‘Put your fingers right in here’: Learnability and instructed experience

Abstract

Examining a fragment of interaction that occurred during a surgery at a teaching hospital, we explore how particular instructed experiences are produced for two trainees, a surgeon in the residency program and a medical student in a surgical clerkship. We are concerned with what is produced as learnable in each case. Stated slightly differently, we are interested in the ways in which the attending surgeon uses demonstrations as instruction and the ways in which recipients of that instruction, in this case the resident and the clerk, respond with enactments of those demonstrated actions. The recipients of this kind of instruction participate in a form of experiential learning in which they enact their own versions of the instructor’s demonstrated actions to be observed and assessed by the instructor. These enactments provide learners with experiential access to the instructor’s demonstrated actions. They are designed to be experiences that learners may draw upon to make experientially warranted claims at some later time.

Finger dialogue: The embodied accomplishment of learnables in instructing grammar on a worksheet

“…'learnables' (Majlesi & Broth, 2012;Szczepek Reed, Reed & Haddon, 2013;Zemel, & Koschmann, 2014). The participants' bodily actions are reflexively mobilized to foreground, and make connections, not only between the visible written objects on the paper, but also between them and their grammatical glosses.…”

Collaborative Reflection Under the Microscope: Using Conversation Analysis to Study the Transition From Case Presentation to Discussion in GP Residents' Experience Sharing Sessions

“…3 Koschmann has examined how a learning issue is generated and how surgeons learn from their supervisors, by approaching "'the learnable in the lesson' [as] an interactional accomplishment of both the instructor and instructee." [33][34][35] He described how specifying the exact topic of the discussion takes up much of the conversational work. Any student can renegotiate the boundaries of a discussion topic, and the tutor provides implicit endorsement of certain topics as worthy of further exploration.…”

Instruction in Computer Modeling Can Support Broad Application of Complex Systems Knowledge

“…Further, students adopted certain, specific linguistic forms (e.g., "complex patterns") when describing phenomena during the posttest. Having new phrases, at minimum, shows that students have acquired "prospective indexicals" (Goodwin, 1996) that can ease learning of the concept in the future (Zemel and Koschmann, 2014). Learners likely would not have experienced the same cognitive benefits from using ready-made models because they would be less likely to internalize formalizations of rules, gain new language to describe phenomena, and connect the abstract rules to concrete outcomes.…”