Retreat

I have been trying to be consistent with my blog and to post something at least once a week. As you can see by the date of the current and previous blog post, I missed last week. However, I feel like I have a good excuse. During the past week, I spent quite a bit of time in focused work, both individually and with my co-workers. This work required me to take a retreat from the outside world.

I closed myself away in my office and at home and spent time working on building up course material for my fall course. This fall, I am teaching qualitative methods to our NAU OTD Class of 2022. Each year, when I teach this content, I like to take time to update all of the resources I provide to students. As much as possible, I incorporate the current research I am doing into the course. In addition, there are sometimes new great readings or videos I find that I want to be sure to include. It always frustrated me as a student when I felt like my instructor was just rehashing the same material they had used for years, so now as a teacher I have vowed to not fall into that trap.

Northern Arizona University Occupational Therapy faculty stop for a photo along the East Verde River

Then, I spent some additional personal retreating time to focus on some writing. During this past year, I had the great privilege to be a part of a research team focused on addressing the needs of youth in the foster care system who are transitioning into adulthood. My colleague, Dr. Amy Armstrong-Heimsoth has been co-leading the project with partners at OCJ Kids in Phoenix. As part of our work, we discovered the potential role of occupational therapy in assisting these youth and we wrote an article advocating for the addition of occupational therapists into the transition team. This was not a traditional type of article so we were thrilled when the journal asked us to revise and resubmit. We were less thrilled with the quick turn around time, but we managed to get it done.

Finally, a group of our NAU OTD faculty (all but one who was unable to make it) participated in a group retreat to Payson, AZ. We rented a great home on the East Verde River which had no cell service and spent time celebrating the past year, reflecting on ways we could be better in the future, and just generally getting to know each other more on a personal level. I feel very fortunate to work with such an amazing group of people. It is a rare thing when you can say that you want to spend an entire weekend away with your co-workers and we all really enjoyed it. And we also managed to be productive!

Sometimes you just need a retreat from all the noise. It caused me to miss my weekly blog post, but it was worth it.

Road Trip & Reflection

Yesterday, I got to do two of the favorite parts of my job. 1) Get out of the office and take a road trip to make progress on one of my research projects and 2) See one of our talented NAU OTD students (Samantha Sasse, Class of 2021) participate for the first time hands on in research! The project we were working on is our Partnership for Native American Cancer Prevention funded grant focused on developing breast and cervical cancer screening educational resources for Native American women with intellectual and/or developmental disabilities (IDD). As part of the project, we have partnered with Hopi Cancer Support Services.

Hopi Cancer Support Services Logo

Our road trip took us out to the Hopi Cancer Support Services offices in Kykotsmovi Village, which is located on the Third Mesa of the Hopi Tribe’s Reservation. They offer health education regarding cancer screenings, provide patient navigator services, and offer supports for receiving cancer screening and treatment including travel assistance and funding for families. They are funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Breast and Cervical Cancer Early Detection Program. However, they are able to provide additional supports to families like travel assistance funding to get cancer treatments through their fundraising. So for those of you who are local and interested, please consider supporting/attending their Climb the Mesa event on September 29, 2019. I will be there and hope you can make it too!

It was an eventful day for our project as we were able to complete nine individual interviews with providers of social and health services for women living on the Hopi Reservation. Given the diversity of their roles, they gave us insights into key cultural considerations and how those can be incorporated into the cancer screening educational resources for women with disabilities. They also provided several recommendations on the content and delivery of the educational program.

This was Samantha’s first time participating in data collection on a research project. She completed five of the interviews and loved the process! One of the great perks of my job is the chance to mentor students in research. As we drove back, we reflected on the day. Samantha noted how beneficial it was to do the individual interviews with open-ended questions as she heard so many different ideas that she probably wouldn’t have heard from a paper survey. She just kept saying what a amazing experience it was and that she was so glad she took the time during her well-deserved break between semesters to take the road trip.

There are many days when I just have to sit in front of my computer writing and emailing. It can get tedious. Yesterday was one of those days that I really needed to recharge my batteries and to remind me how lucky I am to be a researcher and teacher.

The Bottom Line

Over the past few months, I have been learning more about ways to present my research work in formats that make it easier for others to get to the take home message or the bottom line of the work. Some of this has been inspired by the work of Michigan State University doctoral student Mike Morrison who has gone viral with his video about how researchers should consider redesigning the presentation of our work, specifically scientific posters, into more digestible chunks for our audience. I plan to try this out at my next scientific poster presentation at the ArizOTA conference and maybe even the American Public Health Association conference in November! I have to say I am really looking forward to trying this new approach in hopes that it will create more conversations about the projects I am involved in with others.

