Professional Epistemic Games

Markauskaite, Lina; Goodyear, Peter

doi:10.1007/978-94-007-4369-4_14

Lina Markauskaite⁶ &
Peter Goodyear⁶

Part of the book series: Professional and Practice-based Learning ((PPBL,volume 14))

2006 Accesses
6 Citations

Abstract

Chapter 14 maps the different varieties of epistemic games to be found in professional work. In general terms, epistemic games are generative patterns of inquiry, and we show how this notion can provide insights into ways of working creatively with knowledge in professional fields, not just in the domains of scientific inquiry in which the term ‘epistemic game’ originated. Using distinguishing qualities of epistemic games – such as the sorts of knowledge each produces and the skills needed to play each game – we identify six main types of professional epistemic games and illustrate how they are played in professional work and learning. But we also note that these games are rarely played just one at a time. They are often woven together into one gradually unfolding situated activity.

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I think that nearly every service that you provide [in pharmacy], even if it was just really quick and you’re getting a prescription in and then you’re giving it back out – at some stage there needs to be some information gathering to find out whether that’s appropriate; the processing is working out and ‘is it appropriate?’; and then the delivery is at least giving it back to them and providing some counselling. (Pharmacy Lecturer)

The main aim of this chapter is to explain the function and nature of professional epistemic games. We identify a number of varieties of such epistemic games and we offer a taxonomy to capture their main similarities and differences. We take the view that programs of professional education implicitly involve students in learning to play a variety of epistemic games . Being able to distinguish clearly and explicitly between different kinds of games seems to us to be a prerequisite for a more considered, defensible and effective approach to curriculum planning. The bulk of this chapter is taken up with a presentation of the taxonomy . This is preceded by an introduction to the notion of an epistemic game , with some pointers to the literature in which this construct originates (Sect. 14.1). After that, we offer an extended example, inspired by some of our observational work in pharmacy education (Sect. 14.2). Section 14.3 summarises the rationale for, and approach to constructing, our taxonomy , which is presented in detail in Sect. 14.4. Our taxonomy includes a particularly important kind of epistemic game, which we have named the weaving game. We explain and illustrate this in Chap. 15, which also includes our general conclusions about the importance of epistemic games in professional education and professional work.

14.1 Introducing the Idea of Epistemic Games

The notion of game has roots in diverse traditions: game as socially learnt rules and habits (Bourdieu, 1977); language games as a way of meaning-making (Wittgenstein, 1963); game as a kind of formal high-level thinking with abstract schemas (Ohlsson, 1993); game as a form of inquiry informed by a set of rules and strategies that guide inquiry around specific forms of discourse (Collins, 2011; Collins & Ferguson, 1993; Ohlsson, 1993; Perkins, 1997); and game as a set of skills, knowledge, values , identity and epistemology that characterise expert behaviour in a particular community (Shaffer, 2006).

Combining those traditions, our emphasis in using the notion of game is on rules and flexibility, a fine-tuned practical sense of a situation and disposition for action. A game is a form of action that entangles rules of thought and rules of culture with affordances and constraints , symbolic inscriptions and the physical world.

Wittgenstein (1963) used the notion of a ‘language game’ to describe the way language combines rules and flexibility . On the one hand, rules that are recognisable in language games make it possible for people to grasp each other’s meanings. On the other hand, the flexibility provided by rules enables people to produce an infinite variety of meanings.

Somewhat differently, Bourdieu (1977) used the term ‘game sense’ to emphasise the routine nature of practical action. He argued that social agents in different fields of modern life (e.g. the economy, politics, science and education) develop certain dispositions for social action . These dispositions combine with each other when the individual engages in a multidimensional (multi-field) social world, eventually forming a ‘practical sense ’ or ‘sense of the game’ that is based on practical reason for social action and an ‘economy of logic ’, rather than objective, true and complete understanding.

Games can also be seen as abstract structures that operate at the level of generative cognitive mechanisms (Ohlsson, 1993), inquiry patterns structured around specific forms of inscription (Collins, 2011; Collins & Ferguson, 1993) or other forms of discourse (Ohlsson, 1993; Perkins, 1997).

In the context of professional learning, we see a particular value in the generative capacities of epistemic games and the discourse structures that guide them. Novices may play these games more consciously, while experts, in routine situations, usually have more finely tuned attention and skill and may play them without (much) deliberative thinking and conscious attention. On this view, understanding that is based solely on abstract generic ways of thinking – technical rationality – is far from sufficient for fluent situated professional work. That said, epistemic games are not purely intuitive or exclusively situated. Each has rules that can be explicated, taught and learnt. Moves can be rehearsed and fluent play can be built up gradually. So actionable knowledge is inseparable from mastery of a certain set of knowledge and skills, but knowledgeable action also involves a competent grasp of the situation and thoughtful local action.

If we accept the existence of epistemic games , as inquiry patterns and characteristic structures that guide human thought and action – and there is enough evidence to do so – the important questions then become: what is the origin of those generative patterns and structures , and how does the human mind work with them and (how) can this capability be learnt?

There are at least several distinct views about how such patterns (i.e. schemas) might arise . Ohlsson (1993) summarises two distinct views. The first is that such schemas have a biological origin. As Hayek (1972) argued,

Most of the action patterns by which the organism responds will be innate. (Hayek, 1972, p. 317, cited in Ohlsson, 1993, p. 63)

Such patterns may be uncovered in reflection, but, before this, they are created and are used in human discourse . These patterns have biological rather than psychological origins, thus, reflection can only uncover them, and it does not create them.

In contrast, the second view, espoused by Bartlett (1932) and Piaget (1985) and others, says that such schemas are created through conscious reflection by discovering regularities in discourse and in one’s own thought. In this case, consciousness allows humans to alter their schemas. Others argue for a middle ground, suggesting that such schemas might have an innate origin, but later are revised, corrected and amended (Ohlsson, 1993; Schank & Abelson, 1977).

Others again have suggested that there is no such direct mapping between the world and the abstract mental schemes that people may use to comprehend the world and to structure discourse and their behaviour. Some deny the very existence of such ‘schema-like’ mental representations (Greeno & Hall, 1997; Roth & McGinn, 1998; Salomon, Perkins, & Globerson, 1991; Suchman, 2007). In contrast, these researchers focus on the relationship between various visual inscriptions (such as graphs, tables or concept maps) as ‘tools for thought’ and the unfolding processes of thinking and action – as distinct but constitutively entangled aspects of human thought and the external world.

The debate about whether such generative patterns and structures have similar (isomorphic) representations or are somehow represented differently in the human mind is not so relevant to our argument here. There is enough evidence to suggest that tools of thought that guide human thinking and inquiry exist can be learnt and actively deployed as a part of perception and/or of the thinker’s intellectual agenda (Fischer, Kollar, Mandl, & Haake, 2007; Henning, 2004; Moseley et al., 2005; Ohlsson, 1993). A more important and challenging issue is that professional work combines multiple ways of knowing and thus requires the ability to use multiple ‘tools for thought ’ that have diverse epistemic origins and purposes: that is, to engage in different kinds of epistemic games simultaneously.

14.2 Illustrating the Idea of Epistemic Games in Professional Practice: An Example from Pharmacy

In various situations in professional work – as diverse as the dispensing of a single medication by a pharmacist to completing a complex medication review – it is not very difficult to spot some characteristic, recurrent features. Consider the following situation.

