Growing a Specialty-Specific Community of Practice in Education Scholarship.

Emergency medicine (EM) educators have many masters. These include our hospital administrations who expect efficient patient care reflecting the priorities of safety and quality,1,2 the accreditation council for graduate medical education which has introduced a new competency-based standard by which our learners must be educated3,4 and last but not least, our learners that are using new educational modalities based on expanding digital platforms.5 To be successful, educators must satisfy each of these masters against the backdrop of increasing regulations, decreasing funding6,7 and information technology that appears to decrease our time with patients and perhaps learners in clinical practice.8 Success in our mission as educators is dependent upon coming together as a community of practice driven by scholarship that provides rigorous, high-impact studies that guide our educational practices. According to Lave and Wenger, a community of practice is defined as “groups of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly.”9 Though there are a number of accomplished EM education researchers in the United States today, the specialty remains early in its development of such a community of practice. The Council of EM Residency Directors (CORD), Clerkship Directors of EM (CDEM) and the Society of Academic EM (SAEM) have all contributed to nascent progress in this regard. For many years, SAEM/CDEM and CORD have offered presentations and abstracts related to education scholarship at the annual CORD Academic Assembly and SAEM meetings. Over the past seven years, the American Association of Medical Colleges and CORD have collaborated in a venture to provide a year-long experience in education research called the Medical Education Research Certification (MERC) at CORD Scholars’ Program.10,11 This program is based on the experiential learning Georgetown University School of Medicine, Department of Emergency Medicine, Washington, D.C. Emory University School of Medicine, Department of Emergency Medicine, Atlanta, Georgia *