Future Directions in Faculty Development in Health Professions and Biomedical Education Research: Building Infrastructures for Interdisciplinary Collaboration

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Friday 11:45 am - Gold 4
  In Roundtable Session: Future Directions for Faculty Development in Health Professions and Biomedical Education Abstract

Abstract

Tekian (2014) describes increased interest among health care professionals in pursuing graduate training in health professions education (HPE), a movement perhaps motivated by “innovations in curriculum and instructional strategies, competency-based assessment, particularly at the postgraduate level, and accreditation requirements” (p. 73). However, even as more clinicians pursue formal training in health professions education degree programs, education researchers situated in HPE contexts and those involved in fostering HPE research via faculty development may encounter, or collaborate with, clinician educators and health professionals who have a great deal of practical teaching experience and clinical acumen but may lack formal knowledge or training in education research design and methods. Similarly, Van Wart and colleagues (2024) document the evolution of education research in the context of the biomedical research enterprise. Despite being experts in their disciplines, basic and translational science faculty who are frequently responsible for leading training and education programs in biomedical graduate and postdoctoral education are often unfamiliar with discipline-based education research and education research principles more broadly. Education researchers and others involved with faculty development in these organizational contexts may navigate challenges, including how to provide adequate methodological education in relatively brief encounters, how to navigate disciplinary perspectives around what constitutes high-quality research, how to ensure rigor, and how to foster acceptance of methods that may fall outside of disciplinary norms in other fields, such as qualitative or mixed methods approaches, among others.

Given the focus of this symposium on future directions in faculty development, we ask ourselves: how do we design and implement faculty development initiatives/programs to enable meaningful collaborations with health professionals and biomedical researchers in education research? What role should the education researcher play in this context? This paper explores these questions from a theoretical lens and offers suggestions for praxis.

A cross-disciplinary team science approach may offer one lens through which to approach faculty development in HPE and biomedical education (HPBE) to foster interdisciplinary education research collaborations. Gesing et al (2024) utilize the Dynamics of Cross-disciplinary Research Development conceptual framework to provide a model for interdisciplinary HPBE research, concluding that transparent and distributed team leadership, project management, and shared goals and interests contributed to successful team science collaboration outputs. Future directions for faculty development could include providing explicit instruction on team science, setting the stage for participating fully in education research collaborations designed with these principles.

Training in team-science, consultations with experts, and additional training in education research design and methods can be combined to iteratively build capacity in HPBE professionals. Additionally, interdisciplinary communities of practice can help build shared language, increase exposure to new methods, and research norms.

We assert that there is a need for more training in methods for HPBE professionals. We suggest a three-pronged approach will improve the use of rigorous educational research design and methods in HPBE professions and expand the use of evidence-informed approaches to education and training.

Authors

• Ashley E. Grantham, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

• Yuane Jia, Rutgers University

• Rebekah L. Layton, University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill