Reconceptualising faculty development for the future

Faculty development (FD) helps to build educational expertise and capacity among those involved in health professional education (HPE). Informal FD encompasses the learning that health professionals, educators and researchers do outside of formal structures and includes learning through everyday work. This paper reframes learning through work using situativity theory and presents three principles for optimising it: cultivating a learning mindset, leveraging social conditions for learning and (re-)negotiating a social contract.

Based on this theorisation, we propose the term embedded FD in acknowledgement that learning through work arises in the complex interactions between individuals, groups and their environments. Implications of this reframing include shifting the focus onto helping individuals, groups and organisations develop effectivities to navigate social structures and systems for the purpose of learning, and redefining what success might look like. This reconceptualisation can help health professionals, educators, researchers and organisations optimise embedded FD to meet the educational opportunities and challenges of the next 50 years.