We Have Multiple Professional Identities. We have all formed a professional identity over years of training and practice, created by the personal and social context we experience in the work environment. Our professional identity is what we would say in answer to the question from a neighbor who asks, “Just what is it that you do you?” Our identity is valuable because it is the way that we understand ourselves, interpret experiences, present ourselves and is how we are perceived and recognized by the community outside of work. Nevertheless, it is not as simple as a single professional identity as either teacher, clinician, or researcher. Don’t we have multiple professional identities at any given time? I certainly have had many professional identities over my career at UofL...times in which multiple identities were operative in any given week, and times when one or the other identity predominated my work. For example, I am now largely in an educator mode as my predominant professional identity through my responsibilities in faculty development. I suspect that you, too, are aware of the many identities you have in your work life. How do you see your professional identity if you have more than one? Which one dominates? Do your identities as clinician and educator merge or co-mingle on any given day? If so, is there some competition between these identities? In faculty development, we believe that our identity and work as educators is how we will magnify our impact for the next generation of healthcare professionals and the learners they train and the patients they care for. Through teaching, we help our learners develop the critical thinking skills they will need to meet the challenges they will face in their own professional careers. So how can we be assured that our educator role is not overshadowed by the clinician identity and its all-consuming demands on our time?

Our Professional Identity as Teachers. In September, we attended the International Conference on Faculty Development in Ottawa, Canada, where we had the opportunity to hear an excellent presentation from Dr. Peter Cantillon, Professor of General Practice at the National University of Ireland (Galway). He is interested in how our identity as clinicians and teachers develops as we are formed into doctors, nurses, and dentists through the intertwining of work and learning over the years. He posed the questions, “How does the clinical work environment impact the teaching component of what we do, and how should faculty development efforts support the professional identity as teacher?”. Professor Cantillon challenged us to think deeply about how to use faculty development to foster and strengthen our professional identities as educators by highlighting a recent Academic Medicine publication from McGill University and the University of California at San Francisco (Steinert, O’Sullivan, & Irby, 2019).

The authors provided some reasons why our identity as a teacher is so important?

• It can impact the choice of professional roles in your career
• It can enhance career satisfaction and motivation
• It is an opportunity to contribute back by educating the next generation
• It can be energizing and gratifying
• It is one of the reasons you likely chose an academic career in the first place

How Can Faculty Development Efforts Help? The authors provide several strategies for how we can foster and strengthen faculty teacher identity. These include embedding identity formation as teachers into our existing programs, making career paths as educators clear, and creating communities of education practice where education innovation is encouraged, educators are honored, and mentoring is provided around learning-science and educational scholarship (Steinert et al., 2019). 

What Can You Do? Your HSC Office of Faculty Development is taking these recommendations seriously as we continue to create new programming and enhance existing programming. The Office of HSC Faculty Development at the University of Louisville exists to engage, equip, and inspire all Health Sciences Center faculty to be learner-focused and to excel in teaching and academic leadership. We are committed to the professional growth of HSC faculty with the ever-present goal of providing a learner-centric approach that legitimizes education as a valued field of scholarship as we train the next generation of providers and leaders in medicine, nursing, dentistry, and public health. We invite you to participate in our programs and let us know if we can do more to meet your needs as educators.

Embrace your professional identity as a teacher and do it well. It is how you will magnify your impact on the next generation of healthcare professionals.

Let us know about your teacher identity and how it works with the other professional identities you have developed. Send us a message and let us know what you think. Email HSCFACDV@louisville.edu with the words teacher identity in the subject line.

References

Steinert, Y., O’Sullivan, P. S., & Irby, D. M. (2019). Strengthening Teachers’ Professional Identities Through Faculty Development. Academic Medicine, 94(7), 963-968. doi:10.1097/acm.0000000000002695