Insights Through Interactivity: Learning as Interactivity in the Ecological Niche of Supervision in Higher Education

Line Brink Worsøe’s takes as her point of departure the coordinated sense-saturated interactivity of a supervisor and a supervisee performing the extended social and cognitive system of “supervising.” In doing so, she explores the complex multivoicedness of the selves that are developed in the “mentorship” relation between thesis supervisor and supervisee. This study investigates a specific type of learning (insight) in academic supervision from a distributed cognitive perspective. In the perspective of distributed cognition, learning relates to salient progress of a cognitive system through flexible adaptive behaviour of the (learning) agents. Human social agency in learning contexts becomes a capacity to align one’s thoughts and actions with those of others to interpret aspects of one’s world and to act on and respond to those interpretations. The processes of progress of a cognitive system, and the transformations of agency in relation to this, owe themselves to “interactivity,” that is sense-saturated embodied coordination that contributes to human actions. The concept of interactivity emphasises a perspective on how human co-existence is intertwined with an ecological niche, which is deeply and irreversibly saturated with other (past and present) agents’ concepts and behaviours. The sense-saturated coordination enables “a new possibility of action forming in the process of transition from one act to another”. Through the perspective of distributed cognition, this chapter shows how the ecological results of supervisor?supervisee actions in terms of a specific type of learning, can be described through the concept of interactivity. Worsøe’s study relies on micro-analysis of recordings of master program supervision at two Danish universities. The analysis is informed by an ecological methodology, based on the supervising system’s dynamic recruitment of semiotic resources, therein bodily movement, and articulatory modulations as gestural affordances. The study reveals that “voicing” indeed affords different forms of agency and thus plays a role as a capacity for managing autonomies and coordinating dynamics of various dimensions.