Mr Ward comes into the pharmacy with a new prescription for cholesterol. The pharmacist checks his records in a database and recognises Mr Ward as a customer who has come to the pharmacy regularly to obtain his prescriptions for hypertension. The pharmacist asks Mr Ward some questions related to the new prescription and changes in his health conditions (in order to gather necessary information), decides what and how to dispense, prepares the prescription, writes down information on how and when to take the medication, gives the medication to Mr Ward and provides some related counselling.

There are at least three recognisable moves made by the pharmacist:^{Footnote 1}

To gather the necessary information from Mr Ward and from relevant databases
To process information and make a decision about the appropriateness of the prescription (what and how to dispense for Mr Ward)
To deliver the medication to Mr Ward and to deliver information to him about how to take this new medication, what kind of changes to make in taking other medications and, overall, how to manage his related health conditions

This mundane form of inquiry and knowledgeable action involves certain characteristic rules . The questions to the customer (i.e. gathering) must be relevant to the situation, presented in a logical order and in a language understandable to him. The questioning should provide sufficient information for making a decision and to provide counselling for Mr Ward. For example, Mr Ward would not be surprised to be asked such simple questions as: ‘What did the doctor tell you about this medication?’; ‘Why has the doctor prescribed it for you?’; ‘What have you tried already to lower your cholesterol?’; ‘What effect did dietary changes and regular exercise have on your cholesterol?’; ‘What was your latest blood pressure reading?’; and ‘What other medications do you currently take?’ Mr Ward’s answers are an essential source of knowledge for the pharmacist.

The pharmacist’s decisions (i.e. processing) have to take into account interactions with other medications that Mr Ward is currently using, his other health conditions and risk factors, including his lifestyle and diet. The counselling (i.e. delivery) has to provide clear information about when and how to take this medication, as well as a detailed explanation of possible side effects and actions if they occur.

There are a range of formal rules to follow, such as that the medication dispensed should match the prescription and be appropriate for Mr Ward’s situation and that the information provided to Mr Ward about the medication and possible side effects should be correct, objective and clear. There are also semiformal or informal rules that characterise good decisions and good service, such as that counselling should be provided in language that is appropriate for Mr Ward, without pharmaceutical jargon, and avoiding terms that will alarm him.

There are goals or targets that guide this pharmacist’s inquiry and actions and which characterise the outcome – the medication has been dispensed appropriately if Mr Ward has understood the information and will be able to take this medication in ways that will provide the best health outcomes.

There are characteristic forms associated with the outcome. This will include a label with the information on how to take the prescription and more detailed, though standardised, customer information, such as a product description, what the medication is for, when it must not be taken, how it should be taken and what are the known side effects. This characteristic outcome may also include other kinds of verbal and written counselling, such as information about the medication, side effects and relevant actions related to the particular situation of Mr Ward, including aspects of his lifestyle.

Consider now Ms White who comes into the pharmacy with a prescription for a cough medicine. We observe a similar pattern of inquiry again: the pharmacist asks a set of questions, prepares the medication and explains how to take it. Characteristic moves of information gathering, processing and delivery will accompany many other decisions and knowledgeable actions that have a goal of dispensing the right medication and providing appropriate counselling, even if each step is executed in a variety of ways, with a variety of medications, combinations of diseases, clients, lifestyles and other conditions.

This is far from being the only pattern that the pharmacist will follow. For example, the pharmacist may face a situation when he does not have a prescribed medication available and thus will need to switch for a moment to another kind of inquiry and to find possible alternative treatments. Occasionally it may turn out that the pharmacist has never dispensed this medication before. This will instigate switching to another kind of inquiry to discover relevant information about the medication before providing appropriate counselling and dispensing the prescription. Or the pharmacist may discover an interaction between the prescribed medication and medications that the customer already takes. This then will initiate switching for a moment to a different form of inquiry, which might involve calling the prescribing doctor to discuss alternatives.

There are very large numbers of such situations and options for inquiry in professional practice. Nevertheless, in each profession we can observe a certain set of core generative patterns of inquiry that underpin knowledgeable actions. Such generative patterns can be characterised with the same notions of target outcomes , forms, rules and moves that apply to different kinds of knowledgeable action and which nicely characterise inquiry in professional work. Some underlying strategies, rules , moves and principles can be quite broad and can be applied with some variations across diverse situations. For example, information gathering, processing and delivery apply to the dispensing of a single prescription, as well as to a complex medication review. Some forms and rules , however, will be more specific to the target outcomes. For example, dispensing a single medication and a medication review will follow specific sets of forms and rules that characterise effective inquiry and outcomes related to each of the two intended outcomes. Some of the moves may be explicit and observable in pharmacists’ discourse and actions. For example, we can easily see how the pharmacist asks Mr Ward questions, how he interrogates databases and how he provides counselling. Some other moves will be mental and will not necessarily create a trace in verbal, written or other material form. For example, an external observer would not necessarily see how the pharmacist worked out that two medications will interact.

What characterises the pharmacist’s inquiry pattern is that it generates new situated knowledge . The pattern that guides inquiry , however, is neither situated nor hard-wired to a specific context – rather, it is broad and flexible enough to be adapted across medications, customers, pharmacies and pharmacists.

14.3 Creating a Taxonomy of Epistemic Games: Approach and Rationale

In this section, our purpose is to extend the notion of epistemic games to professional work and to propose a taxonomy of characteristic professional epistemic games . We intend it to serve as a framework to identify different kinds of epistemic games that are at the core of professional epistemic infrastructures and which organise professional knowing in a variety of workplace settings. From this perspective, professional knowledge is constituted from a range of strategies that are deployed in and characterise professional knowledgeable actions and knowledge-rich work, including innovation . These strategies involve specific conditions when they are employed, specific rules and characteristic forms of epistemic outcome . They are guiding knowledge structures and generative strategies for inquiry , knowledge building and other ways of knowing that professionals deploy when they face various tasks. Some of these tasks may be rare and complex. However, many of them are quite mundane. In short, epistemic games are used to make sense of phenomena encountered in professional work and to construct knowledge needed for professional action.

In constructing a taxonomy of epistemic games , we applied two main principles . First, each epistemic game should have a typical functional epistemic goal , a typical form or typical target outcome. Second, each game should involve characteristic moves, rules and other generative mechanisms , as well as principles about how to proceed in various situations (which could be more or less informal heuristics and other principles of procedure).

We used the following four dimensions of variation in epistemic games to place them into different classes:

Epistemic focus : what sort of knowledge the game produces
Epistemic agenda : what the game aims to achieve
Object: nature of the epistemic object around which the game unfolds
Expertise : the sorts of knowledge and skills expert players use

Before we proceed further, we should acknowledge that our sense of epistemic games runs broader than the descriptions found in early writings on the topic (Collins & Ferguson, 1993; Perkins, 1997). Ours draws on the breadth of professional work and includes various kinds of knowledge that professionals produce within their work. This consists of propositional knowledge that contributes to the professional knowledge base (e.g. articulating rules that prove to be effective in particular situations and creating practical heuristics), as well as solutions to professional problems (e.g. diagnosing, creating a plan), and also other characteristic forms of knowledge which professionals create for informing knowledgeable actions in specific situations (e.g. figuring out why a student did not understand an explanation). Therefore, some of the outcomes of these games belong solely to the professional knowledge base and inform professional actions; others belong on the boundaries between several professions or between professional and public worlds (e.g. a teacher’s plan for parents to help a child to improve his reading skills).

We differ from Collins and Ferguson’s (1993) original account of epistemic forms and games in four other ways.

