{"title":"It's Not Just About the Tools: Emotionally Responsive GenAI Education.","authors":"Anita Samuel, Jerusalem Merkebu","doi":"10.5334/pme.2280","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<p><strong>Background & need for innovation: </strong>Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) is rapidly entering health professions education, yet most training emphasizes tool use and ethical guidelines while neglecting emotional readiness. Educators often experience affective discomfort, such as a fear of obsolescence, uncertainty about the ethical use of GenAI, and threats to their professional identity, which can undermine their engagement with GenAI. Few professional development models offer structured support to address these barriers.</p><p><strong>Goal of innovation: </strong>To show that emotional readiness is not a secondary concern but the central determinant of GenAI adoption.</p><p><strong>Steps taken for the development and implementation of innovation: </strong>We conducted a six-week, fully online, asynchronous course titled AI in Health Professions Education for healthcare professionals that integrated two core innovations: (1) an emotionally responsive, learner-centered environment and (2) a structured assignment framework, FAIR-Familiarization, Application, Interpretation, and Recalibration. The course prioritized emotional safety, instructor vulnerability, and learner agency to support educators through identity disruption and build reflective engagement with GenAI.</p><p><strong>Outcomes of the innovation: </strong>Three cohorts (N = 40) participated in the course. Pre-course surveys revealed a mix of experience with GenAI and a wide range of emotional responses, including fear, excitement, and apprehension. Thematic analysis of end-of-course reflections showed a shift from anxiety to confidence and from resistance to leadership. Participants reported using GenAI tools in teaching, curriculum design, and faculty development. Six-month follow-up interviews (n = 5) demonstrated sustained tool use and institutional dissemination. Learners described themselves as change agents and expressed a commitment to supporting peers in the adoption of GenAI.</p><p><strong>Critical reflection: </strong>This approach shifted learners from apprehension to leadership, proving emotional safety is key to GenAI adoption. Key pitfalls are the high instructor resource intensity and the entanglement of the FAIR framework and emotional design. We argue that this entanglement is the innovation, and emotional safety is the necessary precondition for the framework's success.</p>","PeriodicalId":48532,"journal":{"name":"Perspectives on Medical Education","volume":"15 1","pages":"356-362"},"PeriodicalIF":3.5000,"publicationDate":"2026-04-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC13068100/pdf/","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Perspectives on Medical Education","FirstCategoryId":"3","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.5334/pme.2280","RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"医学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"2026/1/1 0:00:00","PubModel":"eCollection","JCR":"Q1","JCRName":"EDUCATION, SCIENTIFIC DISCIPLINES","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Background & need for innovation: Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) is rapidly entering health professions education, yet most training emphasizes tool use and ethical guidelines while neglecting emotional readiness. Educators often experience affective discomfort, such as a fear of obsolescence, uncertainty about the ethical use of GenAI, and threats to their professional identity, which can undermine their engagement with GenAI. Few professional development models offer structured support to address these barriers.
Goal of innovation: To show that emotional readiness is not a secondary concern but the central determinant of GenAI adoption.
Steps taken for the development and implementation of innovation: We conducted a six-week, fully online, asynchronous course titled AI in Health Professions Education for healthcare professionals that integrated two core innovations: (1) an emotionally responsive, learner-centered environment and (2) a structured assignment framework, FAIR-Familiarization, Application, Interpretation, and Recalibration. The course prioritized emotional safety, instructor vulnerability, and learner agency to support educators through identity disruption and build reflective engagement with GenAI.
Outcomes of the innovation: Three cohorts (N = 40) participated in the course. Pre-course surveys revealed a mix of experience with GenAI and a wide range of emotional responses, including fear, excitement, and apprehension. Thematic analysis of end-of-course reflections showed a shift from anxiety to confidence and from resistance to leadership. Participants reported using GenAI tools in teaching, curriculum design, and faculty development. Six-month follow-up interviews (n = 5) demonstrated sustained tool use and institutional dissemination. Learners described themselves as change agents and expressed a commitment to supporting peers in the adoption of GenAI.
Critical reflection: This approach shifted learners from apprehension to leadership, proving emotional safety is key to GenAI adoption. Key pitfalls are the high instructor resource intensity and the entanglement of the FAIR framework and emotional design. We argue that this entanglement is the innovation, and emotional safety is the necessary precondition for the framework's success.
