Rachel Ellaway

Biographic Data

ID	5120647
NAME	Rachel Ellaway
GIVEN NAMES	Rachel
FAMILY NAME	Ellaway
SIGNATURE	ELLAWAY R
AFFILIATIONS	University of Calgary
ORCID	0000-0002-3759-6624
VERIFIED	Yes
TOTAL WORKS	37
TOTAL CITATIONS	3
WORKS AS AUTHOR	37
WORKS AS EDITOR	0
FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR	2013
LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR	2026
H-INDEX	1

Extrapolitis
Open AccessRachel EllawayARTICLEAdvances in Health Sciences…2026
The defensibility of beginnings and endings
Open AccessRachel EllawayARTICLEAdvances in Health Sciences…2026
The best of all possible worlds?
Open AccessRachel EllawayARTICLEAdvances in Health Sciences…2026
How feedback works in practice
Open AccessCatherine Patocka, Lara J Cooke et al.ARTICLEMedical Education2026
The ethical foundations of professional resistance
Open AccessRachel Ellaway, T R WyattARTICLEMedical Teacher2026
ISSUE: Although it has long been present in medicine and medical education, the growth in the number of instances of resistance by medical trainees around the world, the visibility thereof, and the resulting disruption of medical education have made the grounding of professional resistance a critical concern for all involved. POSITION: The authors argue that professional resistance needs to be understood as being subject to the principles of bioe…
Grim fairy tales of curriculum change in medical education
Open AccessRachel Ellaway, T R Wyatt et al.ARTICLEMedical Education2026
Fairy tales play a significant role in shaping cultural norms and adult behaviours. They imprint values and moral norms on children and adults alike by eliciting emotions to characters that uphold or break these norms, and they set standards for socially appropriate behaviour. In this article, we use the fairy tale idiom to retell the story of curriculum change from being an activity in medical education where everyone works together in harmony a…
Myths of contestation in the medical education curriculum
Open AccessRachel Ellaway, Martina Kelly et al.ARTICLEMedical Education2026
Mixed‐methods research in medical education
Open AccessJennifer Cleland, Alan Macleod et al.ARTICLEMedical Education2026
INTRODUCTION: Mixed-methods research (MMR) intentionally combines (variously) theories, study designs, data collection, analyses and/or syntheses associated with more than one approach to research. Despite a rich literature on the theory and practice of MMR, the authors were concerned that much MMR in medical education fell short of the state of the art. To substantiate the problem, the authors conducted a meta-study to explore the strengths and …
Landscapes of psychological trauma in residency education
Open AccessAmanda L Roze des Ordons, Aliya Kassam et al.ARTICLEMedical Education2025
Taking a definitional stance in health professions education scholarship
Open AccessCatherine Patocka, Rachel EllawayARTICLEMedical Education2025
Study the past if you would define the future
Open AccessRachel Ellaway, Alan Macleod et al.ARTICLEMedical Education2025
Untangling feedback
Open AccessCatherine Patocka, Lara J Cooke et al.ARTICLEMedical Education2025
Although feedback is widely recognized as essential to improving performance and learning outcomes, what feedback involves and what it achieves can vary significantly according to researchers and practitioners. This variability reflects the lack of a shared conceptual framework to unite feedback practices, theories, findings and recommendations. In this paper, the authors use a recently developed pattern system to compare different models of feed…
What do we become? Artificial intelligence and academic identity
Rachel EllawayARTICLEMedical Teacher2025
I hope that, when Masters argued that artificial intelligence (AI) should take over the burdensome work of writing academic papers [1], he was seeking to be provocative rather than advancing an arg
How Should Professional Resistance Be Integrated Into Conceptions of Professional Accountability
Open AccessRachel Ellaway, Lisa Graves et al.ARTICLEThe AMA Journal of Ethic2025
As more health professions students, trainees, and clinicians engage in acts of professional resistance, professional accountability is needed when acts of resistance influence patient care. This article suggests standards that can help distinguish between professional and nonprofessional resistance and prioritize minimizing harm and injustice to patients
Is There a Problem With Evidence in Health Professions Education
Open AccessRachel Ellaway, Bridget C OʼBrien et al.ARTICLEAcademic Medicine2024
What constitutes evidence, what value evidence has, and how the needs of knowledge producers and those who consume this knowledge might be better aligned are questions that continue to challenge the health sciences. In health professions education (HPE), debates on these questions have ebbed and flowed with little sense of resolution or progress. In this article, the authors explore whether there is a problem with evidence in HPE using thought ex…
A meta‐study analysing the discourses of discourse analysis in health professions education
Open AccessAlan Macleod, Rachel Ellaway et al.ARTICLEMedical Education2024
Researching models of innovation and adoption in health professions education