First, in our view, epistemic games are not necessarily associated with a distinct representational form that can be expressed in symbolic media. Some are, but some are not. Rather, we suggest that an epistemic game is associated with a particular epistemic target that has an established recurring presence in professional discourse and actions. An example of this might be an epistemic game played by a pharmacist while dispensing a prescription. The final target of this game is a correctly chosen medication and accurate, accessible information about how to take this medication – tailored to the needs of a particular patient. Some of this information might be inscribed on a label (and such inscriptions usually have a recognisable form), but the target is far broader than the few words written on the medication box.

Second, professional epistemic forms are not generic structures. Rather, they are intertwined with the epistemic frameworks and symbolic systems of inscription of a particular epistemic domain. For example, a map constructed and used by social geographers and a map constructed and used by geologists are both maps, but they are maps that have distinct epistemic forms . The professional games for constructing and reading each map involve very different rules and require different professional expertise . In short, an epistemic form becomes epistemic only when it is embedded in a particular epistemic space .

Third, many epistemic games are associated with particular forms of knowledge that are usually expressed in external media (e.g. a map or a written plan). While there is a relationship between the game and its symbolic form, this relationship is not strict or symmetrical. Rather an epistemic form may be associated with a class of symbolic forms that have similar epistemic affordances . For example, two symbolic forms that guide a teacher’s development of a new syllabus (e.g. two templates) may be different if we look at their inscriptions (i.e. sign vehicles) from a strictly proportional or symbolic perspective. Nevertheless, they could have very similar epistemic affordances and, from an epistemic perspective, will be linked to a very similar epistemic game .

Fourth, we extend the notion of epistemic games from characteristic moves and forms that are primarily associated with language and inscriptions to other forms of discourse, including body language and other kinds of material, embodied, dynamic expression that are used in human activity. As Ohlsson (1993) says, discourse refers

… not only to spoken and written thought but also to silent thinking – the stream of consciousness. Also, the term is not bound to the medium of language. A computer program, a drawing, a mathematical proof, and a musical score all qualify as discourse. (Ohlsson, 1993, p. 52)

Indeed, professional epistemic games involve all these kinds of discourse. For example, physical actions, verbal exchanges, mental actions, gestures and other transactions that occur during medication dispensing are inseparable aspects of the pharmacist’s epistemic game .

From this perspective, professional epistemic games involve strategies, rules and moves associated with a characteristic epistemic outcome (target) . This target outcome might be explicit – represented in an articulated epistemic form , inscribed in some kind of medium. Or it might be less explicit – represented in characteristic kinds of artefacts with a loosely articulated form from a symbolic/structural perspective. Or it might just be implied in intentions and actions – tacit.

Why do we need to locate professional epistemic games in particular epistemic spaces ? As Ohlsson (1993) argues, abstract schemas provide useful tools for entering into unfamiliar discourse and generating new discourse. Thus, formal thinking, focussed on abstract content and context-free generative structures and rules , might be a reasonable target for learning at school – where the aim to foster general intellectual competence. Expertise , however, as Ohlsson affirms, belongs to the other end of ‘high-end’ cognition. The purpose of expertise is effective action. It is based on large amounts of domain-specific and context-specific facts and heuristics that are not easily applicable in other contexts. (A good taxi driver operates on a large amount of information about local traffic, intersections, one-way restrictions and so on that allows her to get around smoothly in that city. Similarly, an expert has to operate on large amounts of local knowledge that enables decision-making and acting smoothly.)

Professional expertise – and actionable professional knowledge – sits somewhere between these two ends. So our focus is on the epistemic games characteristic of particular epistemic cultures : ways of thinking that are prevalent within a profession and that inform local action. We are interested in identifying key epistemic games shared among members of each profession – classes and kinds of games that are used in situated professional work and which belong to a professional epistemic infrastructure , not just to a particular setting. Knowledge of such games can be very productive when working on the redesign of professional education programs.

14.4 The Taxonomy of Epistemic Games

Figure 14.1 and Table 14.1 provide overviews of our taxonomy of epistemic games . We distinguish six classes of epistemic games :

Table 14.1 An overview of the taxonomy of professional epistemic games

Full size table

Propositional games
Situated problem-solving games
Meta-professional discourse games
Trans-professional discourse games
Translational public discourse games
Weaving games

The columns in Table 14.1 capture the principal distinguishing features of the different classes of games , as explained in the previous section.

The rest of this section introduces each of the six classes of epistemic games . We illustrate each class of games with examples taken from our empirical research. To keep things simple, we draw most of these from pharmacy. Professional tasks which require the construction of situated knowledge by embracing a variety of ways of knowing involve learning to weave together diverse epistemic games . Thus, the most complex and important class of epistemic games is what we call the ‘weaving game ’. It draws upon and coordinates all the other games – which usually belong to several classes – into fine-tuned, fluent, knowledgeable action. In Chap. 15, we present an extended exposition of the weaving game and show how various epistemic games , introduced and illustrated in this chapter, are coordinated and ‘woven ’ together into one epistemic game .

14.4.1 Propositional Games

The epistemic agenda for propositional games focusses on enhancing conceptual understanding that informs action.

Propositional games involve strategies, rules and moves for creating general professional knowledge objects and artefacts that can be used across a range of similar situations (theories, models, useful references, heuristics, etc.). They are what might be called ‘real’ (substantive) knowledge games, as the outputs are conceptual artefacts that codify the professional knowledge base (a.k.a. propositional knowledge ). Thus such games rest upon the organisation of professional knowledge as a domain, including (a) how professional knowledge is structured, (b) how new knowledge claims are created and validated as well as (c) knowledge of those concrete knowledge claims. These three elements broadly correspond to the conceptual and syntactical structures as well as the substantive knowledge base of the domain, in Schwab’s (1962, 1970) terms.

In professional fields, propositional games also depend upon knowledge of other disciplines related to the profession. For example, in pharmacy, professional knowledge rests on such domains as pharmaceutical chemistry, which provides knowledge about chemical properties of drugs; pharmaceutics, which deals with the formulation of pure drug substances into medications ready for delivery and safe use; therapeutics, which covers how medicines are used in the treatment and management of disease; etc.

Propositional games are not reducible to one particular strategy. Rather, this broad class of epistemic games has a shared epistemic target of creating generic knowledge objects and artefacts . We can identify three more specific kinds of propositional games : research games , concept combination games and conceptual tool-making games .

Research games are mainly empirical games for creating new concepts, theories (including very practical theories) and other evidence-informed kinds of knowledge for the profession, using the accepted inquiry methods of the domain. For example, such professions as education and health often construct their knowledge base by conducting design-based research studies, action research projects and clinical experiments. Health practitioners create evidence-informed knowledge about risks of different treatments by implementing practical risk management and monitoring programs. They are usually composed of a set of heuristic steps and rules for how to conduct the inquiry. For example, an inquiry conducted as a part of risk management and monitoring involves an iterative process composed of five main steps: risk identification, risk assessment, choice and other decisions about risk treatment, implementation of the plan and evaluation (Fig. 14.2). Overall, research games are broad overarching epistemic games , usually composed of a range of more specific games that are called upon at different stages of an inquiry. For example, a step such as design of risk treatment is itself an epistemic game , composed from a range of rules and multiple activities.

One may question if such broad research strategies really meet the criteria for epistemic games , as the knowledge created using similar research games may be different and take different forms. For example, a piece of design research may be used to develop and test a new theory, a model or a pedagogical strategy, and the final constructed knowledge may take the form of a taxonomy, a stage model, a situation–action model or some other characteristic form for representing a particular kind of conceptual knowledge. We argue that this is not the case. First, each specific game (i.e. each research strategy) follows a set of rules and moves . Second, the epistemic artefact created will have a distinct characteristic form of the target associated with the particular game (e.g. a research report).

