Bridging Pedagogical Concepts In Dive Training

by Marcus Doshi. Images courtesy of the author unless noted.

Meet Marcus Doshi, an avid diver and a seasoned professor of stage design at Northwestern University, Chicago. In this article, Marcus draws parallels between the world of teaching and scuba training, exploring contraries, learning partners, threshold concepts, and assessments. He reflects on how these pedagogical ideas can enhance the effectiveness of scuba training, providing valuable insights for both instructors and students. Join Marcus as he navigates the intersection of education theory and underwater exploration.

I am a professor of stage design in a highly competitive Masters of Fine Arts (MFA) graduate program at Northwestern University, where I have taught since 2012 following a decade of professional practice as a lighting designer for theater and opera. In 2019, I was certified as an open water diver, and in 2021, I began the Global Underwater Explorers (GUE) curriculum with Fundamentals. In spring 2023, I completed Tech 1, and in winter 2023, I took Cave 1. 

One of the fascinating—and useful for my own teaching—parts of the courses has been inhabiting the role of the student. While at Northwestern, I’ve engaged in deep research into teaching and learning to shape my own course design, and I have come across several concepts that I believe are directly applicable to high level scuba training; for example, the GUE curriculum. These concepts have to do with supposed contraries in the teaching process, student destabilization, and effective methods for assessment. In this article, I will tie these ideas to dive-training-specific examples, reflect on my own experience as a student diver, and offer anecdotal evidence from colleague divers and observations from my own teaching and course design.

This article is not intended as a critique of my experience in GUE courses, a critique of my instructors, or a proposal to radically alter the largely successful way the classes are taught. Rather, my goal is to investigate—using the lexicon of student-centered teaching and learning—how the concepts listed above can be mapped to GUE courses in order to explore actual practice using established theory. My proposal is that identifying and understanding these techniques and their attendant vocabulary will add to the extant toolset that instructors use while teaching as well as arming instructors with a sharper and more diverse toolset with which to improve student learning, with a likely knock-on effect impacting course design writ large. 

In other words, by bringing more specificity to language used in all contexts of teaching and learning, and by overtly talking about it by identifying the concepts to students in the context of teaching, the process will be richer, more efficient, and more productive—and that is the goal, right? Plus, there is the added benefit of utilizing these tactics to accomplish more within a finite number of hours (a good thing in cold water!).

Contraries

In his article, “Embracing Contraries in the Teaching Process,” Professor of English Emeritus at University of Massachusetts Amherst Peter Elbow interrogates the conflicting, seemingly contrary, obligations inherent to teaching: the obligation to the students and the obligation to knowledge and society. In other words, how can teachers be an ally to their students in the learning process while still strictly upholding standards of their subjects? 

His conclusion is that one can’t embody both positions at the same time, but being explicit with one’s students about which position one is taking at any given time allows one to occupy both spaces equally without it being contradictory. This can be achieved with explicit statements to students such as, “Right now, I’m holding you to this standard,” and, “Hey, I’m on your side—let’s work together to meet this goal.” Thus, it is possible to hold one’s students to very high standards if those standards are clearly explained in advance and while teaching. 

Clearly identifying the standards allows an instructor to act as an ally in learning without sacrificing any of the standards to which the students are held. He writes of his own experience, “I feel better about being really tough if I know I am going to turn around and be more on the student’s side than usual.” 

Learning Partners

Fortunately, GUE Standards are explicit on this front for all courses, so it is easy for instructors to clearly articulate them to students. However, given that they are rather universally regarded as the toughest standards in the scuba training space, the standards tend to create an elevated level of stress, which can get in the way of student learning (present company not excepted). 

The explicit positioning of oneself as an ally is perhaps a bit more personal, but Elbow proposes that “The more I can make it specifically clear how I am going to fulfill that commitment”—how he is going to help the students meet the expectations of the standards—“the easier it is for me to turn around and make a dialectical change of role into being an extreme ally to students.” 

