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Mental Health Literacy for Adolescents with Special Needs: A Pilot Occupational Therapy Curriculum in a Middle School
Get PDFIn school communities, addressing student mental health and establishing safe, supportive relationships have become part of our everyday work. National statistics currently report one in five children in the United States struggles with a mental disorder (One in Five Minds, 2020). Students are presenting with increasingly complex psychiatric, behavioral, and trauma experiences that impact their ability to access education and navigate the tasks of adolescence-with life-long health results. This doctoral project has explored youth mental health prevention and promotion interventions for the occupational therapy practitioner and contributing factors such as youth marginalization, social inequity, and youth health literacy deficits.
Throughout my career, I have worked in diverse settings, serving in different roles. Each experience has taught me skills and built upon core professional values to shape my practice. I have worked collaboratively with patients, parents, and peers to create programs that expanded the role of occupational therapy in a given community and have been privileged to work with individuals who have experienced significant loss or trauma. Their stories have inspired me to develop professional competencies to create safe, supportive environments that teach skills and allow healing. Through facilitating successful occupation and engagement in community, I have helped individuals define and create their next chapter of meaningful living.
My three knowledge translation projects apply the occupational therapy lens to maximize effectiveness and student engagement in implementation of mental health promotion programs in a school serving adolescents with special needs. The project aims are to improve mental health literacy of adolescent students with special needs by offering a pilot curriculum within the science class of a special education setting, to increase awareness of occupational therapy contributions to a school-based mental health program for adolescents with special needs through a professional presentation at an interdisciplinary national conference, and to introduce entry-level occupational therapy graduate students to the process and outcomes of a pilot mental health literacy curriculum for adolescents in a special education setting through completion of an educational module.
The projects, themselves, and their outcomes have been significantly impacted by societal changes of the COVID-19 pandemic. The mental health literacy pilot, begun in a middle school classroom, was converted and successfully delivered through virtual learning. Despite changes, both students and staff consistently reported positive increases in knowledge of mental health with effective strategies for coping in everyday life. The interdisciplinary conference proposal is currently stalled as we await the conversion of the conference to a virtual format. The presentation for occupational therapy graduate students was successfully developed for virtual delivery. The questions and dialogue with the students were insightful and hopeful about the future of occupational therapy in addressing mental health needs in school-based practice.
In reflection, I can identify two aspects of achievement in these doctoral projects. In the first, my clinical expertise has been honed into an innovative, successful intervention approach for youth-supported by science and implemented with creativity and flexibility. The second is the understanding that completion of an advanced practice degree comes with a responsibility to share one’s narrative, from both a scholarly and a clinical perspective, to guide and encourage others in their practice. If the work resonates, they carry it forward in multiple directions similar to a pebble that creates ripples in a pond
Pilot Project on a Palliative/Hospice Care Educational Video
Get PDFAt a long-term care facility in a suburb of Minneapolis, Minnesota, there is no formal training for the facility Nurse Practitioner (NP) on palliative care (PC) and hospice care (HC) content. Older individuals want to discuss end of life (EOL) care (Yokoya et al., 2018) however; these conversations are often not being discussed due to lack of education/training and confidence of long-term care (LTC) staff (Epstein et al., 2015). When an educational video on PC and HC was implemented to LTC Nurse Practitioners (NPs), evidence showed increased knowledge acquisition based on a 10 question pre/post video test. Qualitative evidence presented themes about the content of the video, video execution, and target audience. Since the video provided increased knowledge of LTC NPs, this project recommends that the pre and post video questionnaires and video be implemented to LTC residents
Handwriting and Adolescents: Implications for Occupational Therapy and Educational Policy
Get PDFThe National Handwriting Association or NHA (2019) explains that the act of handwriting is a symbolic and visual way for individuals to represent language and concepts in a physical and permanent format (NHA, 2019). The skill of handwriting is made up of multiple components including the domains of handwriting (such as tracing, near-point copying, writing from dictation or composition of sentences), legibility, speed, and ergonomic factors (Schneck & Case-Smith, 2015).
