Abstract
In this chapter, we explore educational issues related to helping professional students apply a transactional perspective in the practice of occupational therapy with children. We address students’ and the literature’s persistent habit of locating development within the child. We offer a transactional description of a childhood occupation as a social process, then highlight how the essence of intervention lies in providing opportunities for children’s engagement with occupations in new ways, utilizing the relational and interdependent elements of occupational situations. We introduce an educational process that helps students see children and their occupational situations as a functioning whole system. We discuss how students are challenged to reflect critically on views of childhood, and we illustrate how through facilitated discussion students are led to adopt a highly contextualized perspective, particularly in terms of how children and their families experience their life situations. The use of storytelling, case-based groups and fieldwork assignments are shown as opportunities for applied learning, and we discuss the structure of assignments to guide thinking along transactional lines.
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Notes
- 1.
Observations and fieldnotes made by Emily Furgang, research assistant.
- 2.
Names used are pseudonyms.
- 3.
Fieldnotes were edited for comprehension and verb tense.
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Humphry, R., Wakeford, L. (2013). Educational Implications of Taking a Transactional Perspective of Occupation in Practice. In: Cutchin, M., Dickie, V. (eds) Transactional Perspectives on Occupation. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-4429-5_17
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