188 Chapter 7 personal contacts with students and with peers and mentors with an articulated awareness of their educational identity and mission. In addition, it is important to consider the educators’ workplace context, which can be both supportive and challenging, and to pay attention to the informal teaching culture. A supportive leadership at all levels of the organisation, rewarding teaching across career paths, fostering teacher networks and communities, and minimising conflicts arising from competing tasks are examples of how the workplace context can be beneficial to the development of an educator’s identity and mission. To increase our understanding of whether and how medical educators develop their perspectives on being a teacher we performed the study presented in Chapter 5. We use the term ‘maturation’ to emphasise that development of faculty is a holistic and ongoing process that takes place in the everyday work setting. For this qualitative ten-year follow-up study, as mentioned above, we re-interviewed 21 educators from the initial study. We used the same interview protocol as during the initial interviews. The dataset collected in 2008-2010 formed the baseline study. We deductively analysed both datasets, using the educator phenotype model as described in Chapter 3. For each participant we explored whether they had matured towards a more inclusive educator phenotype. The educators who showed maturation were interviewed again to explore factors they perceived to have guided their maturation. Our findings showed that a minority of the medical educators matured over the 10-year study period. Maturation followed the order of the phenotype categorisation from less to more inclusive. Regression towards a less inclusive phenotype did not take place. Factors considered influential for maturation varied for each phenotype and could be divided into intrapersonal aspects and meaningful experiences. Intrapersonal aspects refer to factors that are experienced as part of the ‘inner self,’ such as personal values, characteristics, or competencies. The relevance of the meaningful experiences was not so much the experience itself, but rather the attributed meaning to the experience. The three educators who were initially categorised in the Critic phenotype, all showed maturation. They indicated that it had been important to learn to come to terms with adverse circumstances such as lack of rewards for teaching tasks. In addition, they acknowledged that positive changes in their professional and private circumstances had been influential. The educator who matured towards the Practitioner phenotype credited the development of his competencies predominantly to meaningful experiences, such as taking on new teaching responsibilities. The educators who matured towards the Role model
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