The Lived Body and Embodied Instructional Practices in Maritime Basic Safety Training

Abstract

This paper explores the role of the lived body in maritime professional training. By focusing on how instructors include students’ subjective experiencing bodies as an educational resource and context for directives and demonstrations, the study aims at informing training of professionals for survival in emergency situations onboard ships. Drawing on a mobile video ethnography and on phenomenological analyses of the presence/absence of the body in experience, the study illustrates how instructors direct students’ attention towards or away from their appearing corporal field depending on the stage of the training. The article documents three instructional practices incorporating students’ lived embodiment during training: coping with distress by foregrounding the lived body, backgrounding the lived body for outer-directed action and imagining others’embodied experiences. The study contributes to our understanding of intercorporeal practices in instructional interaction and guidance in simulation-based vocational training.

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“…During the lessons the students are working on various tasks of production, either individually or in small groups, manipulating their own mannequin heads, while the teacher is moving around to give individual feedback and supervision or modelling demonstrations to larger or smaller groups. Practical training involves simulations that mimic real situations and prepare students to execute correct actions (Viktorelius & Sellberg, 2022). The simulations are dealt with continuously in demonstrations or simply working on a section of hair attached to a mannequin head.…”

“…Despite the amount of educational contexts having a sensorial content, the research of the role of sensoriality is scarce (Viktorelius & Sellberg, 2022), especially in the form of tactility and not the least in vocational education and training (VET). As stated by Goodwin and Smith (2021): '…the sensory aspect of touch -that is, the tactility of a given experience and its description -is rarely given explicit focus in the analysis of participants' actions and orientation ' (p. 270).…”