Epistemic stances in student-led post-simulation debriefings: reflective discourse in maritime training

This paper investigates how senior and novice students in nautical higher education negotiate epistemic stances during student-led post-simulation debriefings while collaboratively reviewing novice students’ earlier simulation practice. It focuses on supplementary pre-exam training involving navigation simulation activities led by senior students serving as Simulator Student Assistants (SSAs). Through interactional analysis of video-recorded debriefings, the study examines a) how senior and novice maritime students use linguistic and multimodal resources to negotiate epistemic stances, and b) what the students’ negotiations demonstrate about the roles and responsibilities of SSAs. The findings demonstrate that, although participants make different epistemic contributions, the review is jointly accomplished through their interaction. Playbacks of earlier simulation activities function as shared interactional resources for establishing a common focus and collaboratively examining navigation practice. Within this process, SSAs display particular epistemic rights and assume responsibilities for organising the review by assessing, instructing, and validating novice students’ navigation practice and reasoning. Novice students, however, actively contribute by elaborating on and accounting for their earlier actions and reasoning. The study contributes to understanding how assessment and collaborative review are interactionally organised among students who share a similar institutional identity but occupy asymmetrical epistemic positions in a supplementary training context.