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?