A narrative inquiry into the cultivation of professional identity of medical students – through an online knowledge-sharing community

Cultivating medical talents with professional identity is the ultimate goal of medical education, yet there is a lack of long-term empiric data on the process of cultivation. This longitudinal narrative inquiry study collecting data from chat records, meetings and interviews involved a dynamic online knowledge-sharing community. Through focusing on the evolving characteristics of the online knowledge-sharing community and the changes in medical students’ dentities, this study utilized Clandinin and Huber’s framework to explore how students’ knowledge resonated with the group and developed in the online knowledge-sharing community, and during the process, how professional identity was cultivated in those pre-career years when professional growth opportunities were lacking. Fine-grained analysis showed that in a virtual community that overcame some barriers and formed multi-layered teacher-student relationships, medical students struggled to balance their self-identities and the professional identity by playing a proactive role and changing perspectives to share explicit and tacit knowledge, with blended interaction, facilitating strategies and the mentor’s role as influencing factors. The analysis also identified that the online knowledge-sharing community formed around originating events, with memories reconstuction and multi-layered interactions as the positive features of the way students engaged in online conversations to facilitate their professional identity. Online teacher-student knowledge-sharing communities provide an innovative approach to assisting professional identity formation. The study complements the literature about doctors’ online communities, knowledge sharing and the professional identity of medical students, and has important implications for medical education.