Cultivating cultural awareness among medical educators by integrating cultural anthropology in faculty development: an action research study

BACKGROUND: In faculty development, understanding each participant’s cultural context is important. However, there is scarce evidence on how to improve cultural understanding in faculty development. Cultural anthropology is a discipline that focuses on developing cultural self-awareness by understanding different cultures. Professionals from this field can be crucial to the goal of cultivating cultural awareness among medical educators. The aims of this study are to 1) develop and modify cultural anthropology sessions in faculty development and 2) evaluate the effectiveness of these sessions, including their long-term impacts. METHODS: The cultural anthropology sessions were organized as part of a longitudinal faculty development program—Foundation Course for Medical Education—at Kyoto University in Japan. The study included 47 medical educators participating in faculty development and three lecturers: two cultural anthropologists and a medical educator. We developed the cultural anthropology sessions and implemented them in the longitudinal faculty development program. In these sessions, cultural anthropologists used inquiry-guided reflection. An action research methodology was employed and repeated in four cycles from 2015 to 2018. Qualitative and quantitative data were collected during the action research cycles. The qualitative data were thematically analyzed. RESULTS: The cultural anthropologists’ inquiries fostered learning during the sessions, and three themes—cultural relativism, attention to context, and reframing—were synthesized. As a long-term impact of the sessions, the learners reported becoming more aware of the cultural contexts in their daily educational and clinical activities. CONCLUSIONS: The cultural anthropology sessions in the faculty development program were shown to have enhanced the participants’ awareness of cultural contexts. The concept and format of these sessions may be used more widely in faculty development programs. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12909-022-03260-7.