“Understanding where you're coming from”: Discovering an [inter]professional identity through becoming a peer facilitator

Abstract

Peer facilitation offers an innovative and effective means of promoting interprofessional learning (IPL) between health and social care students. This paper highlights the benefits that peer facilitators themselves experience from involvement in assisting junior colleagues to engage with IPL in an online context. The setting for the inquiry is an online interprofessional learning pathway shared by two higher education institutions in the UK. Insights have been developed over a 3-year period through collaborative inquiry with 41 peer facilitators, academic tutors and the students who benefitted from their input. This paper which focuses on peer facilitators' application data, interview data and written reflections explores the instrumental, cognitive and personal gains experienced. However, more fundamentally, theorizing findings in relation to identity theory we substantiate the claim that the role provides opportunity for testing and refining important aspects of both professional and interprofessional identities.

Online interprofessional education facilitation: A scoping review

“…Most studies used health professionals or faculty members in the facilitation role, however two utilized students/peers in this role (Clouder et al 2012;Kroph et al 2015). All but one of the studies involved facilitators working on IPE activities with pre-licensure students from between three and 11 different professions.…”

“…The most common of these outcomes was the facilitators experiencing their own interprofessional learning as a result of their facilitation role. Both peer facilitators (Clouder et. 2012) and health professional facilitators (Evans et al 2016) reported increasing their own understanding of other professions as a result of the facilitation experience.…”

“…In addition to interprofessional learning, peer facilitators also reported other personal growth such as having developed skills in reflection, organization, communication, teaching/facilitation, diplomacy, conflict resolution and overall a greater sense of confidence, along with the opportunity for interprofessional identify development (Clouder et al 2012).…”

Disclosed Curriculum: Transfer-Climate Mediates Discipline-Differences in Learner Outcomes

“…47 Our findings are complemented by arguments for research of facilitator training and student transfer. 48 More directly, Clouder et al 49 examined the role that IPE student-facilitators has on widening perceptual scopes of professional identity. Extrapolating, recent longitudinal findings support the effects of learner's identification with instructors, in situ, on trainees' motivation to transfer.…”

Developing interprofessional education online: An ecological systems theory analysis

“…Implicit in this statement is the suggestion that identity is a social construct that is not 'given' but is a fluid on-going process. Nor is it unitary; professional and interprofessional identities interact with one another, by virtue of 'perforate boundaries' (Clouder, Davies, Sams & McFarland, 2012) that allow either identity to be dominant at any time depending on context (Burford, 2012). However, a sense of identity developed through the professional socialization process invokes 'in-group' (with their own profession) and 'out-group' (with other professions) dynamics (Brewer, 1979), which allows self-categorization or the ability to distinguish 'who one is not from a sense of who one is' (Burford, 2012).…”