In the meantime, I thought, well why do I need to wait to try this out only at these in-person events? Therefore, I spent some time this past week practicing some of these concepts on my website. You will notice now that for each project I am currently or previously involved in that I have provided you at the very beginning the Bottom Line followed by the Details. The Bottom Line is my attempt to provide a 1-2 sentence description of either the take home message of completed work or the quick snapshot of why and what I am doing with currently active projects. If you get intrigued by the Bottom Line, then you can go ahead and read more of the Details and follow the embedded links to full articles, conference presentations, or posters.

Let’s see how this works out!

Collaboration is Key

I was honored today to have the opportunity to present some of the collaborative work I do here at Northern Arizona University’s Center for Health Equity Research and Department of Occupational Therapy. I titled this blog post Collaboration is Key as this work would not be possible without the efforts of many.

According to Merriam-Webster the definition collaborate is “to work jointly with others or together especially in an intellectual endeavor.”

Screen shot of our National Indian Health Board presentation today. Left side is the powerpoint slide image and the right side includes a poll we took of the audience and provides a place for questions/answers.

This collaborative project titled, Improving Cancer Screenings for Native American Women with Disabilities, has been in development for the past two years thanks to the funding support of the Partnership for Native American Cancer Prevention.

To date we (my Co-Investigator Julie Armin and I) have collaborated with several partners including: Arizona Advisory on Indian Health Care, The Arc of Arizona, The Arizona Department of Economic Security’s Division of Developmental Disabilities , The Arizona Department of Health Services Well Women program, The University of Arizona’s Center for Rural Health, Pima Community College Disability Resources, Hopi Cancer Support Services , both graduate and undergraduate students in the fields of public health, anthropology and occupational therapy and the list goes on….

Thanks to all of the wisdom, guidance, and great discussions these past two years, I truly feel that we have been able to raise awareness, create new partnerships, and advocates for promoting the health and wellness of Native American women with disabilities here in Arizona and maybe even beyond. For example, just this morning we provided a National Indian Health Board sponsored education program on the topic to 39 people from around the United States who are providing cancer screening programs for Native American women in their communities!

These types of opportunities remind me of how fortunate I am to get to work with such amazing collaborators to develop and share new knowledge and resources to impact change. As the project continues on over the next few years- I will be sure to provide some blog post updates.

Family Time

The Jaskolski kids and the Smith (i.e. Williamson, Sutch, Kilpatrick) kids.

Over the fourth of July holiday week, my immediate family members (and some of their children) got a chance to return to Michigan to visit family. The trip was emotional and exciting. It is always exciting to reconnect with family that you don’t get to see as often as we would like and also emotional to process all that has happened in our lives. These are people that I have literally known my entire life, some because we are blood related and some because we have been connected since I was in diapers.

We have been vacationing with the Jaskolski family since I was a baby. As a child it was an annual trip somewhere on the water (i.e. lake or ocean) where we would find a cottage/condo and just enjoy our surroundings for a week. As the “kids” got older and headed off to college/careers, the annual vacations stopped, but fortunately we have reconnected and have enjoyed pretty regular trips (every 3-5 years) with the “kids” and now our partners and children. It is hard to describe the comfort and joy we feel when we get a chance to be around people who have known you entire life and who just “get” you. Never gets old and I look forward to our next visit.

Grandpa Goodrich seated with my family surrounding him.

On this trip, we also got a chance to visit with my cousins and my 94 year old grandfather. My Grandpa Goodrich (my mom’s dad) is my last remaining grandparent. He is now living in a retirement home in the community he lived in since he was an infant and where my mother was born and raised, Marlette, Michigan. We got to visit with him for several hours over the course of a few days. We saw the house where he grew up, my mother grew up and heard about the places like where he met my grandmother, they had their first date and where they were married. Stories about my great grandparents we have never heard—for example, my great grandfather brewing beer in his bathtub during prohibition…an original craft brewer!

All too often in life, we don’t take the time to connect with those that really matter in our lives. This trip reminded me that I need to pick up the phone more often and reach out to family and people I consider family, my friends. These days with social media it is easy to feel “connected” with those we love, but nothing replaces the time we spend hearing stories and laughing and crying together. So if you are among those I consider my family, look out, because if I hold myself accountable, you should be expecting to hear from me much more often than you did before.

