Breaking barriers: widening participation for cross-cultural faculty development in Japan

Accepted: June 03, 2022 Introduction Participating in faculty development is mandatory for all health professionals involved in medical education to improve their knowledge, skills and teaching practice.1 A vehicle to inform and facilitate organisational change, effective faculty development relies on appropriate representation from all groups to capture the broad range of perspectives from teachers at the organisation grass roots.2 With rapid globalisation comes the diversification of social needs and the socio-cultural contexts which intersect with medical education, necessitating faculty development programmes that cultivate attendee cultural competence, unconscious bias awareness and an understanding of how these translate to the academic and clinical learning environments. In addition to low numbers affecting representation, international faculty in Japan also have difficulty participating in local mainstream activities, existing in a 'bubble of foreignness' due to language barriers and cultural challenges.9 This feeling of exclusion has been shared by academics in other countries where the number of international faculty members is relatively small,10,11 and also impacts local faculty who may be unsure how to interact smoothly in a domestic multicultural situation. [...]in recognising these challenges to international faculty participation and responding to the environmental pressures exerted by COVID19 in reducing opportunities for international interaction, we have developed a faculty development session which lowers the threshold for the participation of all faculty through increasing cultural accessibility. Each video featured an unprofessional behaviour that may be subject to cultural differences in perception and situational management, comprising: 1) a group of students informing their teacher that they would prefer to finish their clinical teaching early due to extra-curricular activities; 2) an attending physician breaking hospital policy in accepting gifts from a patient and sharing them with the students, and 3) an attending physician who undermines a colleague in the presence of medical students and teaches by humiliation. In our session, the content of the video clips was based on the real-life experiences of the Japanese facilitators. [...]the nuances conveyed may have been more effectively picked up by local faculty members during the group work.