163 General discussion 6 We will describe under separate headings the role of the environment and mission, which emerged so prominently from our findings. The environment The environment plays a role in both our lines of research. Our study on educators’ beliefs about teaching and learning shows that educators with learning-centred beliefs indicate that they feel responsible for creating a safe, stimulating, conducive learning environment for student learning. This means that the student’s environment is included as part of the educators’ belief system about student learning and development. The environment also appears to play a major role in educators’ perspectives on being a teacher: all educators were aware of the importance of the environment for their functioning as teachers. We discovered that it is not only the objective, observable environment, but particularly the educators’ perceived environment which influences their functioning, and in which affective aspects are included. While, in line with other studies,12,18 in the Critic phenotype the environment is mainly experienced as restrictive, educators in the other phenotypes have a more varied experience of the environment. They also acknowledge negative elements in the environment, but additionally emphasise positive elements, for example how recognition of the importance of teaching by the administration can contribute to their functioning as teachers. Thus, similar to the first line of research, the environment is also incorporated into educators’ perspectives on being a teacher. This has theoretical significance because it sheds a different light on the educational environment: not only as an objective reality situated outside of the person, but also as a personally constructed or perceived reality. It also has practical significance for faculty development, which we will discuss further under the Practical implications section. Mission One of our most prominent findings with regard to perspectives on being a teacher is the importance of being aware of one’s personal mission as a teacher. A mission can be defined as the source of one’s deepest motivations that drive and guide an educator in their teaching. One important characteristic of a mission is that it is not focused on the self, but on the other, and on desiring to contribute to a larger community and its contexts. The notion of educational mission has not received much attention in the medical education literature. While medical educators’ motivation to teach has been the subject of multiple studies, particularly within the ‘professional identity’ literature,12,14,19-21 the concept of motivation is not
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTk4NDMw