The Questions in a Decoding the Disciplines Interview

We created this video to highlight the role of the interviewers, the exploratory questions they ask, and how they feel their way to an understanding of the mental move. We’re playing with expert and novice knowledge, where the novice interviewers do not know how to make the mental moves that the expert does, but through or many questions and restatements, we get her to explain what she does. We identify the bottleneck, her mental moves she uses in order to avoid getting stuck in the bottleneck, and several analogies for this mental move, which help us understand which mental muscles she uses.

For example, after several bad analogies are put forward, Kimberly suggests a stoplight as an analogy for deciding the function of a noun in a sentence. Just as the color red means STOP for traffic and yellow means use caution, in language, nominative case means, use the ending that shows the doer (the subject) and genitive case mean’s use the ending that shows possession. Across the interview, the interviewers understanding of the mental moves becomes clearer. You can watch a short summary of the main ideas from this interview here [link].

Click on the chapter title to advance to that part of the video. Open up the attached document to see the the interview questions in their entirety.