Learning in Technology-Enhanced Medical Simulation: Locations and Knowings

Abstract

This qualitative study focuses on how knowings and learning take place in full-scale simulation training of medical and nursing students, by drawing upon actor-network theory (ANT). ANT situates materiality as a part of the social practices. Knowing and learning, according to ANT, are not simply cognitive or social phenomena, but are seen as emerging as effects of the relation between material assemblages and human actors being performed into being in particular locations. Data consists of observations of simulations performed by ten groups of students. The analysis focuses on the emerging knowings in the socio-material—arrangements of three locations involved in the simulation—the simulation room, the observation room and the reflection room. The findings indicate that medical knowing, affective knowing and communicative knowing are produced in different ways in the different locations and material arrangements of the simulation cycle. Keywords: simulation, locations, knowings, actor-network theory, collaborate learning, multiprofessional learning.