Gabrielle started her academic career as an anatomy lecturer before transitioning to postgraduate medical education. She also volunteers as an Education Officer for the Anatomical Society, a position through which she is able to advocate the use of evidenced based practice within the education of healthcare professionals.
Gabrielle has developed a range of innovative pedagogic approaches for learning and assessment in undergraduate and postgraduate education, including the use of ‘collaborative group wikis’ as a learning and assessment tool. As well as utilising a broad range of tools in her own teaching, Gabrielle has developed an online ‘PaintME’ network and the ‘Anatomists Toolkit’ workshop series to support others, including academics, fitness professionals, artists and healthcare workers, in implementing new methods into their own toolkits. She has built on the success of her art-based approaches such as body-painting, and taken them a step further by pioneering the use of ultraviolet body-paint within healthcare and anatomy education. This new techniques enables multiple views of different layers of the body to be viewed simultaneously, as well as depicting muscle tension and having a more visceral appearance. Gabrielle uses the technique to bridge the gap between theory and future clinical practice in a fun and memorable way. These engaging techniques create ‘learning landmarks’ for students, promoting better retention of knowledge.
Gabrielle has been fortunate to develop anatomy syllabi for a range of healthcare students which have been adopted by HEIs nationally and advocated by national bodies. She challenges herself to develop collaborative learning networks for blended and distance learning programmes, encouraging students to co-construct their learning. Gabrielle has invested significant effort in supporting diverse groups of learners through the development of wikis as learning and assessment tools thus promoting inclusive and shared learning. She devotes time to improving assessment processes and signposting for students, which has seen her assessment rubrics implemented institution wide.