Collaborative knotworking – transforming clinical teaching practice through faculty development

BACKGROUND: Faculty development is important for advancing teaching practice in health professions education. However, little is known regarding how faculty development outcomes are achieved and how change in practice may happen through these activities. In this study, we explored how clinical educators integrated educational innovations, developed within a faculty development programme, into their clinical workplaces. Thus, the study seeks to widen the understanding of how change following faculty development unfolds in clinical systems. METHODS: The study was inspired by case study design and used a longitudinal faculty development programme as a case offering an opportunity to study how participants in faculty development work with change in practice. The study applied activity theory and its concept of activity systems in a thematic analysis of focus group interviews with 14 programme attendees. Participants represented two teaching hospitals, five clinical departments and five different health professions. RESULTS: We present the activity systems involved in the integration process and the contradiction that arose between them as the innovations were introduced in the workplace. The findings depict how the faculty development participants and the clinicians teaching in the workplace interacted to overcome this contradiction through iterative processes of negotiating a mandate for change, reconceptualising the innovation in response to workplace reactions, and reconciliation as temporary equilibria between the systems. CONCLUSION: The study depicts the complexities of how educational change is brought about in the workplace after faculty development. Based on our findings and the activity theoretical concept of knotworking, we suggest that these complex processes may be understood as collaborative knotworking between faculty development participants and workplace staff through which both the output from faculty development and the workplace practices are transformed. Increasing our awareness of these intricate processes is important for enhancing our ability to make faculty development reach its full potential in bringing educational change in practice. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12909-020-02407-8.