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Finding Harmony in Academic Life: Blending the Teacher-Scholar Model
Get PDFOccupational therapy affords many role options. Academic faculty is one example of a role. Faculty are expected to participate in teaching, service, and research/scholarship activities within their roles, as shaped by institutional type. This article highlights the academic journey and considerations for embracing leadership as teacher-scholars in occupational therapy
Effectiveness of an Occupational Therapy-Led Social Skills Group Using Parent Training: A Pilot Study
Get PDFBackground: Social skills support the development of a positive self-concept and engagement in a variety of life roles, habits, and routines. The Occupational Therapy Practice Framework clearly defines the occupational therapist’s role in working with children with difficulties in social skills; however, little research exists examining the effectiveness of occupational therapy-led group interventions to support social skills development. Incorporating parent training into social skill development can improve overall outcomes and reinforce skill development across contexts.
Objective: The purpose of this pilot study was to determine whether an occupational therapy-led social skill group, combined with parent training, was effective in improving social skill outcomes in children with parent-reported social skill delays.
Method: Occupational therapists developed collaborative social goals and implemented a social skills group intervention with eight school-aged children presenting with parent-reported social skill delays. In addition, occupational therapists provided parent training to support onsite interventions. Pretest and posttest data was collected and analyzed.
Results: The results of this pilot study indicate that 8/8 children demonstrated progress in social skills on outcome measures including the Canadian Occupational Performance Measure and Goal Attainment Scaling.
Conclusion: This pilot study supports the premise that occupational therapy-led social skills intervention groups, combined with parent training, are effective in promoting social skills. Occupational therapists and occupational therapy assistants have a clear role in designing and implementing group interventions to support social skill development
Occupational Therapists’ Consideration of Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity when Working with Adolescents: A Preliminary Study
Get PDFBackground: Adolescents who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, asexual, and plus (LGBTQIA+) have reduced quality of health care because of stigma, lack of awareness, and insensitivity. Recently the American Occupational Therapy Association added sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI) as a personal factor in the Occupational Therapy Practice Framework. It is important to understand how occupational therapists incorporate SOGI into their services provided to adolescents.
Purpose: This study explored if occupational therapists considered an adolescent client’s SOGI when providing services. Research questions included: do occupational therapists perceive that SOGI influences adolescents’ occupations, and do occupational therapists perceive gaps in their knowledge related to SOGI?
Method: A qualitative study using semi-structured interviews was conducted with four participants. Data was analyzed via open coding, then placed into categories, and then final themes.
Results: Three themes were identified from the data: Open and empathetic but uneducated about SOGI; SOGI does not influence practice; and occupational therapy could have a role with SOGI.
Conclusion: Occupational therapists may not consider SOGI when providing occupational therapy services to adolescents, and they may not be prepared to include SOGI because of gaps in their knowledge about SOGI-related factors and the influence on occupational engagement
Current Landscape of Interventions that Promote Self-determination in Adolescents with Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities in Secondary Transition: A Scoping Review
Get PDFPurpose: Although promoting self-determination in secondary transition is an important goal when working with adolescents with intellectual and developmental disabilities, the conceptualization and definitions of self-determination and its associated skills are not consistent. The aim of this scoping review was to examine how self-determination and its associated skills have been conceptualized and defined in interventions that support secondary transition in adolescents with intellectual and developmental disabilities and how self-determination is operationalized accordingly in those interventions.
Method: Studies published between 2006 and 2021 were searched using databases, including MEDLINE, PubMed, ERIC, PsycINFO, Education Source, and OTseeker. Hand-searching of bibliographies was also performed.
Results: Twenty-eight articles were included in this review. Eighteen articles provided explicit definitions of the term self-determination, which was categorized into four orientations: special education, disability rights advocacy, public health, and psychology. Interventions that support secondary transition in adolescents with disabilities developed under these different orientations were described.
