Professional culture

-

You would not believe me, but I am writing this piece at more than 10,000 feet high. I am on my way to the Latin American Conference of Residency Education (LACRE) in Santiago, Chile. I will be presenting one of the previous studies that we ran for my doctoral project. I will be discussing the topic of how professional culture influences professional identity on medical educators.

Professional identity refers to how they see themselves, and life itself. Members of a profession share knowledge, values and attitudes.

Professional culture, as described by Hargreaves & Fullan (1991), could be categorized into individualized, balkanized, per project collaboration, and extended collaboration.
-          Individualized: refers to a medical educator focused on the service provided to the students. Every professor in the educational setting would be focusing on his own subject, and not about the curriculum as a whole.
-          Balkanized: refers to a collaboration between two professors. This collaboration started because of shared interests, or to facilitate a student project.
-          Per project collaboration: describes a learning setting where medical educators integrate by the department. Typically, teams are formed by a manager, think about last time you worked on reforming the curriculum.
-          Extended collaboration: in this setting, you cannot distinguish the subject the educators teach, nor the department, they are just working together to achieve the same goal.

We asked a group of professors to answer: what it means to be a medical educator? And the answers show how a professional culture influence professional identity. For example, in the lowest level of collaboration, the individualized category, educators would describe a medical educator as someone with the required credentials, or a physician that works in the clinic and teaches. An educator on the highest level of collaboration would describe a medical educator as a health professional that is committed to society reflecting over his own experience to make students gain knowledge, and how to make the patient the most important thing.

I would love to share with you the poster that I prepared. 


What do you think? How is the professional culture in your school?

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

AMEE 2018

-
Image
Last year, I attended for the second time to the AMEE conference. I felt very empowered after attending several lectures and workshops. Here is a picture of the Tecnologico de Monterrey group at AMEE. And although I came back with a few new great ideas to implement, somehow I felt that there had to be something else that I could do. I learned about the AMEE Fellows and Associate Fellows, and I knew I wanted to apply. The previous years had been a very special journey where I had an initial preparation for me as an educational leader, but belonging to the thriving AMEE community would be an intensive learning experience that will help me to continue growing as a professional. It would allow me to participate in more engaging projects with senior medical educators with whom I share a passion. This synergy would result in significant contributions to medical education. Say CHEESE! Getting to talk a few minutes with THE legend, was very inspiring. He was very down to earth, ...
Read more

FAIMER family

-
Image
Last year I had the amazing opportunity to start a FAIMER fellowship in the beautiful city of Santiago, Chile. I started this program with a proposal to develop a VR setting to contribute to a patient safety culture. For me, it was a personal journey, as I got involved in this theme because my family and I experienced it in first hand when my mom had surgery. This project, allowed me to get to know the FAIMER family. This program was developed to improve world health through education, through a powerful community of very committed people.   These family, that I did not know that I had, were willing to provide feedback, learn together, and sometimes even being a shoulder to cry on. In this learning community, I have met the kindest people I have ever known, but most importantly, we are dreaming together about how to make the world a better place. I wouldn’t dare to say we have everything figured out, but we are doing something. I want to share a picture with you of la...
Read more

After all, what is a medical educator?

-
This question resonates to the bones…medical students have participated for centuries accompanying expert physicians observing their consultations, visits and even surgeries to learn from the medical practice in situ (Valdez-García, 2007). This has been the prevailing way in which training of new professionals is carried out; however, the profession itself has advanced considerably in the last hundred years through the development of credentialing processes, and ethical standards (Steinert, 2012). This has created multiple career opportunities within the area of ​​health. In addition to the opportunity for doctors to do a medical residency, and dedicate themselves to clinical-care, they can pursue a career as educators, researchers or a mixture of these. Being of particular interest these last ones which have been recognized in multiple studies as academic doctor, medical teacher, clinical educator or medical educator (Salcedo, 2016, Schuwirth and van der Vleuten, 2006, Roberts,...
Read more