One example of such a game could be a piece of action research implemented by a teacher.^{Footnote 2} Action research follows characteristic steps and other rules for this kind of inquiry, such as (a) identifying the issue that needs to be addressed; (b) locating the issue in the broader context of a school, syllabus or other aspects of an educational system as a context; (c) connecting the issue to the literature and identifying suitable pedagogical approaches; (d) outlining strategies to be implemented; (e) deciding on what kind of evidence will be gathered; and so on. The report has a typical form for this kind of study, containing such elements as the rationale, context of the project, design, results and implications of findings for practice. That is, it has an agreed epistemic form . Various kinds of research games, particularly practice-based inquiries, are an important group of professional epistemic games . Furthermore, these research games are sometimes firmly fused into the practitioner’s daily work, as with the example of actions and decisions related to risk management in the health sector (Fig. 14.2).

Concept combination games are more fine-grained propositional games than the research games. They primarily include general analysis techniques for figuring out and describing the structure and function of phenomena, establishing how structure relates to function and in other ways making sense of various dynamic phenomena related to professional work. Many of the games described by Collins and Ferguson (1993) belong to this category. For example, pharmacy students learn theoretical knowledge that informs pharmacy practice by making comparisons between different products and therapies (Fig. 14.3), creating taxonomies of symptoms for a disease, and comparing symptoms of two diseases (Fig. 14.4). These combination games are usually played when one tries to describe, explain or establish new relationships. Thus, they usually involve abstract theoretical constructs. New propositional knowledge emerges from new combinations and representations, even if the contributing knowledges are not new in absolute terms. For example, a comparison between two diseases or between several medications and treatments is new knowledge over and above what exists in separate descriptions of the two individual diseases or treatments.

Conceptual tool-making games are design games that result in new practical devices that link propositional and applied actionable knowledge. For example, creating guidelines for nursing using evidence from best practice , establishing the relationships between treatment options for a disease, and drug therapies and doses are among such tool games (Fig. 14.5). These games usually involve practical cases that portray conceptual knowledge and show how it features in practical decision-making and action. They use conceptual knowledge to explain cases encountered in practice.

Propositional games result in artefacts that articulate the knowledge base of the profession . It is important to note that playing such games involves meta-professional expertise , to work with and create conceptual knowledge , but does not necessarily require the professional capability needed to solve concrete professional problems. In other words, the rules and moves involved in creating guidelines for nursing, using evidence from best practice , require knowledge and the ability to locate sources of evidence, judge their validity and relevance, describe nursing procedures and justify them using evidence. In contrast, the rules and moves involved in carrying out these procedures depend upon a capability to see relevant aspects of a concrete situation and carry out practical procedures in ways that are congruent with best practice without necessarily having a capability to create best practice guidelines for others. Of course, in many practical situations, such as in the example of risk management in the health sector, propositional games are played in combination with practical problem-solving .

14.4.2 Situated Problem-Solving Games

The epistemic agenda for situated problem-solving games focusses on enhancing situated understanding of a particular problem.

Problem-solving games are played when practitioners encounter specific professional problems. Examples of such games include creating a lesson plan, creating a floor layout for a new pharmacy, creating a new health promotion program to address certain common health issue in a community, designing a course or sketching a scenario for online resources for teaching this course. These games require knowledge and capability to solve professional problems and produce professional epistemic artefacts that offer, what could be called, ‘conceptual solutions for specific problems’. While some artefacts might be quite abstract, the epistemic aim is specific; thus the problem-solving games follow an epistemic path (rules and moves ) that draws upon and is rooted in the practitioner’s perception of the situation. These rules and moves are different from the propositional games , where they are rooted in abstracts claims.

Perkins (1997) suggested that problem-solving and decision-making are not epistemic games as they do not have an epistemic agenda . We argue that this is not the case in professional work. Such practical strategies of inquiry have an epistemic agenda of producing knowledge for knowledgeable action (see Chap. 7). As with all epistemic games , they involve characteristic rules and moves . They also have a characteristic epistemic target . This is sometimes represented in the particular symbolic form of the artefact. For example, a psychological assessment report, a legal case and an annual financial statement are examples of professional artefacts that express outcomes of problem-solving games in distinct, characteristic forms . In other cases, this epistemic target gets expressed in characteristic discourse and outcomes (e.g. dispensing a medication). The problem-solving games have an epistemic agenda with the target of producing practical solutions, that is, producing actionable knowledge.

Problem-solving games involve the ability to use a range of conceptual devices and representational systems of the profession. They primarily rest upon a professional knowledge base : conceptual and syntactical structures and substantive knowledge of the profession and rather less on the contributory disciplinary domains.

Problem-solving games are a large class of epistemic games . We can classify them in distinct categories along two dimensions: openness of the solution space and aspects of the problem-solving (Table 14.2).

Table 14.2 Examples of different kinds of problem-solving games , based on openness of the solution space and aspects of the problem-solving

Full size table

According to the openness of the solution space , games can vary from flexible to situation specific . This dimension shows how tightly the game, and the solution, is linked to the material and social arrangements of a specific situation.

Flexible games are played in a relatively open outcome space with fairly loose constraints from the social and material situation. Creating a program to prevent a common health issue and designing a school library space or a pharmacy layout that meets current regulations, standards and other broad requirements are examples of such games. In these games, rules and moves are generally applicable to a broad class of similar games, and solutions may involve a variety of options. For example, a library space for collaborative work could be designed in many different ways.

Semi-constrained or outcome-focussed games are more tightly linked to the outcome requirements and the specific context. Designing a half-day excursion about aboriginal culture for children in a certain school and creating a lesson plan for teaching a particular topic to a specific class of children are examples of such games. The rules and moves of such games usually involve substantial balancing between the aims of the game – specified by the outcome requirements – and the situation. For example, the options for designing and organising the above-mentioned excursion are partly constrained by the school’s location and distance to suitable sites, time, available funding and other resources.

Situation-specific games are highly contingent on a specific instance and situation. Figuring out issues and creating a suitable treatment for a specific patient and diagnosing a child’s learning difficulties are examples of situation-specific games. Accurate coding of the situation (entry conditions) and then gradual movement towards a specific solution are among the main features of such situated games. These moves commonly involve continuous checking and balancing of the emerging solution with the constraints and affordances of the encountered situation.

The games described above are broad overarching problem-solving games . We call them assembling and decomposing games as they are assembled from various components and steps that guide inquiry from the initial specification of the issue or task to the final solution. They do not necessarily have one specific symbolic form for expressing outcomes – some may have several – but they guide the inquiry and solution process from the beginning to the end. For example, designing an efficient therapy for a patient could involve initially investigating and detecting issues and inefficiencies in current therapy, identifying the most important aspects and then creating a better solution. These overarching problem-solving games often involve rules and moves for approaching a broad class of tasks through temporally interleaved decomposition and assembly processes. Problems are tackled by decomposing them down into a set of components or steps that can be solved locally and assembling the outcomes of those components into a solution: all the time maintaining coherence between individual elements and sensitivity to the needs of the situation.^{Footnote 3} Some key features of decomposing and assembling are nicely captured in lesson planning activities and in the lesson plans thereby produced – some examples of which we presented in earlier chapters (Fig. 11.1). Creating a lesson plan initially involves identifying relevant curriculum objectives and matching with lesson outcomes, decomposing this into decisions about appropriate content and tasks, creating a set of activities and then assembling all the elements into one coherent lesson.

