Abstract
This study examines storytelling episodes in 13 video-recorded and fully transcribed post-simulation debriefings from a maritime navigation course. The aim is to scrutinize the facilitators’ practice of telling stories from the sea during debriefings, to explore the organization and inner function of storytelling in debriefing. A combination of dialogical-performative analysis and a structural narrative model was conducted to analyze and contextualize stories from working at sea in the debriefing practice. The analysis shows how storytelling in debriefing frequently occurred, and was mainly occasioned by critical discussions about students’ mistakes during the simulated scenario. In such a critical debriefing practice, the results show how telling stories about lived experiences of professional dilemmas and mistakes serves multiple functions. In line with research results from previous studies on storytelling in higher education, this study demonstrates how storytelling connects the simulated event to the professional responsibilities on board seagoing ships. In addition, storytelling might also serve face-saving purposes in this critical debriefing practice, which raises important questions regarding psychological safety and the debriefing climate.
Highlights
The life of a sailor has been the subject of numerous legends, myths and stories
In classical literature on becoming a member of a community of practice, learning a profession involves observation, supervised experience and storytelling (Lave and Wenger 1991; Orr 1996). These activities are mainly situated at work, i.e., learning the institutional rules, norms, ethics, jargon and customs of that work culture through apprenticeship and on-the-job training. In educational settings, such as the debriefing activities examined in the present study, supervised experience and storytelling practices may not carry the same meaning as they do in learning a profession at work (Roth and Lee 2006)
The two narrative approaches share an analytical focus on detailed analyses and comparisons of small samples of data, and combining them provided a general picture of the overall function of storytelling as a learning resource in the data corpus, as well as detailed accounts of how students responded to the stories told
Summary
The life of a sailor has been the subject of numerous legends, myths and stories. In classical literature on becoming a member of a community of practice, learning a profession involves observation, supervised experience and storytelling (Lave and Wenger 1991; Orr 1996) These activities are mainly situated at work, i.e., learning the institutional rules, norms, ethics, jargon and customs of that work culture through apprenticeship and on-the-job training. The two narrative approaches share an analytical focus on detailed analyses and comparisons of small samples of data, and combining them provided a general picture of the overall function of storytelling as a learning resource in the data corpus, as well as detailed accounts of how students responded to the stories told (cf Riessman 2008).
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