An explicit statement I make to my students after explaining the standards I expect to be met in my classes is some version of, “Now I am going to do everything I can to help you meet or exceed these standards.” It may sound simple, but a straightforward statement like that can help reposition a student into a less stressful, more receptive space where the instructor is not situated as an arbiter of standards, but a partner in learning. How one talks to one’s students about the process of learning is as important as the information one is trying to teach.

Threshold Concept

Another method of positioning oneself as an ally to one’s students is to overtly acknowledge the destabilizing nature of the educational environment by clearly identifying why it is destabilizing. This is especially important because students engaging with GUE training often bring baggage from previous classes that they, counter-intuitively, have to “unlearn.” In their remarkable work, education researchers Jan Meyer and Ray Land propose an extremely useful way of conceptualizing this destabilization in terms of threshold concepts, troublesome knowledge, and liminal spaces. 

A threshold concept, simply put, is a critical concept that once learned, can’t be unlearned. For example, the necessity for good trim and stability in the water. I contend that threshold concept theory can also be mapped to skills (it’s one thing to know that trim and stability are important; it’s another to be able to do it). Meyer and Land define it thus: “A threshold concept can be considered as akin to a portal, opening up a new and previously inaccessible way of thinking about something. It represents a transformed way of understanding, or interpreting, or viewing something without which the learner cannot progress.” 

For instance, a student can’t successfully complete a valve drill or deployment of an SMB without good trim and stability. They continue, “As a consequence of comprehending a threshold concept there may thus be a transformed internal view of subject matter, subject landscape, or even worldview. This transformation may be sudden, or it may be protracted over a considerable period of time, with the transition to understanding proving troublesome.” 

A threshold concept has five key characteristics:

1. It is transformative in that it results in a shift in understanding. For example, that good trim and stability is foundational to being a good diver transforms the way students look at that skill.
2. It is irreversible in that it is unlikely to be forgotten. However, that is not to say that it cannot be challenged by what researcher Glynis Cousin refers to as “more refined or rival” understandings. For example, sometimes one has to break trim to move gas around a drysuit, and that is okay.
3. It is integrative in that it shows how multiple ideas are related and allows for “ah-ha!” moments. For example, how the valve drill in Fundamentals is related to managing failures in Tech 1 and Cave 1. 
4. It is bounded, “In that any conceptual space will have terminal frontiers, bordering with thresholds into new conceptual areas.” For example, oxygen is good right up to the point that oxygen is bad.
5. It is troublesome, in that it is counterintuitive, alien, or seemingly incoherent. Wait, one can fin backwards!? (Now to actually do it…) 

Meyer and Land further posit that the threshold can be seen “as the entrance into the transformational state of liminality,” a transitional place between levels of understanding. This liminal space for students, with its lack of navigational markers, can be disturbing, stressful, and confusing. In my courses, I have my students read Cousin’s “An Introduction to Threshold Concepts” on the first day of class. Then, I repeatedly acknowledge during the class that the students are occupying a state of liminality, and that it is perfectly natural and to be expected. This eases stress, lowers the stakes, and makes students more receptive and willing to try new things. That’s a good thing, right?

Assessments

I contend that it is not only critical to acknowledge the concepts introduced in the sections above to students, but that it must be repetitive in order to meet the goal of improving the environment for student learning. I believe this is best done in the context of assessments during class.

A definition is in order: assessment (verb) is the collecting of information about student learning and using it for some purpose. That information can be quantitative or qualitative. 

For the sake of this discussion, quantitative maps to objective (which typically means that it is standard-referenced) and qualitative maps to subjective (which means that it is referenced to the tacit knowledge of the assessor). In the world of GUE training, some standards are objective: for example, from the general training standards, “swim 375 m/400 yds in less than 14 minutes without stopping” for Technical Diver Level 1, while others are subjective as evidenced by the repeated use of the phrase “demonstrate proficiency,” which relies almost exclusively on the experience and judgment of the instructor. 