Turning now to specific aspects of problem-solving into which problem-solving games are decomposed and from which they are assembled (shown in the horizontal dimension of Table 14.2), problem-solving games can be classified into four kinds: coding, producing, organising and making .

Coding (or translation) games depict relevant information from a discourse, including various symbolic sources and observation of the environment, and (re)present (encode) it using professional coding schemes , such as concepts, categories and symbolic systems , in a different epistemic space . For example, such games include translating curriculum requirements into the aims for a lesson or depicting critical information and symptoms from an interview with a patient and representing them in a form suitable for further processing using professional heuristics, formulas and databases. Rules and moves that professionals apply for shaping perception and depicting relevant information from an interview with a client, observation or working documents belong to this category of epistemic games (Fig. 14.6). (Coding games relate to the public discourse games , described below, but move in the opposite direction – from public discourse to representation using professional coding schemes .)

Producing games involve using epistemic rules and working on a solution primarily in the epistemic space of the task. Making decisions about the pedagogical approach, content and nature of tasks that are appropriate for achieving the aims of the lesson and figuring out interactions between medications, inappropriate doses and other issues during the medication review are examples of such games (Fig. 14.7).

Organising games involve using certain heuristic rules to create the final solution or decision from the heterogeneous pieces that have been produced. Integrating different tasks, curriculum materials, classroom resources and other arrangements into a lesson plan that meets a curriculum goal and ordering issues and recommendations after identifying a range of problems and working out possible solutions during medication review are examples of such organising games. This kind of game includes various strategies, rules and heuristics for highlighting, grouping and prioritising issues and solutions; integrating different aspects of the solution, such as creating priority lists (Fig. 14.8); identifying the main goals; and explicitly working through possible solution options and the reasoning behind each recommendation (Fig. 14.9). Organising games result in decisions about what is most important and relevant and how things fit together into one acceptable solution.

Making games involve creating the final product – a public^{Footnote 4} professional artefact – using discourse forms that are shared within a profession. For example, teachers produce their lesson plans using agreed common formats within a school; psychologists and community workers produce their assessment reports and recommendations following agreed community conventions and standards (Fig. 14.10). Making games require a capability to use professional language , codification systems and rules – and in principle they are specialist discourse games that are played within the profession.

These four different aspects of problem-solving – coding, producing, organising and making – broadly correspond to the stages of inquiry in more rigorously codified professions. For example, a medication management review completed by pharmacists usually involves choosing and recording relevant information – gathered from interviews and doctor referrals – into a form ready for processing; figuring out possible issues by making sense of collected information using knowledge of pharmaceuticals and other relevant knowledge domains; prioritising the issues and fitting everything into a possible decision; and writing a recommendation in an agreed professional language.

Recording, figuring out, prioritising and writing broadly correspond to coding, producing, organising and making games . Coding, organising and making also reflect the three discursive practices for shaping professional perception – coding, highlighting, producing – that Goodwin (1994) used to describe ‘professional vision ’. However, these aspects of problem-solving do not always appear in the same order, and each task does not always involve all four aspects. For example, the assembling game for creating a pharmacy layout or lesson plan may involve substantial amounts of tinkering where coding, producing, organising and making proceed almost simultaneously or are repeated several times.

Are these different kinds of problem-solving games epistemically distinct from one another? We argue that this is so. For example, pharmacy students, in the production game of the medication review, may follow a strategy of either going through each drug or through each disease state in order to identify drug or dosage discrepancies, potential therapeutic issues and recommendations specific to each finding. This game primarily draws on pharmaceutical, therapeutic and other kinds of professional knowledge, as well as strategies for using various devices for extracting relevant information and strategies for meaning-making and inscription. In the making game , these same students embrace a set of strategies that primarily involve discursive rules for describing, explaining and justifying professional recommendations. This game diverges from the initial strategies used for meaning-making and follows a distinct set of discursive rules specifically for this kind of professional communication. In our study, pharmacy students learnt such strategies as a part of pharmacy practice. The strategies were outlined and illustrated in their course handbooks and other course resources (see Fig. 14.11). That is, problem-solving games may share the same broad epistemic target , but each of them also has a more specific and distinct purpose, each follows a particular set of strategies (rules and moves ) and draws upon a particular set of meaning-making and discursive skills .

How do problem-solving games differ from the propositional games , such as the classic epistemic games identified by Collins and Ferguson (1993) and Perkins (1997)? From a generic perspective – agnostic to the domain of knowledge and practice – many of Collins and Ferguson’s games may be played during problem-solving , and description, explanation and justification, which Perkins saw as a ‘necessity ’, will be present in different problem-solving games. Nevertheless, we suggest that professional problem-solving games are distinct in several ways and are unlikely to be learnt merely by learning generic games, such as producing any kind of descriptions or any kind of explanations, detached from the relevant professional problem-solving practices . We have two main reasons for taking this position.

First, problem-solving games are different from propositional games . For example, a school counsellor may analyse changes in students’ development by mapping evidence of their achievements against a certain developmental model or representing changes in students’ results as a graph and exploring change over time. In their general shape, such games resemble propositional games and may even use propositional concepts. But problem-solving games are not purely propositional. For example, the school counsellor may add new aspects from empirical observations or other sources that turn out to be relevant while constructing the model, while interpreting student progress and making practical decisions, even though this was not intended initially. Such a game involves concepts and properties, but the rules are not constrained by the rules of the conceptual and inscriptional spaces; rather they leak into the world.

Second, many epistemic forms used in problem-solving games combine different elements potentially relevant to the decision, as well as relevant to a cultural practice . For example, teachers include in their lesson plans references to the national curriculum and standards; school counsellors report their assessment results in ways that are consistent with ‘good practice’; pharmacists include in their medication review reports not only their findings and recommendations but also standard information from the doctor’s referral, such as the patient’s laboratory results, and prioritised recommendations. Such epistemic forms that guide professional problem-solving are both more heterogeneous, in that they project different elements relevant for different aims (such as disciplinary logic, politics and culture) into one inscriptional place , and also they embody unique features of epistemic practice . That is, these games are not constrained by the conceptual or inscriptional logic . Which is not to say that they do not have it – rather, they are also governed by the logic of practicality , usefulness and social agreements, legacy and professional culture . Of course, many problem-solving games involve description, explanation and justification, which Perkins (1997) considered to be an ‘epistemic necessity ’. But many professional games mix those elements together into one problem-solving game (see, e.g. a completed medication review with the pharmacist's findings and recommendations in Fig. 15.6, Chap. 15). Learning to play these epistemic games goes far beyond having the general competences needed to describe, explain and justify. Professional epistemic forms and games , as occupational and cognitive practices that emerge around different objects of professional work, are products of professional culture as much as of logic (Star, 1989).

Problem-solving games result in artefacts, or other discursive outcomes, that rest on the knowledge base of the profession . The capacity to play such games involves intra-professional expertise to solve professional problems and to complete professional tasks. It requires what Harry Collins and Robert Evans (2007) called ‘contributory expertise ’ (see Chap. 5). Problem-solving games and their associated professional discourse , we argue, are different from specialist and public discourse-focussed epistemic games, which we turn to next.

We identify three classes of professional discourse games : meta-professional, trans-professional and translational public discourse games .

14.4.3 Meta-professional Discourse Games

The epistemic agenda for meta-professional games focusses on enhancing professional perception by redescribing actions and products from a (shared) professional community frame .

