Calibrating hands-on experience and manual know-how in anatomical dissection

Abstract

Research on instruction in manual skills training has traditionally focused on the practices for displaying understandings that are conveyed via talk or embodied demonstration. Know-how, or the understanding needed for performing a manual skill, however, is necessarily grounded in the practitioner’s sensorial experience of their movements, the tools they use, and the materials they manipulate. As such, sensorial touch is essential to the learning of manual skills, and participants require means for making their sensory experience accessible to one another for coordinating instruction. Building on previous work in practical skills training, this study investigates instructional interactions in cadaveric workshops. Focusing on interactions where a) instructors demonstrate manual actions and articulate tactile experiences, b) trainees attempt to explore anatomical structures, and c) instructors evaluate those attempts, we analyse the embodied and material resources that participants use for making tactile experience accessible, assessable, and thereby instructable in interaction, and how the instruction are consequently organized in pursuing that end.