There are two types of assessment: formative and summative. Researchers Greg Light, Roy Cox, and Susanna Calkins, in their book Learning and Teaching in Higher Education: The Reflective Professional, define them thusly:

Formative assessment can be used to:

• Provide feedback to improve learning

• Motivate students

• Diagnose a student’s strengths or weakness

• Help students reflect critically on their learning

Summative assessment may be used to:

• Pass or fail a student

• Grade or rank a student

• Predict a student’s success in other courses or employment 

A convenient mnemonic to distinguish the two is that one is used in the formation of student knowledge—formative—and the other is used in the summing up of student knowledge—summative.

Student Competence 

Professor and education consultant Susan M. Brookhart ’s definition adds some nuance: “… formative and summative assessments describe two assessment functions. That is, they describe the use of assessment information. Whereas some information is more conducive to being used formatively and some is more conducive to being used summatively, it is the use and not the information that makes the distinction.” 

This is to say that one has to do something with the information collected during assessment, and that what one does with the info is the key. Importantly, the same info can be used both formatively and summatively, which is a very important concept to hold on to in the discussion of GUE training as evidenced by the summative assessment of both a written test (objective) and instructor evaluation (subjective) at the conclusion of a course, as well as the formative assessments students get along the way. I think every reader will agree that the formative assessments are by far the most important so, to reiterate, my goal is to not argue for their efficacy, rather it is to identify why, so that in knowing, these concepts can be applied consciously to dive training.

Why are formative assessments so important as to almost kick summative assessments out of the room? Because formative assessments are:

• About improving student capability, according to researchers Earl Hunt and James W. Pellegrino.
• About encouraging self-regulation, which, to paraphrase educational psychologist Paul Pintrich, is learning where students are in control of their cognitive process and practice—both of which are critical to mastery.
• More effective; in the words of researcher D. Royce Sadler, “Formative assessment is concerned with how judgements about the quality of student responses…can be used to shape and improve the student’s competence by short-circuiting the randomness and inefficiency of trial-and-error learning.” 

Feedback

I propose that the two most important forms of formative assessment with regards to scuba training are authentic assessment and feedback. This proposal does not cut new ground insofar as these are the primary methods in use already. But let’s learn some new vocabulary to improve them more effectively:

Authentic assessments are assessments that replicate real-world situations as closely as possible: for example, an in-water valve failure exercise. I paraphrase curricular design researcher Grant Wiggins’s six characteristics of authentic assessments with corollaries to the drill: 

1. It is realistic (the student hears the bubbles).
2. It requires judgment (the student needs to make a determination of where the bubbles are coming from).
3. It asks the students to go through the procedures that are typical to the discipline (valve failures are dealt with the same way every time).
4. It is done in similar situations to actual contexts where the work would be done (the drill is actually in the water).
5. It requires a wide range of skills and judgment applied to a complex problem (the corollary is self-evident).
6. It allows for feedback, practice, and second chances. (The student doesn’t actually die if they mess up, and there is a discussion of how to do it better).

Viewed through this lens, it is possible to see how the exercise—via repetition and feedback from the instructor—can move the student from being a novice through a threshold to understanding how to develop their evaluative knowledge. In other words, the authentic experience of the failure allows the student to move from executing a rote set of procedures to understanding why the procedure is what it is.

Feedback is the primary communication method by which an instructor comments on the performance during authentic assessments. In the best scenario, it is a dialog between the student and instructor (often Socratic), with peer-students participating (even if only by listening), happening in real time. This allows both the instructor and the student to shift the focus of the conversation as needed while giving students agency over their self-regulation and instructors the ability to be nimble with routes to their learning goals. 

The term feedback requires special definition as I use it because classic definitions make feedback a one-way street: information transmission from assessor to assessee. There is push-back against this definition, and rightfully so. Researchers such as David J. Nichol & Debra MacFarlaine-Dick, Sadler, and many others argue that if feedback is to be useful in student self-regulation it must be conceptualized as dialog. 