Articulation (or intra-professional translation) games are one important kind of meta-professional game . Broadly speaking, they are played when one tries to make tacit professional knowledge explicit and to articulate one’s practical knowledge and action in specialist languages and coding schemes . Such articulation results in artefacts and discourse for a specialist audience. The games described by Nonaka and Takeuchi (1995), involved in articulating tacit knowledge, belong to this group. The underlying principle and aim is to articulate, in the language of specialists , what one has done, how it works, what it means, etc. (There is a relationship with conceptual tool games, yet also there is a big difference.) Such articulation may take place in different ‘languages’ – concepts from the professional knowledge base and codes of various intermediaries, including technical and professional standards – or in more local everyday talk. The shape of the game and epistemic target is broadly the same, but there is a substantial difference between different specialist languages and different specialist discourse games , ranging between what we might call the formal conceptual and the informal situated ends, with a range of standardisation discourse games between.

At the conceptual end, one may use formal conceptual vocabulary in professional discourse. Such games then help understand the meaning of specific professional artefacts and actions in the core propositional system of a profession. At the situated end, one may use informal discourses and concepts at hand and try to articulate one’s practice and meaning-making without committing to a specific discursive system (often perhaps mixing various languages). Such articulation games are often seen in the discourses of apprenticeship , particularly in early stages (Weddle & Hollan, 2010), but also in various practical professional artefacts , such as guidelines, procedures or recipes for doing professional or semi-professional work.

In professional practice much of this articulation is done using the coding schemes of knowledge intermediaries (e.g. technical standards and curriculum standards ) and professional intermediaries (e.g. competence standards and accreditation requirements ). The existence and important role of such knowledge intermediaries in knowledge domains are well acknowledged (Knorr Cetina, 2007), but their existence has a much longer presence in professional practices (Star & Griesemer, 1989) than in knowledge practices and knowledge society discourses. In short, such coding using discourses of standards makes distributed intra-disciplinary work possible, thus, no doubt, is a part of professional discourse . For example, in the professions that we researched, student teachers used technical codes of ‘curriculum’ and ‘standards’ to code and share the materials they designed for teaching. Similar strategies and rules , yet very different coding schemes , were used in articulation games that applied professional competence ‘codes’ for articulating practical knowledge. These discourse games included students’ work preparing professional portfolios for formal accreditation but also for less formal reflection and learning. For example, even in action research projects, students used professional standards as language for articulating and reflecting on their learning experiences, knowledge and skills.

There are two important messages here. First, the coding schemes of various intermediaries , and the discourse games that they bring, are a part of professional discourse . In some professions they tend to be a very important part of everyday professional practice. For example, Nerland (2008, 2010) shows that a great deal of knowledge work in computer engineering is associated with sharing and using knowledge products expressed in the discursive language of a global professional community . The professional discourse games that are played to translate back and forth between one’s local knowledge and the knowledge expressed in a shared community form are extremely important. Second, games that underpin articulation are games that, at least in part, underpin professional perception , which, following Goodwin (1994), we can call ‘coding’

… a systematic practice used to transform the world into the categories and events that are relevant to the work of the profession. (Goodwin, 1994, p. 608)

Nevertheless, such articulation in the codes of various technical and professional intermediaries also carries some dangers. The codes of intermediaries do not necessarily come saturated with the deeper principles that underpin a professional knowledge base (see also Nerland, 2008). But the questions here are more general – whose categories and codification systems are relevant to professional work and whether transforming to professional competence codes helps move closer to professional understanding.

Evaluation games are a second kind of meta-professional game . They follow recognised, explicit rules for evaluating certain professional things, resources, actions and other professional objects, from a particular shared perspective. Evaluation games move in the opposite direction to articulation. Some professional evaluation games constitute a specialised area of expertise. (Financial auditing is one such field.) However, many professional and learning tasks follow strategies and rules common to these kinds of games as a part of other tasks. Evaluating a teaching resource, depicting and judging important properties of a pharmaceutical product and various other coding games that use agreed evaluation schemes and criteria belong to this group of epistemic games . Evaluation games draw upon two important principles: (a) a relevant epistemological framework should be applied consistently and (b) work should result in a public artefact ^{Footnote 5} (e.g. an evaluation report). That is, professional evaluation discourse can be characterised by such rules as explicitness of criteria and consistency. Evaluation games in professional learning have much broader applicability than evaluation in its traditional sense. In our studies, for example, evaluation games were not usually used by teachers to develop capacities for professional evaluation as such, but to develop capacities for skilled professional perception , such as an ability to notice important features of a lesson plan from a social justice perspective (i.e. ‘coding’ , in Goodwin’s (1994) terms). Evaluation games , as they are described here, are a more extreme, explicit form of a large group of games that are evaluative in nature. In practice, some of them are played by experts tacitly, without necessarily making criteria explicit or applying them consistently. Yet the spirit of the game is the same.

14.4.4 Trans-professional Discourse Games

The epistemic agenda for trans-professional games focusses on creating links between different professional knowledges and enhancing joint knowledgeable action .

Trans-professional games are played when professionals engage in interactions with professionals (and their products) from other fields: on boundary topics and issues . Writing referrals and recommendations to specialists in other domains also involve this kind of game.

There are several kinds of trans-professional games . The exchanging game follows strategies and rules for articulating and making professional knowledge products accessible for professionals from other domains. This often involves writing for professional others. An example would be when a geotechnical surveyor provides a report to an architect about the suitability of a building site. The counterpart to the exchanging game is the sense-making game . This commonly involves reading and making sense of products created by experts from other fields, in order to make progress with the task at hand. An example would be the architect making sense of the geotech report, or a civil servant making sense of a legal opinion, or a teacher making sense of scientists’ statements about climate change when planning a lesson on this topic. Figures 14.12 and 14.13 illustrate a doctor’s referral for a pharmacist to complete a medication review, around which the doctor’s exchange game and a pharmacist’s sense-making game evolve.

Sense-making games are not necessarily based on exactly the same epistemic frame from which the artefact was created; rather, the artefact can be understood and evaluated from the perspective of the task at hand. For example, a teacher may not be able to make sense of a counsellor’s assessment report about a student’s learning difficulties in exactly the same way as another counsellor would, but they may not need to do so in order to carry out their professional work as a teacher. Rather, they need to be able to make sense of the report in ways that inform their teaching. Nevertheless, professional sense-making rarely proceeds without some understanding of the epistemological framework of the other. Sense-making games , in this respect, are a trans-professional version of evaluation games. Many of them are at least partly tacit and do not necessarily apply rules consistently or make criteria explicit.

Do professional discourse games , whether meta-professional or trans-professional, constitute separate classes? Using our criteria, yes. They have a specific epistemic target (i.e. exchanging, sense-making, articulation and evaluation) and a set of known strategies and forms . Many professional discourse games are explicitly taught in higher education.

All professional discourse games involve the ability to recognise and adopt an epistemological framework of the domain, as well as the epistemological frameworks of others. However, different kinds of games require different levels of familiarity with the discourse of the field. For example, most complex articulation and evaluation games require a substantial understanding of specialist discourse , including characteristic forms and symbolic systems . It would be difficult to do a financial audit or even to evaluate a financial statement without understanding the professional language and concepts. In contrast, exchanging and sense-making games usually require more schematic understanding of the domain.

Professional discourse games are meta- and trans-professional games involving higher-order thinking. However, it is important to note that these discourse games are not based on the same kind of knowledge and skills that are involved in the propositional games (which are also meta-level games ) or problem-solving games . A person may be able to participate in the discourse, evaluate artefacts and knowledge claims, but not have the capacities needed to contribute to it (i.e. solve a problem and use the symbolic systems of the profession ). In short, by participating in discourse games , students learn strategies of articulation and evaluation, not knowledge building and problem-solving . (Professional education approaches that give a central place to reflection tend to overlook this important distinction.)

