental actions in some demonstrations are produced independently of their descriptions, there are other situations where descriptions and embodied courses of actions mutually elaborate each other. In addition to this interest in descriptions as part of instructional demonstrations, we also turn to our own practices of description. Throughout this chapter, we discuss how professional sociological analysis trades on and differs from the analysis produced by members themselves in the course of demonstrations.

This study deals with turn-taking in human-robot interactions (HRI). Based on 15 sessions ofvideo-recorded interactions between pairs of human participants and a social robot called Furhat, we explore how human participants orient to violations of the normative order of turn-taking in social interaction and how they handle those violations. As a case in point, we present sequences of HRI to show particular features of turn-taking with the robot and also how the robot may fail to respond to the human participants’ bid to take a turn. In these sequences, the participants either complete the turn in progress and ignore the overlap caused by the robot’s continuation of its turn, or they cut short their own turn and restart in the next possible turn-transition place. In all cases in our data, the overlaps and failed smooth turn-transitions are oriented to as accountable and in some sense interactionally problematic. The results of the study point not only to improvables in robot engineering, but also to routine practices of projection and the ways in which human subjects orient toward normative expectations of ordinary social interactions, even whenconversing with a robot.

In this chapter, we explore the organization of feedback in simulation-based team training for healthcare students at a Swedish university. The students in the investigated setting conduct team-training scenarios based on a patient simulator, after which their simulation performance becomes subject to joint discussion and feedback. The chapter considers instances in which instructors respond to prior critical feedback from students to peers. Prior studies have shown that peer feedback tends to be locally oriented and characterized by hedging and mitigation, whereas the feedback of instructors embodies a generalized stance that reframes local events in terms of professional considerations. In the chapter, we build on and qualify this characterization by (a) pointing out the relevance of students’ accounting practices in the delivery and reception of feedback and (b) showing how instructors address the generalizations inherent in student accounts and reframe them in terms of professional accountability. Socialization in healthcare settings includes not only the learning of different modes of conduct – it also operates at the level of accountability, addressing how the social and professional significance of conduct is constructed in accounts.

While it is recognized that instruction between co-workers is a central component of everydayworkplace interaction and learning, this study investigates the ways in which such instructionalevents are practically initiated in interaction. We analyse recordings of everyday work at a radiostation, where journalists prepare and broadcast local news. In our data, a distinction can bemade between two interactional contexts from which instructional interactions emerge: searches,where one party is looking for a suitable helper; and established interactions, where the initiation ofinstruction is prefigured by immediate prior interaction. A further finding is that these twocontexts are associated with two different ways of initiating instruction. Direct requests areused in established interactions. In searches, we instead find questions regarding the otherperson’s procedural knowledge – what we term know-how questions. We finally discuss theways in which instructional configurations are assembled without reference to institutionallydefined instructor/instructed roles.

In “Intentional action and side-effects in ordinary language” (2003), Joshua Knobe reported an asymmetry in test subjects’ responses to a question about intentionality: subjects are more likely to judge that a side effect of an agent’s intended action is intentional if they think the side effect is morally bad than if they think it is morally good. This result has been taken to suggest that the concept of intentionality is an inherently moral concept. In this paper, we draw attention to the fact that Knobe’s original interpretation of the results is based on an abstract rendering of the central scenario (the Chairman scenario) that is significantly different from the vignettes presented to the survey participants. In particular, the experimental vignettes involve temporal and social dimensions; they portray sequences of social actions involving an agent and an interlocutor, rather than a lone agent making a momentary decision in light of certain attitudes. Through textual analyses of a set of vignettes used to study the Knobe effect, drawing on ethnomethodology, conversation analysis, and discursive psychology, we show that there are many differences between the experimental conditions besides the moral valence of the side effect. In light of our textual analyses, we discuss vignette methodology in experimental philosophy and suggest an alternative interpretation of Knobe’s original experimental results. We also argue that experimental philosophy could benefit from considering research on naturally occurring social interaction as an alternative source of empirical findings for discussions of folk-psychological concepts.