HPE as a Field: Implications for the Production of Compelling Knowledge

Research in education, including health professions education, has long struggled with the competing concerns of academic and practice-based stakeholders. Inspired partially by the work of Stokes and other theorists in science and technology studies, we propose that discussions about compelling research in health professions education might be usefully advanced by considering what it would mean if the community framed itself as a knowledge-producing field instead of aligning itself with either disciplinary or practical interests.

Efforts to foreground disciplinary or practical interests in education research have been unproductive, leading to the privileging of one group's expertise at the expense of the other. Currently proposed principles and practices for responding to the divergence between these interests, such as knowledge translation or practitioner inquiry, have yielded comparatively little in the way of mutual satisfaction.

As a field, health professions education research would not privilege either disciplinary or practical interests, nor would it attempt any sort of definitive blueprint for resolution to the tension. Rather it would regard these interests as inherently interconnected and, therefore, always in tension to varying degrees. The challenge for a field is not to resolve that tension but to harness it in productive ways through collaboration, negotiation, and compromise, through ever-shifting engagements that will not necessarily be comfortable but will nonetheless foster knowledge that resonates with all parts of the community.