Professional discourse games are closely related to what is known as ‘interactional expertise’ (Collins & Evans, 2007), ‘relational agency’ (Edwards, 2010), ‘epistemological sophistication ’ (Bromme, Kienhues, & Stahl, 2008) and other kinds of boundary expertise and meta-level capacities . Ohlsson (1993) persuasively argued that ‘powerful thinkers operate with a repertoire of thought forms’ (p. 52) that regulate discourse and are able to extract essential properties without a deep understanding of content. This is the critical feature of ‘high-end cognition ’ which Ohlsson contrasts with expertise , that is, ‘too domain specific’.

Do professional discourse games draw on similar abstract thought and discourse forms as ‘high-end’ cognition ? One can argue that this is at least partly so, and, in order to engage with the meta- or trans-professional discourse games , professionals should be able to adopt and see the world through the epistemological frames of the domains in which they operate. Yet, it is also important to note that adopting an epistemological frame and mastering rules of the game is not sufficient to operate within this frame. Imagine a math teacher who is asked to evaluate the appropriateness of a lesson plan for teaching arts. She could be perfectly able to identify and make judgements about some qualities of the plan and lesson design and could be perfectly able to appreciate differences between ways of teaching maths and arts and see the plan from the latter perspective. Yet without having deeper knowledge of arts pedagogy and the arts, she will probably not be able to judge the overall quality of the lesson design. That is, one cannot solve a problem with just a game, without a knowledge base. Further, complex professional discourse games involve their own sets of rules and moves for articulating, evaluating, exchanging and sense-making: some of which are outside the epistemological frame within which this knowledge was produced. For example, evaluation in almost any professional field is a specialised domain of expertise that involves mastering specialised meta-discourse games .

As a further point, we can ask what are the differences between specialist discourse games and propositional games ? They are similar insofar as both make some use of formal propositional knowledge and language . Yet they are fundamentally different. Discourse games do not aim to create general professional knowledge ; rather, they draw upon this general knowledge to make sense of local situations and align local actions with community knowledge (i.e. code). In Harry Collins and Robert Evans' (2007) terms, the expertise that underpins these games is interactional, not contributory, expertise (see Chap. 5).

14.4.5 Translational Public Discourse Games

The epistemic agenda for translational public discourse games focusses on extending professional knowledgeable action to the actions of others in the everyday world.

Public discourse games are played by professionals when they engage in interactions with clients. They are translational games that underpin professional work in public epistemic spaces . The main epistemic target of such games is knowledge artefacts and objects that emerge from meshing professional and non-professional knowledge and ways of knowing. This class of games involves public tool-making, investigative discourse and concept games .

Public tool-making games result in various professional epistemic artefacts intended for non-specialists’ guidance. That is, these artefacts function as epistemic tools to support capacities to act knowledgeably, drawing on the professional knowledge of non-professional people. Examples of such tools include worksheets for students produced by a teacher; a pre- or post-operation plan prepared by a nurse for a patient; an asthma management plan, with personalised instructions for an asthmatic patient on how to improve respiratory inhaler techniques; or a label printed on medication, advising a patient on how often and when to take the medicine. Some of the games involved in creating these tools may be quite open and defined only by the epistemic target . Some may be more tightly or explicitly structured. For example, in an open game for producing a worksheet for teaching students strategies for recognising differences between historical and critical analysis in arts, a teacher might follow a set of strategies, rules, moves and forms defined by the epistemic target – such as that the final form of a worksheet should have a ‘compare and contrast’ structure. The task should be based on a set of consistent criteria that allow comparisons to be made between the two (e.g. expressed as guiding questions). Students should be engaged in a specific practical task that allows them to practice conducting both types of analysis. In other cases public tool-making games may be more restricted by the targeted form of the tool. For example, a pharmacist or a doctor may create a personalised asthma management and control plan by adapting a generic asthma action plan and giving a patient a personalised sheet outlining (a) characteristic symptoms of different asthma states – when well, when not well, etc.) (Fig. 14.14) and (b) what kinds of medications should be taken and how, depending on the severity of the condition (Fig. 14.15).

The critical feature of these public tool-making games is that they combine professional knowledge forms (e.g. patients should be prescribed symptom preventers, relievers and controllers) and knowledge of public communication strategies, suited to the needs of a specific situation (e.g. the plan should be structured according to different medical conditions recognisable by a patient). The epistemic target , in this case, is also not a specific conceptual artefact , but an artefact that is used as a tool by the public. It allows a non-professional to make similar decisions to those a professional would make, given knowledge of specific circumstances. For example, an asthma action plan for a patient is not only a professional public discourse product but also a tool that a patient uses for producing knowledge about his health conditions and for taking appropriate actions.

In our empirical observations, we noted that pharmacy students are taught a variety of strategies for creating public tools of this kind. For example, in an allergy and asthma tutorial, students were taught that it can be useful to add a colour scheme to a generic asthma plan, where green means ‘when well’, yellow means ‘when not well’ and red means ‘danger signs’. The tutor also explained to the pharmacy students that, rather than just giving a list with generic symptoms describing each state, it is better to adapt those symptom descriptions to match characteristic symptoms for the specific patient. Another nice example was given by students. They suggested creating a sticker with the steps involved in a correct inhaler technique. Then they would ask a patient to demonstrate her inhaler technique and highlight on a sticker those steps that need attention and improvement. This would be placed on the inhaler. There were a number of very commonsense examples like this that do not seem to have much to do with any ‘higher-order’ professional knowledge , yet which make a lot of ‘higher-order good sense’ and draw on a significant body of professional knowledge . The students explained – providing statistics – that, depending on the type of inhaler, 4–94 % of patients have incorrect inhalation techniques and that this can be detrimental to the effectiveness of medications (Lavorini et al., 2008).

Investigative discourse games guide professional interaction and dialogue with a non-specialist audience. In contrast to public tool-making , these games are played when professionals use public discourse to produce final, ready for ‘consumption’, professional knowledge and understanding. The main feature is that the game is public in nature, but the knowledge that is generated is professional. For example, a pharmacist’s communication with a patient (in order to gather relevant information for dispensing a correct medication) or a teacher’s questioning strategies (aimed at assessing a student’s understanding of a topic) or a counsellor’s assessment interview with a client involves instances of these games (Fig. 14.16). The epistemic target , therefore, is professional knowledge and understanding that are created via social interaction. This knowledge is often shaped by specific symbolic epistemic forms and rules (e.g. an interview using a schedule or getting relevant information by asking a patient to complete a questionnaire), but may be purely verbal and not mediated by an artefact at all (e.g. questioning during the dispensing process).

Concept games are played when professionals explain professional things in everyday language for a non-professional audience. The epistemic target is, therefore, non-professional knowledge that is created via professionally guided public discourse . These games are characterised by the fact that professionals use specific discourse strategies and rules , such as metaphors, analogies and examples, as discourse tricks. For example, a recommendation to increase intake of potassium for a patient with hypertension could be given by providing examples of products that are rich in this mineral, such as bananas, legumes, meat, poultry and fish. This group of games involves many other strategies that are commonly found in teachers’ everyday professional work, such as producing lesson handouts, and in the work of other professionals who are creating similar ‘finished’ public knowledge products, such as pamphlets to increase awareness about certain diseases.

Are public discourse games epistemic? Yes they are, since they result in actionable knowledge or knowledgeable action , whether by a client or a professional. Are they games? Yes again, since they have an epistemic target and knowledgeable professionals use certain professional strategies and rules when they play these games.