Current handwriting assessments, such as the Evaluation Tool of Children’s Handwriting (ETCH) or The Shore Handwriting Screening for Early Handwriting Development focus on assessment and intervention for early childhood and elementary when writing skills are developing. There are not handwriting assessment tools listed for adolescent students (Schneck & Case-Smith, 2015).
Handwriting intervention can take on a variety of forms depending on the identified needs of the individual. There are no national requirements for handwriting instruction in the United States and there is variety among states and school districts of possible handwriting instruction curriculums used (Schneck & Case-Smith, 2015). Resulting deficits may present in students for a variety of reasons. Intervention may include accommodating the deficits through the use of assistive technology (Schneck & Case-Smith, 2015). Intervention studies and research are limited to early childhood and elementary aged students or adolescent students with known disabilities (Schneck & Case-Smith, 2015).
Handwriting for adolescents in the school setting is a complex topic. The impact of difficulty with handwriting skills can be observed in a variety of ways and has potential to impact a student’s future and career (Miller et al., 2018). Current educational standards, or Common Core Standards, do not provide guidance for handwriting instruction beyond first grade, resulting in no expectations for direct handwriting instruction in secondary grades (Alstad et al., 2015). Intervention and assessment tools designed for younger students do not support improving writing skills in adolescents. Referrals for occupational therapy practitioners to address handwriting skills in the school setting are not limited to one age group.
Through three focused knowledge translation projects on this topic, it was found that occupational therapy practitioners and other stakeholders working with this population agreed with the importance of handwriting instruction in the school setting. Upon completion of the literature review a professional poster reviewing the main themes of the findings indicated the effects of Common Core standards on handwriting instruction. Through presentation of this evidence at an occupational therapy professional conference, occupational therapy practitioners indicated positive beliefs on the importance of this topic and the need for increased awareness.
Through a second knowledge translation project using the evidence found, an article was written to highlight the impacts of educational policy on occupational therapy practice in the school setting. This allowed for recognizing future opportunities and understanding a practitioner’s role in advocacy and education for stakeholders in the school setting.
The third knowledge translation format created was a formal slide presentation including the literature review process, review of evidence and exploration of the role of occupational therapy practitioners in advocating for change in the school setting. Following a practice presentation at an occupational therapy practitioner community of practice meeting, occupational therapy practitioners expressed similar practice dilemmas and recognized the strong evidence supporting handwriting instruction in the school setting. Completion of these knowledge translation projects allowed for increased awareness, educating on opportunities for advocacy and affirmed the importance of this topic for school-based occupational therapy practitioners and related stakeholders.
Further research is needed to understand the implications handwriting difficulties have on academic and non-academic outcomes in adolescents. Occupational therapy practitioners have a unique role to advocate for the importance of handwriting instruction in elementary grades and influence changes in educational policy through future research. Handwriting is an important occupation for students in secondary grades and more research is needed to understand how to develop and support success in this area
The Effects of Play-based Learning on Early Literacy Skills in Kindergarten
Get PDFKindergarten teachers instruct early literacy skills to some of our earliest learners. Providing effective literacy strategies that offer rich and developmentally appropriate instruction includes providing systematic instruction through play-based learning in phonemic awareness and phonics. This action research study examines different strategies that are developmentally appropriate for kindergartner’s early literacy skills
Reducing System Barriers Within a Public Health Nurse and Licensed Alcohol Drug Counselor Collaborative: An Evidenced-Based Quality Improvement Project
Get PDFInterprofessional barriers negatively impact services and quality of care to chemically-dependent pregnant women
Extended Symmetric Spaces and θ-twisted Involution Graphs
No full textFor a Weyl group G and an automorphism θ of order 2, the set of involutions and θ-twisted involutions can be generated by considering actions by basis elements, creating a poset structure on the elements. Haas and Helminck showed that there is a relationship between these sets and their Bruhat posets. We extend that result by considering other bases and automorphisms. We show for G = Sn, θ an involution, and any basis consisting of transpositions, the extended symmetric space is generated by a similar algorithm. Moreover, there is an isomorphism of the poset graphs for certain bases and θ