期刊介绍：
Perspectives on Medical Education mission is support and enrich collaborative scholarship between education researchers and clinical educators, and to advance new knowledge regarding clinical education practices.
Official journal of the The Netherlands Association of Medical Education (NVMO).
Perspectives on Medical Education is a non-profit Open Access journal with no charges for authors to submit or publish an article, and the full text of all articles is freely available immediately upon publication, thanks to the sponsorship of The Netherlands Association for Medical Education.
Perspectives on Medical Education is highly visible thanks to its unrestricted online access policy.
Perspectives on Medical Education positions itself at the dynamic intersection of educational research and clinical education. While other journals in the health professional education domain orient predominantly to education researchers or to clinical educators, Perspectives positions itself at the collaborative interface between these perspectives. This unique positioning reflects the journal’s mission to support and enrich collaborative scholarship between education researchers and clinical educators, and to advance new knowledge regarding clinical education practices. Reflecting this mission, the journal both welcomes original research papers arising from scholarly collaborations among clinicians, teachers and researchers and papers providing resources to develop the community’s ability to conduct such collaborative research. The journal’s audience includes researchers and practitioners: researchers who wish to explore challenging questions of health professions education and clinical teachers who wish to both advance their practice and envision for themselves a collaborative role in scholarly educational innovation. This audience of researchers, clinicians and educators is both international and interdisciplinary.
The journal has a long history. In 1982, the journal was founded by the Dutch Association for Medical Education, as a Dutch language journal (Netherlands Journal of Medical Education). As a Dutch journal it fuelled educational research and innovation in the Netherlands. It is one of the factors for the Dutch success in medical education. In 2012, it widened its scope, transforming into an international English language journal. The journal swiftly became international in all aspects: the readers, authors, reviewers and editorial board members.
The editorial board members represent the different parental disciplines in the field of medical education, e.g. clinicians, social scientists, biomedical scientists, statisticians and linguists. Several of them are leading scholars. Three of the editors are in the top ten of most cited authors in the medical education field. Two editors were awarded the Karolinska Institute Prize for Research. Presently, Erik Driessen leads the journal as Editor in Chief.
Perspectives on Medical Education is highly visible thanks to its unrestricted online access policy. It is sponsored by theThe Netherlands Association of Medical Education and offers free manuscript submission.
Perspectives on Medical Education positions itself at the dynamic intersection of educational research and clinical education. While other journals in the health professional education domain orient predominantly to education researchers or to clinical educators, Perspectives positions itself at the collaborative interface between these perspectives. This unique positioning reflects the journal’s mission to support and enrich collaborative scholarship between education researchers and clinical educators, and to advance new knowledge regarding clinical education practices. Reflecting this mission, the journal both welcomes original research papers arising from scholarly collaborations among clinicians, teachers and researchers and papers providing resources to develop the community’s ability to conduct such collaborative research. The journal’s audience includes researchers and practitioners: researchers who wish to explore challenging questions of health professions education and clinical teachers who wish to both advance their practice and envision for themselves a collaborative role in scholarly educational innovation. This audience of researchers, clinicians and educators is both international and interdisciplinary.
The journal has a long history. In 1982, the journal was founded by the Dutch Association for Medical Education, as a Dutch language journal (Netherlands Journal of Medical Education). As a Dutch journal it fuelled educational research and innovation in the Netherlands. It is one of the factors for the Dutch success in medical education. In 2012, it widened its scope, transforming into an international English language journal. The journal swiftly became international in all aspects: the readers, authors, reviewers and editorial board members.
The editorial board members represent the different parental disciplines in the field of medical education, e.g. clinicians, social scientists, biomedical scientists, statisticians and linguists. Several of them are leading scholars. Three of the editors are in the top ten of most cited authors in the medical education field. Two editors were awarded the Karolinska Institute Prize for Research. Presently, Erik Driessen leads the journal as Editor in Chief.
Perspectives on Medical Education is highly visible thanks to its unrestricted online access policy. It is sponsored by theThe Netherlands Association of Medical Education and offers free manuscript submission.
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