Situational Awareness as an Instructable and Instructed Matter in Multi-Media Supported Debriefing: a Case Study from Aviation

Abstract

Debriefing is an important practice for learning from experience especially in high-risk industries, including the medical field and aviation. Although it might be assumed that tools aiding in representing the events to be debriefed will improve the learning outcomes, meta-analytic studies appear to show that there is no advantage to debriefing sessions that use videos. Simultaneously, such meta-analytic studies are calling for process-related investigations of debriefing generally and those focusing on representational tools more specifically. In this study, we provide an exemplary interaction analysis of debriefing meetings in aviation that immediately follow 4-hour examination sessions. We examine how situational awareness—a crucial feature of aircraft piloting performance—becomes an instructable and instructed matter in and through the meetings. We exhibit the anchoring role of the tool, the opportunities for distinguishing knowledge from performance components, and the opportunities for anchoring third-person perspectives of performance to embodied knowing.