Building a Collaborative Community of Practice in Medical Education Research

Abstract

Communication in medicine is extended from doctor–patient and doctor–colleagues in team settings to doctor–researcher and researcher–researcher dynamics. How might we build collaborative communities of researchers around the issues of communication discussed in this book? Again, conceptual work is suggested to clarify what ‘collaborative community’ means. Alfred Adler’s notion of ‘fellow feeling’ can underpin the formation of such communities. Without the generosity and understanding of fellow feeling, communities will disintegrate. While medicine is theoretically open to democratization through medical education, it is medical education research that promises to democratize medical education through provision of an evidence-based challenging assumption. However, such democratic intentions will not be realized without effort towards community fellow feeling, and this is also an issue of building genuine interdisciplinarity.