166 Chapter 6 others, this not only contributes to psychological well-being, but can also protect people from the hardships of their work, even in extreme contexts. We conclude that mission awareness is highly relevant to functioning as a teacher, as a mission guides adult lifelong learning and development. Almost a century ago, one of the founders of adult education in the USA indicated that adults learn in order to give meaning to life.34 More recently, a study confirmed that mission awareness has a strong impact on adult learning and suggested that a mission awareness directs both the level of motivation to learn and the learning choices that the individual makes.32 So, being aware of one’s mission as a teacher gives meaning to an educator’s professional life and can fuel motivation for further development and maturation as a teacher. Maturation of medical educators In our 10-year follow-up study (Chapter 5), we explored how educators mature in their perspectives on being a teacher. We concluded that perspectives on being a teacher can develop over time, but that maturation is not self-evident and happened in only a minority of the educators. In other words, educators’ perspectives on being a teacher appear as relatively stable and do not change easily. We discovered that maturation proceeds through ‘developmental stages’ and follows the order of the phenotypes from less to more inclusive. Our finding of developmental stages corresponds with an ‘individualist’ view-point on how educators mature, which situates maturation within the individual14,35 and pays attention to affective outcomes such as psychological well-being.36 In addition, the least inclusive, ‘Critic’ phenotype, which highlights the influence of the educational context on the maturation of educators, fits a ‘social-relational’ view-point on maturation. In this view-point, maturation is perceived as fluid and constructed, negotiated through social interaction in cultural contexts.14,35 Indeed, our findings suggest that the Critic phenotype may be a more transient phenotype. An educator may temporarily lose sight of their competencies, or identity or mission as a teacher, when these become suppressed by the experience of unfavourable external circumstances. These circumstances may be work-related, such as a lack of appreciation for education within the organisational culture, particularly by peers, department heads or the higher education administration. Furthermore, we discovered that, in retrospect, difficult private circumstances may also play a role. Reasons that we have only been able to determine these private circumstances as influencing factors in hindsight may be that an educator is not aware of the influence of the private circumstances on their professional functioning, or does not yet want to disclose them while they are happening.
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTk4NDMw