Helen Melander

Learning to Fly--The Progressive Development of Situation Awareness.

The aim of this article is to argue learning as interaction, and how processes of learning a content as constituted in interaction, can be approached analytically and theoretically. Within aviation, the concept of situation awareness (SA) is used to describe a pilots capability of correctly perceiving and interpreting a situation, and of understanding what the implications are. We investigate how SA is constituted in interaction, through the theoretical and methodological perspective of conversation analysis. In the analysis, we focus how a student develops SA as an intrinsic part of learning how to fly an airplane.

Mathematizing in preschool: children’s participation in geometrical discourse

ABSTRACT This study explores preschool children’s mathematizing in everyday block play activities. Building on an ethnomethodological and multimodal conversation analytic framework, we explore how geometry (i.e. spatiality, shape, and symmetry) is actualized in children’s verbal and embodied interaction with their peers, pedagogues, and material environment. The selected data are drawn from a video ethnographic study in a Swedish preschool in which a boy and a girl play with a magnetic construction toy. The results of the study demonstrate how the participants orient to spatial locations, properties, dimensions, orientations, transformations, and shapes as they build a house. The children are shown to rely upon verbal and embodied resources such as deictics (e.g. here, there, these) and pointing gestures as geometrical aspects are actualized in their interaction. The study contributes with knowledge on preschool children’s everyday mathematizing, in particular, children’s appropriation of geometric discourse as it emerges in the unfolding flow of interaction.

Becoming a “Good Nurse”: Social Norms of Conduct and the Management of Interpersonal Relations

Within the profession of nursing, an intrinsic aspect of interactional competence is the nurses’ ability to manage interpersonal relations and to act in accordance with cultural and social norms of proper nurse conduct. The focus of this chapter is on how student nurses are socialized into preferred modes of interacting with patients. The data consist of video recordings of a training session in which nursing students at a clinical training center learn to insert peripheral venous catheters. The results of the study show various ways in which the students and their teacher explore social norms of proper nurse conduct by mobilizing the category term “patient,” and how the notion of a “good nurse” thus emerges in interaction between the participants.