OCCUPATIONAL THERAPY ASSISTANT
Mission
Guided and complemented by the mission and core values of Erie Community College, the Department of Occupational Therapy at ECC strives to provide the highest quality occupational therapy assistant education and career preparation to students from our diverse regional community. Our mission is to serve our customers: our students, our profession and our community.
Commitment to Our Students
In a context of respect, caring and trust, we seek to guide students in the holistic learning process to become competent and caring entry-level occupational therapy assistant practitioners who demonstrate the clinical and interpersonal skills, knowledge, cultural sensitivity, experience, maturity and values necessary for success in the dynamic health care, human service, wellness and rehabilitation sectors in Western New York.
We are also committed to equipping students to be lifelong learners by teaching them the skills to be self-learners, and providing them with the resources and access to quality, relevant, continuing education and higher education transfer opportunities.
Commitment to Our Profession
With integrity and accountability, we are committed to providing a high-quality, multifaceted, state-of-the-art curriculum and learning resources that reflect current, applied and emerging areas of occupational therapy practice, and exceed the standards of our profession's accrediting body. We are also committed to playing a visible and active role in our regional occupational therapy professional community.
Commitment to Our Community
Through our relationships with employers, clinical fieldwork affiliates and the community-at-large, we are committed to serving our community by promoting occupational therapy as an important contributor to health, function and well-being, and by graduating highly qualified occupational therapy assistants who will meet the dynamic health care, human service, wellness and rehabilitation employment demands in Western New York.
Program Philosophy
Our program philosophy reflects the following over arching values of occupational therapy. It includes our belief about how adult students learn.
Volition
Humans, intrinsically motivated by personal values and aspirations, and extrinsically directed by environmental demands, inherently engage in a variety of occupations.We place value on the volition of individuals we work with. Therefore, volition must be encouraged and supported through therapeutic relationship, emphasis on patient/client choice and involvement, and respect for the values, culture and beliefs of patients/clients.
Occupation
Occupations are "Activities...of everyday life, named, organized and given value and meaning by individuals and a culture" (Law, Polatajko, Baptiste and Townsend, 1997). Through self-selected occupations that are relevant, meaningful and therapeutic, humans have the capacity to influence their physical and mental health, their social and physical environments. In occupational therapy, we use occupations which have intrinsic and extrinsic value; occupations that have immediate and long-term therapeutic benefits.
Adaptation
Adaptation is a change in function that promotes survival and self-actualization. By engaging in meaningful occupations, humans adapt to a variety of contexts. The capability or capacity to adapt is characteristic of health and wellness. Our focus is on finding ways to help individuals adapt to changing social, physical, cultural, personal, spiritual, temporal and virtual contexts.
Enablement
Occupations, and consequently, adaptation, may be interrupted at any time during the lifespan by biological, psychological and environmental barriers, resulting in dysfunction. The focus of occupational therapy personnel, process and technology is to enable humans, in spite of biological, psychological or environmental barriers, to gain, maintain or regain the capacity and volition to adapt by engaging in meaningful occupations. We enable adaptation through remediation, compensation, education and encouragement. In addition to enabling adaptation, occupational therapy faculty maintains core values of the profession to include: beneficence, non-maleficence, autonomy/confidentiality, autonomy/confidentiality, duty, procedural justice, veracity and fidelity (AOTA, 2005).
Mary Reilly, an early leader in the occupational therapy profession, reflects the values of the profession in the simple, yet profound statement: "Man, through the use of his hands, as they are energized by mind and will, can influence the state of his own health" (1962).
Our department has the following beliefs about learning. Learning is a dynamic process which develops over a time continuum. Learning promotes cognitive and affective maturation.
Cognitive maturation is the "development of an internal process by which learners select ways of attending, learning, remembering, or thinking to develop creative problem solving and thinking" (Gagne 1992).We promote problem solving and critical thinking by building complex learning on the simple and abstract learning on the concrete. Learning develops within a hierarchy from general information acquisition to concept formation to problem solving. For cognitive strategies to be learned the students must engage in developing solutions to problems, learning new attitudes and be exposed to role models.
Students have the potential to discover meaning and connect that meaning to their career and their lives. They bring with them a set of acquired attitudes and behaviors. We believe that attitudes and behaviors can be changed; or a new set of behaviors can be learned. Behavioral development encompasses the promotion of receiving, responding, valuing, organizing, and acting consistently with values one has internalized (Krathwohl's affective taxonomy, 1964).
We believe behavioral growth and cognitive maturation of students are equally important. Through confidence building, feedback and self reflective assessment activities, we are able to progress the student through the cognitive and behavioral learning continuums.