ABSTRACT
Trasmundi considers the daunting nature of the educational challenge for a department of emergency medicine: the majority of doctors are novices that are faced with patient narratives and symptoms that differ from textbook diagnoses and descriptions of diseases. In this perspective, medical departments must organise a stimulating and trustful work environment that facilitates a learning attitude. Medical novices must become experts capable of making critical decisions while managing fluid teams in an unpredictable clinical context. Medical practitioners, therefore, need knowledge of how medical teams function, how practitioners interact, and how to develop the skills required. Trasmundi's chapter examines how healthcare teams manage real-time cognitive events (a case of decision-making) by relying on interactivity. By emphasising the role of interactivity, attention is paid to how team members are able to pick up on other members’ embodiments in ways that enable them to understand situated, skilled decision-making behaviour directly. The goal of analysing such examples is to generate a better understanding of the dynamics involved in situated learning emergence in teams, which in turn can help design optimal education settings.
Trasmundi uses naturalistic video-data from a cognitive ethnographic study on medical interactivity at an emergency ward. Her chapter investigates a case-study of learning emergence in a medical team. Methodologically, she uses Cognitive Event Analysis to investigate 1) how the team animates the interactivity trajectory to achieve results (provide a diagnosis and a plan for further treatment) and 2) how the situation functions as a learning environment for the novice team members.
Being part of a professional team enables the novice member to emulate the team's decision-making process in a way that allows for the emergence of insight and learning in a naturalistic setting. On this basis, the learner develops an embodied, experiential basis for adapting to a complex setting in a professional manner. Trasmundi shows that when learning emerges successfully as a result of relying on interactivity within a skilled team, much can be gained from organising medical training in teams. Further, with Cognitive Event Analysis analysts can zoom in on crucial points within the interactivity that are crucial for understanding the conditions for embodiments involved in learning.
