The 4OT suite of facebook pages, along with the Kawa Model page, have been a life line for me as I have been making my way back to practice. In part the route I have chosen has been a matter of survival, but I think that underlying that has been a certain aspect of my character which always has to do things differently.
Part of my learning has been understanding when my “inner rebel” is a help, and when it is just getting in the way of good practice. Another aspect to my learning “journey” has been to establish methods of feedback and support. This is where the 4OT suite comes in.
My interest in Role Emerging practice stems from my RE Placement back in 2009. I had deferred a placement due to some changes in my personal life and because of this I went out solo. Most of the other RE placements were done in pairs, but (and I should feel flattered by this) it was deemed that I could handle a solo placement. I was working at a YMCA training centre with young people who had been excluded from school for any number of reasons. We applied the OT process and gathered information and data on the setting and the young people. I sat in on classes and delivered one or two sessions myself. I quickly began to develop the hypothesis that there were two strands to addressing the issues in the centre. One was the boredom and lack of motivation experienced by the students and the other was the frustration and subsequent loss of motivation experienced by the staff.
For the students I developed a strategy which I called CIEN. This stood for Communication, Identity, Environment and Narrative. Allow me to give an example of one of the practicals. For the communication element, I bought all the components for two morse code transmitters. I then assembled one of them and did a meticulous activity analysis of this task so that I could provide exact instructions as to how the machine should be assembled. I then split the instructions in half, seperating all the odd and even instruction numbers into seperate sheets. In the session, I split the room in two and put a screen up down the middle. Each team was given a walkie talkie and told that they had to communicate with each other to build the machines.
This was a challenge that they all took to. Once the machine was complete they were given brib sheets and were able to send morse code messages to each other and decode them. The messages were mostly of a sexual nature these being teenagers. However, the important thing is that the content was theirs – they owned it, and they had learned a system of communication whilst being immersed in various communicative processes at the same time.
The idea began to crystalise that we needed to give the staff greater creativity in session planning, and give the students greater control over content.
One of the problems with RE is that one does not get the chance to fully develop and appraise these hypothesis. However, we did take the CIEN process through the next two stages. One of the staff proposed that the students put on a scratch fashion show. This was consistent with the my theory that we needed to give more creativity to the staff and more control over content to the students. The next stage in the CIEN process was Identity, and we needed to establish who were the models, who were the technicians, who were the designers and so on. The environmental aspect came in actually changing the space with staging, lighting, food and drink.
The handbook that I wrote for the CIEN process still sits on my hard drive awaiting development. Jessica Kingsley showed an interest but said that it needed a good deal more work. It is one of those things that I have not had the time or opportunity to develop. Perhaps we will be able to incorporate it into the business now that we are set up.
My role emerging placement has probably influenced more than anything else the direction that I have taken. Today I am going to look at the work that we created on our pilot project (Healing Messages), as well as meet some other OTs at a journal club. I will also be setting up my return to practice hours and all being well I will be back in the fold by the end of October.
I remember one of my lecturers telling me that I needed to get out of my comfort zone to be an effective therapist, and it now seems that being out of my comfort zone is my comfort zone. Role emerging is not for everyone, it is a personality thing. You use the same procesess, the same skills, the same methodologies. It may be that you osmose a few new ones as well, but we are all still working in the same profession – the main difference, to me, is lifestyle, and as OTs we really should understand that one.
Thanks to Gillian Gorry for posing the question in the first place.
Kawa Creative - Reflections 