Open AccessMartin Pusic, Rachel EllawayARTICLEMedical Education2024
Carda
Open AccessJennifer Cleland, Alan Macleod et al.ARTICLEMedical Education2023
Hiding in plain sight
Open AccessRachel EllawayARTICLEMedical Education2023
Whose problem is it anyway? Confronting myths of ‘problems’ in health professions education
Open AccessAliki Thomas, Rachel EllawayARTICLEMedical Education2023
Response to
Aliya Kassam, Jason Lord et al.ARTICLEMedical Teacher2023
Dear EditorWe read with great interest the work of Hamza et al.’s recent recommendations regarding research into competency based medical education (CBME) (Hamza et al. 2023) that focused on whethe
Physician resistance to injustice
Open AccessT R Wyatt, Ting Lan et al.ARTICLESocial Science & Medicine2023
Confidence‐competence alignment and the role of self‐confidence in medical education
Open AccessMichael Gottlieb, Teresa M Chan et al.ARTICLEMedical Education2022
The many spaces of psychological safety in health professions education
Open AccessAmanda L Roze des Ordons, Rachel Ellaway et al.ARTICLEMedical Education2022
Addressing the gap between the ideal of psychological safety and health professions education learners’ lived experiences, the authors explore how safe, brave, accountable, trauma‐informed and conceptual spaces might intersect with psychological safety
When I say resistance
Open AccessRachel Ellaway, T R WyattARTICLEMedical Education2022
In an important addition to discourses on how to respond to unethical, unjust, and tyrannical situations in health professional training and practice, the authors define professional resistance in medical education

Medical students as human subjects in educational research
Open AccessUmut Sarpel, Mary Ann Hopkins et al.ARTICLEMedical Education Online2013
Our findings demonstrate that risk assessment and the extent of review utilized for medical education research vary among IRBs. Despite variability in the perception of risk implied by differing IRB requirements, students themselves felt education research was low risk and did not consider themselves to be vulnerable. The vast majority of eligible medical students were willing to participate as research subjects. Participants acknowledged the tim…
Discourses of student orientation to medical education programs
Open AccessRachel Ellaway, Gerry Cooper et al.ARTICLEMedical Education Online2014
By examining how orientation has been described and discussed, we identify three domains of orientation: cultural, social, and practical. These domains are relatively distinct in terms of the activities associated with them, and in terms of who is involved in organizing and running these activities. We also describe orientation as a liminal activity system on the threshold of medical school where incoming students initially cross into the profess…
Being Edgy in Health Professions Education
Alan Macleod, Rachel Ellaway et al.ARTICLEAcademic Medicine2020
The philosophy of science is concerned with what science is, its conceptual framing and underlying logic, and its ability to generate meaningful and useful knowledge. To that end, concepts such as ontology (what exists and in what way), epistemology (the knowledge we use or generate), and axiology (the value of things) are important if somewhat neglected topics in health professions education scholarship. In an attempt to address this gap, Academ…
Critical Realism and Realist Inquiry in Medical Education
Rachel Ellaway, Kehoe A et al.ARTICLEAcademic Medicine2020
Understanding complex interventions, such as in medical education, requires a philosophy of science that can explain how and why things work, or fail to work, in different contexts. Critical realism and its operationalization in the form of realist inquiry provides this explanatory power. Ontologically, critical realism posits that the social world is real, that it exists independent of our knowledge of it, and that it is driven by causal mechani…
How we make choices and sacrifices in medical education during the Covid-19 pandemic
Martin G Tolsgaard, Jennifer Cleland et al.ARTICLEMedical Teacher2020
In this commentary, we highlight some of the pressing choices and sacrifices we must make in medical education during the COVID-19 pandemic
The use of Beme reviews in the medical education literature
Tanya Horsley, Yvonne Steinert et al.ARTICLEMedical Teacher2020
INTRODUCTION: Knowledge syntheses in medical education are intended to promote the translation to, and mobilization of, research knowledge into practice. Despite the effort invested in conducting them, how these knowledge syntheses are used is unclear. This study aimed to explore how knowledge syntheses published by the Best Evidence Medical Education Collaboration (BEME) have been used in a cross-section of published literature. METHODS: Citatio…
Global health electives
Adriena De Visser, Jennifer Hatfield et al.ARTICLEMedical Teacher2020
Purpose: Little is known about the impact medical trainees undertaking global health electives (GHEs) have on host institutions and their communities in low-and middle-income countries. The goal of this study was to explore the relationship dynamics associated with GHEs as perceived by host stakeholders at three sites in sub-Saharan Africa.Method: This case-based interpretive phenomenological study examined stakeholder perspectives in Mwanza, Tan…
