Through the exercise of collaborative autoethnography, we propose intentional and purposeful dialogue can act as a pathway for transformative learning. We seek to first deepen our understandings of transformative learning, particularly for underserved students in higher education and second to advance autoethnographic methods, a method that incorporates personal reflections on culture. Our own dialogue as biracial women in higher education represents the transformative power of talking out loud in a space created to honor and recognize our race, ethnicity, and gender. Topics that deal directly with identity development can have an enormous impact on fostering transformative learning. Moreover, when nondominant methods such as collaborative autoethnography are practiced, specifically with underserved students, deep relationships and soul work can occur.

Despite the increasing numbers of women students in medical schools, focused attention on their perceptions about medical school and the medical profession remain underexamined. These perceptions are important to understand, particularly since women students are likely burdened with a host of gender norms related to work, family, and their future roles as physicians. Early experiences in medical school offer important insights into the larger student experience and are tied to academic outcomes and feelings of belonging. To examine early experiences of women medical students, this qualitative study used sensemaking theory to describe the current context and “story” of ideal worker norms. Critical qualitative interviews of 38 women students were performed during their first 2 months of medical school and explored both how the students perceived and experienced ideal worker norms, and how they made sense of the “story” of ideal worker norms. The participants described ways they encountered gendering and ideal worker norms through displays of nurturing behaviour, expectations to balance a future family, and whether they looked or acted the part of a doctor. This article highlights the challenges women medical students are already aware they will face, the opportunities they look forward to, and the strengths they anticipate leaning on to navigate their profession. Results from this study have implications for women medical students' learning experiences and transitions into medical school and for faculty, staff, and scholars concerned with challenging gendering norms that shape medical education.

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This study presents descriptions of epistemic injustice in the experiences of women medical students and provides accounts about how these students worked to redress these injustices. Epistemic injustice is both the immediate discrediting of an individual's knowledge based on their social identity and the act of persistently ignoring possibilities for other ways of knowing. Using critical narrative interviews and personal reflections over an eight-month period, 22 women students during their first year of medical school described instances when their knowledge and experience was discredited and ignored, then the ways they enacted agency to redress these injustices. Participants described three distinct ways they worked to redress injustices: reclaiming why they belong in medicine, speaking up and calling out the curriculum, and uplifting one another. This study has implications for recognizing medical students as whole individuals with lived histories and experiences and advocates for recognizing medical students' perspectives as valuable sources of knowledge.