Forty-five new Occupational Therapy Doctorate students participated in an inspiring Convocation ceremony on Friday, August 11. The OTD ceremony marked and celebrated the new students’ entry into the program and concluded a week filled with orientation activities.
Barbara Hooper, PhD, OTR/L, FAOTA, founding program director and division chief, marked the significance of the Class of 2026, which officially rounds out the new academic program’s full complement of student cohorts. The inaugural Class of 2024 will graduate in May.
Dr. Gail Whiteford Speaks at Convocation
Professor Michael Iwama, PhD, MSc, BScOT, served as emcee. Gail Whiteford, BApSc, MHSc, PhD, AM, FOTARA, shared the keynote address titled, How to Change the World in Three Steps.
Dr. Whiteford is an international occupational rights advocate and was Australia’s first Pro Vice Chancellor of Social Inclusion. She is known internationally as the author of the Participatory Occupational Justice Framework.
- Step 1: Believe in yourself and what you have to offer others. Dr. Whiteford told the students they would gain knowledge that would set them apart from other health professionals. “Once you begin to see the world from an occupational lens, you can’t unsee it. And that’s a good thing,” she said.
- Step 2: Understand the “why” of what occupational therapists are called to do. She encouraged students to understand the world around them and recognize that structural inequalities exist within governments, systems, and social and economic classes that keep many worldwide from fully participating in occupations in their communities.
- Step 3: Find your voice. Be confident in your voice and learn how to use it to address the many “why” issues from a moral and ethical standpoint. She said that she had visited maximum security prisons and refugee camps in war-torn countries and crossed unfriendly borders to be a voice of occupational justice for many people who have been marginalized. “Once you realize that finding your voice is not really about you, you can make a significant contribution,” she said.
Dr. Hooper presented each class member with a special gift, a wooden, engraved teleidoscope, and explained its symbolic significance.
“When you look through a teleidoscope, you look at an external object. Because of the lens that it is perceived through, the thing changes and becomes this dynamic image of varying colors, textures, and shapes. We have selected the teleidoscope because of how expert OTs perceive people in their occupations...When we are looking at something through the teleidoscope, something that appears singular and straightforward becomes this multiple dynamics that are in continuous transition based on its situation,” Dr. Hooper said.