This study examines how operators’ vocal enactments mediate students’ engagement in simulation-based nursing training, where the limited expressiveness of mannequins necessitates operator-managed voicing to sustain the activity as patient care. Drawing on ethnomethodology and conversation analysis (EMCA) to scrutinize video recordings of simulation-based nursing education, the study focuses on interactions between operators and students as mediated by the mannequin. The findings show that operators’ vocal utterances serve multiple functions: supplementing the mannequin’s limited expressiveness, guiding students toward learning objectives, and providing feedback on clinical actions. However, the operator's enactments are not always taken up by the students as intended, as students navigate the tension between the artificiality of the mannequin and the requirement to suspend disbelief and treat the mannequin as if it is a human patient. Rather than fully immersing in the scenario, students oscillate between engaging with the mannequin as a patient and acknowledging the simulation’s artificiality, highlighting the complex dynamics of simulation-based learning.

Simulation-based training in medical education often takes place in a laboratory setting with trained facilitators and a technologically advanced mannequin patient. The facilitator plays a dual role in supporting the students’ training, as responsible for the execution of the scenario and by playing the role of nurse in the emergency room. In this study we examine the facilitator contributions to the training interaction with a specific interest in how their actions encourage and support the students’ medical reasoning. The data comprise video-taped training sessions in which eight different groups of third year medical students engage in simulation of an acute medical situation at an emergency ward. With a discourse analytic approach inspired by Goffman’s participation framework, the analysis focuses on participants’ shifts in footing in this role play setting in which multiple frames might appear. The analysis identifies facilitator shifts in footing that accomplish different interactional frames; an emergency care frame (nurse role), a simulation training frame (facilitator role), and a medical education frame (educator role). These contributions invite action from the students and ensure progress in reaching the learning outcomes. In this way, shifts in footing serve as a scaffolding device for the students’ medical reasoning, both in terms of content and progress, and at critical moments in the training. The findings have relevance for facilitator training and strategies for supporting group interaction in simulation-based training.

Wargaming is a longstanding educational method used in military training to enhance officers' decision-making and tactical acumen. The current security environment has led to increased interest in diverse wargaming formats among military and civilian stakeholders (Hirst, 2024). Despite this resurgence, empirical research on instructional interactions within wargaming contexts remains sparse.

Drawing upon studies of instructional interactions in simulations (Sellberg, 2017, 2018; Sellberg & Lundin, 2017) and occasioned instructions (Lindwall, Lymer & Greiffenhagen, 2015), this research explores military instructors’ pedagogical interventions during wargaming exercises. Using ethnomethodologically informed conversation analysis of roughly 10 hours of video from naval tactical education at the Swedish Defence University, the study examines interactional and embodied interactions between instructors, cadets, and the digital, map-based wargaming environment.

The analysis identifies three primary intervention patterns: guiding questions prompting tactical reflection, explicit calls for meta-reflection at pivotal moments, and corrective interventions that reshape hasty decision-making processes. These interventions are characterized by their situated nature, being sensitive to specific game events and emerging tactical situations while simultaneously maintaining broader educational objectives.

By closely examining these occasioned instructions, the study highlights how instructors reveal critical simulation elements otherwise inaccessible to cadets, such as resource depletion, altered tactical conditions, and the necessity for reevaluation of plans. Specific attention is given to embodied interactions—including gestures, physical positioning, and visual orientations—that facilitate collective understanding. These findings contribute both to our understanding of instruction-in-interaction in complex learning environments, as well as to the development of pedagogical strategies for military educational wargaming.

The Resilience Engineering (RE) perspective in safety science emphasizes performance variability as crucial for ensuring safety in risk-prone industries. This is often described as socio-technical systems' ability to be resilient and adjust functioning prior to, during, or following expected and unexpected events. Performance variability at the individual level is associated with resilience skills and contains four principles related to safe work practices: responding to regular and irregular threats robustly and flexibly, monitoring ongoing activities including one's own performance, anticipating disruptions and the consequences of adverse events, and learning from both successes and failures. Learning is often highlighted as instrumental in achieving the other three principles, but how this occurs is not well studied in the RE literature.

We explore this topic by applying empirical material from a study of bachelor-level students in a nautical science educational program. To bridge theory and practice, these students rely heavily on simulator-based training throughout their 3-year program. The training scenarios range from short and mundane situations in low-fidelity simulators to complex, hour-long crisis situations in high-fidelity simulators. A key objective of the training is to combine technical knowledge such as navigation and ship handling with interaction and communication skills. We ask the following questions:
- How are nautical students trained to handle system variability in simulator-based training?
- How do they acquire resilience skills throughout their bachelor education?
- What teaching methods are used to develop resilience skills in the safety training of these students?