Jean Clandinin

Narrative reflective practice in medical education for residents: composing shifting identities

As researchers note, medical educators need to create situations to work with physicians in training to help them attend to the development of their professional identities. While there is a call for such changes to be included in medical education, educational approaches that facilitate attention to the development of medical students’ professional identities, that is, who they are and who they are becoming as physicians, are still under development. One pedagogical strategy involves narrative reflective practice as a way to develop physician identity. Using this approach, medical residents first write narrative accounts of their experiences with patients in what are called “parallel charts”. They then engage in a collaborative narrative inquiry within a sustained inquiry group of other residents and two researcher/facilitators (one physician, one narrative researcher). Preliminary studies of this approach are underway. Drawing on the experiences of one medical resident in one such inquiry group, we show how this pedagogical strategy enables attending to physician identity making.

Teacher Education: A Question of Sustaining Teachers

In many places around the world, early career teacher attrition is a major concern. The costs associated with teachers leaving within their first 5 years of teaching are significant in economic terms. However, there are also concerns that the rapid movement of beginning teachers in and out of teaching creates less educative school and classroom environments and, consequently, less ideal learning conditions for students. Another significant concern is the impact on the identities of early career teachers who leave teaching.