Conclusions: Skills associated with self-determination may vary depending on the definition being used. By gaining a deeper comprehension of the different perspectives on the concept of self-determination in the field of education, occupational therapists can tailor their interventions in a manner that is best suited to the individual requirements of students
Using a Career Research Project in the Introductory Communication Course to Develop Agency, Self-Efficacy, Self-Determination, and Adaptability in Career Exploration
Get PDFHelping students make connections between the disciplinary study of communication and the development of student agency in career exploration can be an important part of the mission of the introductory course in communication. This study incorporates social cognitive career theory to examine the effects of a semester-long communication career awareness research project as an intervention in an introductory communication course at a large public university in the Midwest. Survey data from 83 undergraduate students were analyzed to measure perceptions of self-efficacy, perceived competence, autonomy support, and adaptability for career exploration. The results of paired samples t-tests found significant gains on all four dependent variables. These findings indicate the potential for such a project in introductory courses to promote career exploration agency
Decolonizing Disability in Social Work: A Conversation on Colonialism
No full textThe present work seeks to prompt a paradigm shift in the conceptualization of disability within social work through three main goals: a) Problematize the dominant disability discourse in social work, b) Illuminate present day manifestations of settler colonialism and their intersection with disability in social work, and c) Introduce decolonization and its compatibility with disability justice to reckon with disability and colonialism in social work. First, the present work will illuminate social work’s dedication to the medical model, evidence-based practice, and hollow notions of empowerment and inclusion. Next, in viewing intersections of ableism with other forms of oppression, this work interrogates how settler colonialism has informed and perpetuates disability discourses in social work. Finally, this work introduces decolonization as an antidote to these legacies of harm; maps harmonies between decolonization and disability justice; and provides tangible steps to decolonize disability in social work education, practice, and research
Embroidering “Hir Word”: The Assembly of Ladies, Christine de Pizan, and the Medieval Écriture Féminine
No full textThe authorship of the anonymous Middle English poem, The Assembly of Ladies, has been a locus of long-standing critical contestation, and amidst this debate, medieval feminist scholars have continuously and cogently advocated for the poem’s female authorship. Building on these feminist scholarships and simultaneously aiming to move beyond the scope of existing studies, whose discussion has often been limited to whether the poem was written by a woman, this article makes a deliberate and experimental decision in assuming The Assembly’s female authorship and provides a particular feminist reading of the poem enabled by this assumption. This article places the Assembly author alongside her foremother, Christine de Pizan, in their shared struggle to conceptualize and claim for themselves the authorship by and for women, or in other words, to establish a fifteenth-century equivalent of what twentieth-century feminists termed the écriture féminine. In particular, this article focuses on the Assembly author’s employment of clothes-related imagery as a signifier of women’s sexual difference and argues that within her metonymic use of embroidering (the crafting of the textile) to signify literary endeavor (the crafting of the textual), we can find an emulative inheritance of Christine de Pizan’s pro-feminist literary undertakings, whereby Christine utilized the idea of clothmaking as a specifically feminine mode of storytelling to reframe the male-dominated literary culture of the Middle Ages in feminine terms
Beyond the Horizons of Desire: Salme\u27s Subjectivity in Salman und Morolf
No full textSalme in the Middle High German epic poem Salman und Morolf (twelfth–fifteenth century) is conventionally read as a wild, dangerous, animalistic object waiting to be tamed by the men who fight for her hand. An in-depth analysis of her character is long overdue, and this article argues that Salme is a pertinent example of how female figures resist being “tamed” altogether. She is the movable object of multiple bridal quests for which she is ambiguously responsible. The unreachable, exoticized, and foreignized object of men’s desire, Salme embodies the drive of the western man to possess a fantasy of the Orient, forever beyond the periphery of his understanding. Challenging the present skepticism in German medieval studies—dominated by philological and narratological approaches to literature—this article offers a reading of the plot through a Deleuzoguattarian lens, arguing that male desire in Salman und Morolf functions as a metaphorical conveyor belt with Salme its magnetic core to whom all men are driven. Exploring the link between the recipient’s hunger for the story and men’s yearning for Salme, this article reads the female body as a hermeneutic metaphor for the audience’s insatiable desire for the story
