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On the bridge to learn: Analysing the social organization of nautical instruction in a ship simulator

  • Magnus Hontvedt
  • Hans Christian Arnseth
Article
First Online:

Abstract

Research on simulator training has rarely focused on the way simulated contexts are constructed collaboratively. This study sheds light on how structuring role-play and fostering social interactions may prove fruitful for designing simulator training. The article reports on a qualitative study of nautical students training in a ship simulator. The study examines how a group of students, together with a professional maritime pilot, enacted professional roles and collaboratively constructed a simulated context for learning to navigate. Their activities on the bridge were framed within the maritime profession’s hierarchical system of captain and officers, and we examine in detail how these institutionally defined positions become important resources for meaning-making during role-play. The article portrays how two competing activity contexts were constructed, and how the role-play provided opportunities for enacting professional roles and work tasks. However, it also shows that it is challenging to pick up on what is significant to learn and to confront this in debriefing. The article concludes that the students’ collaboration and meaning-making is an entity of training that may be more efficiently addressed.

Keywords

Simulator training Role-play Activity contexts Simulations Interaction analysis 
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Notes

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Elisabeth Stokoe for her valuable comments on data transcripts and for sharing her insights on role-playing as communicative activity. We also would like to thank David Middleton and Anniken Furberg for their positive and constructive comments on an early presentation of data at a seminar on interaction analysis at Intermedia, University of Oslo. We are also in debt to Karianne Skovholt, Marit Skarbø, and Susanne Knudsen for valuable feedback on earlier drafts. Finally, we would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.

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Copyright information

© International Society of the Learning Sciences, Inc. and Springer Science+Business Media New York 2013

Authors and Affiliations

  1. 1.Department of PedagogyVestfold University CollegeToensbergNorway
  2. 2.Department of Educational ResearchUniversity of Oslo, NorwayOsloNorway

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