Anneke van Enk, PhD

Scientist

Dr. Anneke van Enk obtained her PhD in education from Simon Fraser University. Her doctoral research focused on literacy learners’ narratives of schooling and, more specifically, the use of interview-based methodologies to collect narrative data. Dr. van Enk has taught courses on academic writing, discourse analysis, narrative research, adult literacy, and digital literacy at the University of British Columbia. She has also run numerous academic writing workshops and has participated in various initiatives to support practice-based research in adult literacy education.

Dr. van Enk joined the Centre for Health Education Scholarship (CHES) as a research associate in 2015. The focus of her work is on ways of bringing language-related matters to the foreground in medical curricula. Dr. van Enk supports Faculty of Medicine members interested in qualitative, and specifically discourse analytic, approaches to education research.

Research Interests

My research interests, among other areas, include;

  • Linguistic incorporation of judgment in competency-based assessment and entrustment
  • Discursive aspects of active patient involvement in health care and education
  • Communication of scholarly and practical expertise in medical education

Recent Research Activities

  • The Use of Previously Undocumented Data in Competence Committees of Competency-based Medical Education Training Programs (funded by Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada, 2020)

Examines the use of previously undocumented data (PUD) by competence committees (CCs) in a competency-based medical education (CBME) context using an adaptation of Kane’s validity framework as a sensitizing concept for data collection and analysis. This study, to start in fall 2020, builds on an earlier case study of PUD use by the CC of a small residency program, extending the investigation to CCs in two large post-graduate CBME training programs, one a procedural specialty, the other non-procedural.

Related papers:

Languaging” tacit judgment in formal postgraduate assessment: The documentation of ad hoc and summative entrustment decisions (with O. ten Cate) (in Perspectives on Medical Education, forthcoming)

  • Genre-based sub-analysis of data from “Exploring the Patient’s Role in the Medical Learning Environment” (funded by Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada, 2019; PI: C. Holmes)

Explores the behavioural affordances and constraints created by patients’ presence in the learning environment. In the project, learners were asked to make case presentations to teaching physicians while patients were in the room, and all three participants were subsequently interviewed about the encounter. The sub-analysis focuses on interviewees’ talk about what is discursively “appropriate” in the situation and about the tensions produced when patients are present during the performance of a professional and educational genre that was not developed for, and typically does not include, them.

Related papers:

Placing the patient at the centre of the learning environment: Effect on agency for the learner, the attending physician and the patient (B. Cheema et al.; submitted for publication)

Teaching and learning with the patient in the room: A discourse analysis of case presentation in the patient’s presence (in progress)

  • Practical and Scholarly Commitments in Education Research (funded by NCTE/Conference on College Composition and Communication, 2015)

Explores the tension between scholarly and practical commitments in education research as this manifests in academic writing. The project asks whether and, if so, to what extent and in what ways the genre of the education research article is able to accommodate the interests of both scholars seeking to extend understanding and practitioners seeking to improve practice.

Related papers:

HPE as a Field: Implications for the Production of Compelling Knowledge (with G. Regehr) in Teaching and Learning in Medicine 30(12):1-8 · December 2017

What is a research article?: Genre variability and data selection in genre research (with K. Power) in Journal of English for Academic Purposes 29:1-11 · September 2017

Research with wider resonance: Constructing contributions to theory and practice in HPE research article introductions (with K. Power) (in progress)