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

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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.

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Notes

  1. In the transcript, the turns corresponding to the actual simulator event replayed in the debriefing tool are marked with letters, whereas turns corresponding to the debriefing setting are numbered.

  2. In our investigations, other flight examiners do in fact point out that during an autofeather failure the gauge sits around 83 %, but this is irrelevant to the unfolding meeting here, where the three participants appear to be in agreement—there is no contest—that the instrument reading was due to the simulator and should not have occurred.

  3. Versions are available on YouTube (e.g., https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-lhQn-fAR6U).

  4. Our ethnographic observations show that even when a pilot examined had flight examiner status, he never contested the observations of his examiner. Instead, they submitted to the examiner–examinee division of labor and thereby avoided the possibility of conflict (“I snuff it up”).

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Acknowledgments

Grants from the Air New Zealand group and Qantas Airlines covered the travel expenses associated with the data collection and the verbatim transcriptions. We thank all pilots and flight examiners for their willingness to participate in this research. Our gratitude specifically goes to (a) Timothy J. Mavin for the recruitment of participating airlines, contributions to the data collection, and arrangements for obtaining rough transcriptions and (b) Ian Munro and Richard Wallace for their assistance on the technical and procedural matters of flying the aircraft involved. We thank TJM and RW for reading an early draft and providing editorial and technical comments, respectively. The authors bear sole responsibility for the contents of this text.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Victoria, Greater Victoria, Canada

    Wolff-Michael Roth

  2. Griffith University, Brisbane, Australia

    Wolff-Michael Roth

  3. University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway

    Alfredo Jornet

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  1. Wolff-Michael Roth
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  2. Alfredo Jornet
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Correspondence to Wolff-Michael Roth.

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Appendix

Table 1 The following conventions are used in the transcription.
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Roth, WM., Jornet, A. Situational Awareness as an Instructable and Instructed Matter in Multi-Media Supported Debriefing: a Case Study from Aviation. Comput Supported Coop Work 24, 461–508 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10606-015-9234-5

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