Nichol & MacFarlaine-Dick urge that “Feedback as dialog means that the student not only receives initial feedback information but also has the opportunity to engage the teacher in discussion about that feedback.” And Sadler, again: “Feedback is a key element in formative assessment, and is usually defined in terms of information about how successfully something has been or is being done [original emphasis].” This revised definition will be referred to as good feedback.

Self-regulation 

Nichol & MacFarlaine-Dick further propose that feedback stimulates self-regulation and, in order for that to work, three conditions, initially proposed by Sadler, must be met in order for feedback to work. Those conditions are that students must know:

1. What good performance is (i.e., they must possess a concept of the goal or standard being aimed for).
2. How current performance relates to good performance (for this, students must be able to compare current and good performance).
3. How to act to close the gap between current and good performance.

This can be readily mapped to any of the skills practiced in class, and I propose that if phrases like “here is what you are doing right and here is what you are doing wrong” and “here is how to close the gap” are employed, it would create a more receptive environment for feedback. Nichol & MacFarlaine-Dick go on to synthesize seven principles of feedback practice, practice designed to “strengthen students’ capacity to self-regulate:” 

1. Helps clarify what good performance is (goals, criteria, expected standards)
2. Facilitates the development of self-assessment (reflection) in learning
3. Delivers high quality information to students about their learning
4. Encourages teacher and peer dialog around learning
5. Encourages positive motivational beliefs and self-esteem
6. Provides opportunities to close the gap between current and desired performance
7. Provides information to teachers that can be used to help shape the teaching. 

If an instructor can stimulate the three conditions in the first list above in students, and if they also practice feedback as in the second list above, then that feedback becomes the most efficacious assessment in class. Good feedback makes the action/reaction time of sharing the instructor’s tacit knowledge nimble and instantaneous, encourages self-regulation in the student, and creates a positive teaching and learning environment for both. It is important to note that dialog here is not strictly speaking limited to formal instructional time. In this sense, its definition is broader and encompasses banter over beers at the picnic table after class, via social media, or even a phone call months after course completion.

GUE does a good job at not soft pedaling assessments in the General Training Standards, Policies, and Procedures, and while it is not the topic of this article to get into the weeds of curricular design, I wonder if students actually know exactly what they need to accomplish when they begin a course, especially with regards to the authentic assessments (skills). I propose that it would be useful if the first day of classes, or pre-class mandatory study, could include videos of every skill to be taught in the class, so that students have an idea of the examples walking in the door. 

For example, a video of what a good Basic 5 looks like, and also perhaps a video of a bad Basic 5 that shows the most common mistakes instructors see for comparison. As Elbow points out, it’s better to show what does not meet assessment standards as a comparative than to just say, ”Do it right or you will fail.” 

Ideal Outcome 

My hope is that introducing ideas and vocabulary from the lexicon of student-centered teaching and learning in the context of GUE training will prove useful to instructors as they shape their teaching: that the language and concepts introduced can engender a nuanced shift in vocabulary that will create a more positive teaching and learning environment. The ideal outcome is that instructors will overtly and repeatedly acknowledge the conflicting, seemingly contrary, obligations to their students and their obligation to standards and the destabilizing nature of threshold concepts and the attendant liminal space of learning via the language they use during feedback on authentic assessments. And that by doing this, instruction will be richer, more efficient, and more productive for everyone.

Marcus Doshi designs lighting for theater and opera, where his work has been seen on and off-Broadway, at most major regional theaters and opera companies in the US and internationally. He is a professor of theatre at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, USA, where he teaches in the Master of Fine Arts Stage Design and Directing programs. His diving career is nascent: having been first certified in 2019 followed by a GUE Fundamentals recreational pass in 2021, technical pass in 2022, and Tech 1 and Cave 1 in 2023. He is also part of the leadership team of Midwest Underwater Explorers, a GUE local community.