Exhibiting understanding: The body in apprenticeship

This paper uses as its starting point a distinction made by Harvey Sacks between ‘claiming’ and ‘exhibiting’ understanding. In doing so, it explores some of the practices of producing and assessing claims and exhibits of understanding within discussions between student dentists and their supervisors. These are particularly interesting settings as the training episodes are not solely relevant to the work of formal education, but have consequence for the care of real patients attending the clinics. The paper focuses on the local, interactional resources that the supervisors draw on to assess understanding, resources that are not simply tied to the content of students’ talk, but that also relate to the timing of the production of that talk and to the bodily conduct that accompanies it. The analysis is organised around a series of illustrative examples drawn from a corpus of audio-visual recordings in a student dental clinic.