Social Justice

I spent this week at the American Association on Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities (AAIDD) national conference in St. Paul, Minnesota. It was (as always) a wonderful time to connect with colleagues who inspire me, be filled with joy upon seeing one of my many talented students present our work, and also recharge my drive to return to my work to address health equity among adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD).

The image attached to this blog post is the Wabasha Bridge which is flying both the American flag and the rainbow flag to celebrate the diversity and strength of the LGBTQIA community during Pride Month. As I walked across the bridge one afternoon, I was struck by the timing of this conference during Pride Month—we continue to make progress towards equality and access for diverse populations, including people with IDD—yet being at this conference reminds me again of how far we still need to go.

Social justice is defined as the way in which human rights are manifested in the everyday lives of people at every level of society. Often we see social justice considered when discussing disparities based on gender, race, ethnicity, or socioeconomic status-but not often enough based on disability status. Here are just a couple of presentations I wanted to highlight that continue the dialogue around social justice for people with IDD.

During a pre-conference event hosted by the Student and Early Career Professional’s Interest Network, Carrie Eichelberger from University of Utah shared her work on defining and measuring inclusion among students with severe disabilities. She opened her talk with this idea-- you can be physically present in a room with other people and still feel alone. So by just placing youth with severe disabilities in a room with youth without disabilities, doesn’t mean that they are truly included in the energy and connection of that physical space. Social-connectedness is necessary for quality of life and we still have so much work to do to sort out how to make all individuals, regardless of disability status, feel included and connected.

Elizabeth Schiltz, JD from the University of St. Thomas gave a talk entitled: The Delicate Balance Between Independence and Belonging: Flexibility in Housing Options for People with IDD. There has been great progress in closing institutions where people with IDD were housed and isolated from their surrounding community. Today we have policies in place which ensure that individuals with IDD (who require day to day living supports) have living options which are home and community based. This means that instead of living with hundreds of people in an institution, people with IDD now live in small group home settings, with family or on their own. The goal here is that people with IDD can choose with whom and where they live. However, her talk highlighted that there might not be truly be choice, as these group home settings have rules in place pre-defining what makes a home or whom can live there. With our evolving definitions of what makes a home or who you define as family—people with IDD in America are having these core concepts of home and family defined for them and not necessarily by them.  

These are just two examples of social injustices people with IDD face daily. The AAIDD conference had hundreds of presentations on issues related to health, employment, sexuality, parenthood, education, and quality of life for people with IDD. All of which pointed to challenges and potential solutions. This conference reminded me (as it does every year) how grateful I am for the opportunity to work as an advocate alongside people with IDD to address social justice issues.

Purpose

This week, I had the opportunity to facilitate the very last in-person class for Northern Arizona University’s Occupational Therapy Doctoral (OTD) Class of 2020. At the time the lead instructor asked me to teach one session of the course titled Inspired & Emerging Practice through Visionary Leadership, it didn’t register for me the timing of my assigned session. Once I realized it though - I knew I had to do something that honored where these students were in their journeys to become occupational therapists. The NAU OTD program is a three-year full time learning experience that takes a lot of drive, commitment and passion to complete. The students spend close to two full years in coursework and then launch into their last year which consists of six months of fieldwork and four months of a self-driven individualized doctoral project. So basically, this was their last class together as a group before they head off to places all over the state and beyond as individuals to begin experiencing what life is like as an OT in practice. Knowing they would benefit from some self-reflection as to why they wanted to be OTs to begin with, I roped in a guest facilitator with me that I knew could engage them in exploring their personal connection to the profession. Collectively, @ChadWilliamson and the students shared personal stories, discussed the power of stories & vulnerability, and defined (in 12 words or less) their purpose statements for being OTs. Attached to this blog post is an image of one student, who was so enthusiastic to share his purpose statement that he ran to the front of the classroom and performed it in song. It was clear that all of the students in their hearts and minds could easily define their purpose for becoming an OT. As one of their NAU OTD instructors, it was really great to hear their stories and I look forward to reconnecting with them to celebrate their successes when they graduate in May 2020!

Here we go...

Hi everyone visiting my webpage and blog! Developing my personal website has been quite a journey of discovery about my work and how to best share my story. I owe many thanks to my partner @ChadWilliamson who encouraged me to start this process. It took a few years of his encouragement to convince me to finally start my website and well now he is encouraging me to start blogging. So here we go! Stay tuned as I sort out how I want to develop my blog and share updates about my work, my life and well I guess anything I find blog worthy.