title: Possibility and agency in Figured Worlds: becoming a 'good doctor'.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  Figured Worlds is a socio-cultural theory drawing on Vygotskian and Bakhtinian traditions, which has been applied in research into the development of identities of both learners and teachers in the wider education literature. It is now being adopted in medical education.
  
  
  OBJECTIVE
  The objective of this paper is to show what Figured Worlds can offer in medical education. Having explained some of its central tenets, we apply it to an important tension in our field.
  
  
  METHODS
  The assumption that there is a uniform 'good doctor' identity, which must be inculcated into medical students, underlies much of what medical educators do, and what our regulators enforce. Although diversity is encouraged when students are selected for medical school, pressure to professionalise students creates a drive towards a standardised professional identity by graduation. Using excerpts from reflective pieces written by two junior medical students, we review the basic concepts of Figured Worlds and demonstrate how it can shed light on the implications of this tension. Taking a Bakhtinian approach to discourse, we show how Adam and Sarah develop their professional identities as they negotiate the multiple overlapping and competing ways of being a doctor that they encounter in the world of medical practice. Each demonstrates agency by 'authoring' a unique identity in the cultural world of medicine, as they appropriate and re-voice the words of others.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  Finally, we consider some important areas in medical education where Figured Worlds might prove to be a useful lens: the negotiation of discourses of gender, sexuality and social class, career choice as identification within specialty-specific cultural worlds, and the influence of hidden and informal curricula on doctor identity.
authors.affiliation: Medical Education Unit, University College Cork, Cork, County Cork, Ireland.
authors.forename: Deirdre
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Bennett
authors.affiliation: Education and Social Research Institute, Manchester Metropolitan University, Manchester, UK.
authors.forename: Yvette
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Solomon
authors.affiliation: Royal College of Physicians of Ireland, Dublin, Ireland.|Department of Infectious Diseases, St. James' University Hospital, Dublin, Ireland.|Department of Medicine, University of Dublin Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland.
authors.forename: Colm
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Bergin
authors.affiliation: School of Medicine, University College Cork, Cork, Ireland.
authors.forename: Mary
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Horgan
authors.affiliation: Centre for Medical Education, Queen's University Belfast, Belfast, UK.
authors.forename: Tim
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Dornan
mesh_terms: D001291:Attitude of Health Personnel; D002982:Clinical Clerkship; D004504:Education, Medical, Undergraduate; D006801:Humans; D010817:Physician-Patient Relations; D010820:Physicians / Q000523:psychology; D036301:Qualitative Research; D012933:Social Identification; D013337:Students, Medical / Q000523:psychology