Rethinking real-time learning in debriefing: liminality, microgenesis, and semiotic borders

We offer a new interpretive framework to analyze and explain learning processes in real time during discursive interactions in clinical simulation, especially in debriefing. First, we question the computational metaphor of the mind, where the mind is conceptualized as a closed system that processes symbols linearly, typical of traditional cognitivist learning approaches with profound practical implications over debriefing. This approach is insufficient to explain the complexity of learning in situated, uncertain, and dynamic contexts such as debriefing. During debriefing, participants do not simply remember data or assimilate external conceptual structures ready to be used, but rather undergo more complex processes. They experience discontinuities, oscillations, and ambiguities in their thinking, while negotiating tensions and facing moments of cognitive and emotional instability. To capture this dynamic, we need a richer, more flexible, and more responsive approach to lived experience. Given these limitations, new interpretative proposals are emerging that seek to explain learning in debriefing by describing both the logic behind the configuration of the participants’ interpretive frames and the intra-subjective and intersubjective dynamics that modulate them in real time. The goal is to provide theoretical models that help us to elucidate a phenomenon that cannot be understood through linear schemes or unidirectional causalities, as it unfolds in the non-linear flow of brief temporal sequences loaded with meaning. To this end, we present a new interpretive framework in which we have integrated three fundamental theoretical concepts: liminality, microgenesis, and semiotic border. Although these concepts come from different theoretical traditions, we have united them in a conceptual framework that allows us to understand how frames of reference are configured during debriefing, without reducing them to fixed or pre-established conceptual structures, preserving their dynamic, contingent, and situated nature. Each of these concepts addresses, from different theoretical traditions, how meanings are constituted under conditions of structural instability and on very short time scales. Finally, we present empirical indicators that allow us to identify these complex and “elusive” phenomena in practice, providing guidance for supporting debriefers’ practice in noticing and interpreting learning, and a key methodological tool for research analysis as an emerging qualitative coding scheme.