Building and Sustaining Scholarly Communities in Health Professions Education: Lessons from U.S. Academies

Introduction: Academic health centers have invested in academies and related structures to promote health professions education (HPE) scholarship, yet many struggle to sustain vibrant scholarly communities. We aimed to identify lessons for building and sustaining scholarly communities that support HPE scholarship. Methods: Using a constructivist approach, we conducted a qualitative interview study in 2025 with leaders from across all four geographic regions of the U.S. Inclusion criteria required that participants direct an academy or other institutional structure intended to promote educational scholarship, and that they could speak to building and sustaining scholarly communities of practice in their local context. The Communities of Practice framework informed interview guide development and data interpretation. Interviews were audio-recorded, transcribed, de-identified, and analyzed using a six-phase thematic analysis process. Results: Twenty-one academy leaders described five interrelated forms of leadership work that shaped sustainable scholarly communities: (1) building foundations that legitimize educational scholarship by securing institutional investment, leadership buy-in, succession planning, and guiding frameworks; (2) cultivating scholarly sanctuary to counter isolation through psychologically safe, inclusive communities; (3) making scholarship feasible under constraints by creating low-barrier entry points, translating value to leaders, and addressing time, productivity, and infrastructure barriers; (4) tending growth through layered, incremental development, including cohort programs, consultation, mentoring, grants, and flexible participation; and (5) making educational scholarship visible and valued through recognition, dissemination, and outcome tracking. Discussion: Viewed through the Communities of Practice framework, the themes illuminate how leaders cultivated a shared domain of legitimate educational scholarship, a community of relational support, and a practice of tools, routines, and developmental infrastructure. The themes also reveal that sustainable communities of practice do not emerge from any single academy model, but from context-sensitive alignment of structure, culture, and incentives. Institutions seeking to strengthen HPE scholarship should invest in foundational resources, cultivate psychologically safe communities, adopt incremental growth strategies, and create pathways for recognition and dissemination that legitimize educational scholarship.