Strange Bedfellows
Open AccessAllison Brown, Kent G Hecker et al.ARTICLEJournal of Mixed Methods Research2020Cited by: 3References: 12
Realist inquiry, based on the philosophy of critical realism, focuses on exploring the underlying mechanisms that drive social phenomena. Structural equation modeling is a collection of quantitative analytical methods that take a theory-based, confirmatory approach to examining statistical relationships between measured (observable) and underlying (latent) variables. Despite originating from different scientific traditions, the apparent similarit…
What Role Should Resistance Play in Training Health Professionals
Rachel Ellaway, T R WyattARTICLEAcademic Medicine2021
The role that resistance plays in medicine and medical education is ill-defined. Although physicians and students have been involved in protests related to the COVID-19 pandemic, structural racism, police brutality, and gender inequity, resistance has not been prominent in medical education’s discourses, and medical education has not supported students’ role and responsibility in developing professional approaches to resistance. While learners sh…
From Utopia Through Dystopia
Berenike Thomas, Rachel Ellaway et al.ARTICLEAcademic Medicine2021
The transition to the assessment of entrustable professional activities as part of competency-based medical education (CBME) has substantially increased the number of assessments completed on each trainee. Many CBME programs are having difficulty synthesizing the increased amount of assessment data. Learning analytics are a way of addressing this by systematically drawing inferences from large datasets to support trainee learning, faculty develop…
The curious case of case study research
Open AccessJennifer Cleland, Alan Macleod et al.ARTICLEMedical Education2021
The conceptualisation of ‘good’ medical education research as hypothesis testing to identify universal truths that are generalisable across contexts has been challenged. Joining this conversation, the field of health professions education research is complex and contextual and there are ways of examining and reporting locally based activities and innovations, which can be of general value. This position leads to a focus on case study research (CS…
Contextual Competence
Open AccessPim W Teunissen, Christopher Watling et al.ARTICLEMedical Education2021
Confidence‐competence alignment and the role of self‐confidence in medical education
Open AccessMichael Gottlieb, Teresa M Chan et al.ARTICLEMedical Education2022
The many spaces of psychological safety in health professions education
Open AccessAmanda L Roze des Ordons, Rachel Ellaway et al.ARTICLEMedical Education2022
Addressing the gap between the ideal of psychological safety and health professions education learners’ lived experiences, the authors explore how safe, brave, accountable, trauma‐informed and conceptual spaces might intersect with psychological safety
When I say resistance
Open AccessRachel Ellaway, T R WyattARTICLEMedical Education2022
In an important addition to discourses on how to respond to unethical, unjust, and tyrannical situations in health professional training and practice, the authors define professional resistance in medical education
Carda
Open AccessJennifer Cleland, Alan Macleod et al.ARTICLEMedical Education2023
Hiding in plain sight
Open AccessRachel EllawayARTICLEMedical Education2023
Whose problem is it anyway? Confronting myths of ‘problems’ in health professions education
Open AccessAliki Thomas, Rachel EllawayARTICLEMedical Education2023
Response to
Aliya Kassam, Jason Lord et al.ARTICLEMedical Teacher2023
Dear EditorWe read with great interest the work of Hamza et al.’s recent recommendations regarding research into competency based medical education (CBME) (Hamza et al. 2023) that focused on whethe
Physician resistance to injustice
Open AccessT R Wyatt, Ting Lan et al.ARTICLESocial Science & Medicine2023
Is There a Problem With Evidence in Health Professions Education
Open AccessRachel Ellaway, Bridget C OʼBrien et al.ARTICLEAcademic Medicine2024
What constitutes evidence, what value evidence has, and how the needs of knowledge producers and those who consume this knowledge might be better aligned are questions that continue to challenge the health sciences. In health professions education (HPE), debates on these questions have ebbed and flowed with little sense of resolution or progress. In this article, the authors explore whether there is a problem with evidence in HPE using thought ex…
A meta‐study analysing the discourses of discourse analysis in health professions education
Open AccessAlan Macleod, Rachel Ellaway et al.ARTICLEMedical Education2024
Researching models of innovation and adoption in health professions education
Open AccessMartin Pusic, Rachel EllawayARTICLEMedical Education2024
Landscapes of psychological trauma in residency education
Open AccessAmanda L Roze des Ordons, Aliya Kassam et al.ARTICLEMedical Education2025
Taking a definitional stance in health professions education scholarship
Open AccessCatherine Patocka, Rachel EllawayARTICLEMedical Education2025