Public discourse games involve what is often called translational expertise , as they require an ability to adopt and translate between specialist and lay epistemic frameworks and languages. They involve a professional ability to engage in socio-material interactions and discourse with people who may not be familiar with professional representational systems and discourse . Public discourse games are usually a part of our final major class of epistemic games – weaving games .

14.4.6 Weaving Games

Most professional games are not played alone. Many professional actions involve several epistemic targets , each contingent on the other and constitutively entangled . So they involve discourse games and problem-solving games simultaneously woven together with(in) a range of embodied socio-material professional interactions . Weaving games are those dynamic games experts play by meshing various games together – by fusing perception and conception into knowledgeable action . The epistemic target of such games is characterised by ‘rightness’, ‘relevance’, ‘doability’ and other situated outcomes that enhance professional work. Weaving games often evolve around taking professional actions that harness affordances of the environment and tweaking the epistemic environment in ways that enhance understanding of the situation and the possibilities of taking joint knowledgeable action . They are games that often involve fluent coordination of perception , expert mental resources , bodily skills and discourse .

An example of such a weaving game is administering a reading assessment test that requires noticing and coding different kinds of reading errors, and other features, while the student is still reading. Another example would be teaching a lesson and adjusting pitch, responding to students’ performance and behaviour in pedagogically sound ways that are fine-tuned to a particular situation. Weaving games are a diverse and complex class of games – hard to describe in a systematic way. We group them into open, semi-scripted and routine games . Broadly, they can be characterised by three main attributes: (a) contingency, (b) routine character of the course of action and (c) explicitness of the final outcome.

Open games are interactive non-routine games that can be characterised by an open course of actions, high interdependence between related games and low predictability of outcome. For example, an interview with a patient with multiple diseases during medication review has this character and weaves problem-solving with discourse. The target form that characterises outcomes of this game is general and broad, but such an interview needs each time to be redesigned and adapted for a particular patient, and each move during the interview needs to be further tweaked to suit a dynamically unfolding situation. To illustrate this, we can look more closely at a general form used for interviewing patients, shown in Fig. 14.6. The questions asked of a specific patient during an interview are shown in Fig. 14.16, as well as how they are woven together with(in) the pharmacist’s work. The former is the target epistemic form of the problem-solving game . It guides coding of the information from an interview and other sources and helps to represent this information in a form suitable for further processing and producing. The latter is the form of the translational public discourse game and guides the pharmacist’s investigative dialogue with the particular patient. Thus, the epistemic form is aligned with a specific patient’s diagnosis. The two games are woven together with the pharmacist’s embodied action and ongoing sense-making , and the overall unfolding game is guided by the pharmacist’s mental problem-solving activity, by the dialogue with the patient – collecting verbal information during the interview – and also by a range of moves for ‘reading’ other relevant verbal and nonverbal cues. Such moves include the pharmacist’s investigation of the patient’s compliance in taking medications – by reviewing dispensing history, checking the patient’s understanding of what medications are for, assessing administration techniques, checking expiry dates of all the medications and observing other relevant conditions. What kind of information is relevant, and what can be collected, is contingent on the situation and determined within moment-to-moment interaction. The weaving game is generally open to diverse moves and can be adapted flexibly to the situation.

Semi-scripted games have a medium level of interdependence between the related games and actions. A typical example could be a lesson, where the teacher’s actions are directed towards particular expected outcomes and what the teacher does is guided by a course of action that is at least partly pre-planned. Nevertheless, individual moves are contingent on moment-to-moment interaction and the specific enacted path that unfolds during teaching can vary a great deal across situations. The need for this flexibility is well recognised by teacher educators:

… the less bullet points [in the lesson plan] the better, because you have a little piece of paper on your desk to make sure that you’re on track and at the end of the 45 minutes or the double lesson, you’ve actually have achieved ‘I’m going to do this’ because if not, sometimes you might depending on what happens in the classroom, you might end up going into a tangent and into a different area which there has to be room for that, to allow that to happen. But you still need, perhaps, to have a reminder of pulling yourself and your students back on track. (Education Lecturer)

Routine games are generally more repetitive, and possible courses of action and outcomes generally involve only a limited set of possibilities and variations. Administering a reading test to a student with learning difficulties can be an example of such a game. The main steps in administering the test need to be adapted to different students, different contexts and different texts, but the variations in the moves that need to be taken in any particular situation are relatively small. In fact, the characteristic procedure and rules should be followed by a counsellor with considerable precision, so that the test maintains its robustness and the measurements do not lose their validity. Routine games do not always imply easy games and they may involve complex weaving of several games and require fine-tuned embodied skill. For example, the reading test procedure involves complex weaving of public discourse and problem-solving (coding) games and usually requires special preparation:

Lecturer: When I do the – show the DVD of the boy reading and they have to do analysis. They’ve got the sheets in front of them. The very first time they all nearly pass out because it’s quite hard. And then I do it and I slow it all down and get lots of gaps and they relax a bit. They do more practice. And then by the time they get to do their own, I’d say they are pretty much on top of it.

Interviewer: So they [students] have trouble with like actually conducting tests or interpreting the results?

Lecturer: No. No. Not the tests so much actually. It’s more the child’s reading and you’ve got a copy of what the child’s reading. It’s just keeping up. So you get a child and they’re reading and they’re making lots of mistakes. It’s very hard to get it all down. And a lot of the tests are like that. So the child’s reading aloud and you’re trying to record – they’re just – a lot of literacy tests, you have to get pretty good at doing them. And that’s just not even choosing the tests. That’s actually doing the test. (Interview with School Counselling Lecturer and Program Director)

Learning to play weaving games – including those which look quite routine – tends to be hard for students, as such games inevitably involve contingencies. For example, one school counselling student (Jane) reflected on a challenge administering and making sense of a standard assessment test as follows:

It was particularly frustrating as Ron scored points on the basal items but then got every other item incorrect, however I still had to continue with the test. (Student reflection on a completed behavioural assessment)

While the test clearly prescribed the moves , it could not help adjust them to a practically encountered situation. Jane continued by noting a number of other similar challenges, most of which also included complex weaving of several seemly simple, yet hard to enact, epistemic games – such as administering interviews with parents and teachers and reinforcing students while administering tests.

Given the challenges that weaving games can cause to novice professionals, we dedicate the whole of the next chapter to them .

Notes

1.
Note, this example is based on a case that pharmacy students have been exploring in the Cardiovascular and Renal course and our reinterpretation of key features of epistemic games and forms following Perkins (1997).
2.
In our studies, we saw how this game and form were blended with additional pedagogical elements (such as peer collaboration and feedback from collaborating teachers) employed by preservice teachers in action learning projects implemented during school placements.
3.
These overarching problem-solving games are broadly parallel to what Ohlsson (1993) called ‘compositional schemas’ . However, they are situated and mesh together symbolic and socio-material aspects – they are not just mental.
4.
By ‘public’ we mean that the artefact moves into a more public arena, though there may nevertheless be strict controls on who can access it.
5.
‘Public’ in the qualified sense, mentioned above.

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Centre for Research on Learning and Innovation (CRLI), Faculty of Education & Social Work, The University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia
Lina Markauskaite & Peter Goodyear

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Lina Markauskaite
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Markauskaite, L., Goodyear, P. (2017). Professional Epistemic Games. In: Epistemic Fluency and Professional Education. Professional and Practice-based Learning, vol 14. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-4369-4_14

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-4369-4_14
Published: 22 September 2016
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