Occupational Therapy
Faculty and Staff News
Drexel
General News
During the pandemic when children and adults alike were stuck learning and working virtually from home, Andrea Tyszka, OTD ‘18, MS, OTR/L, SIPT, associate professor in the University’s Occupational Therapy (OT) department, would often overhear her teenage son’s French teacher reviewing lessons.
“I started to pick up a little bit of French, and I thought, wouldn’t it be neat to really dive into a foreign language,” said Dr. Tyszka.
So, when she saw that the World Federation of Occupational Therapists (WFOT) international conference was in Paris in the late summer of 2022, she was motivated to apply. The conference, which brings OT professionals together from member countries all over the world to share ideas about teaching, learning and clinical practices, is held every four years and difficult to get into.
“It’s an exciting opportunity to see not only what my colleagues in Pennsylvania, in the Northeast and across the United States are doing but also the world, where health systems change from place to place,” said Dr. Tyszka. “There are definitely different ways of practicing our craft and it’s nice to meet people who are doing new and exciting things.”
Among those new and exciting things was an innovative model of fieldwork that the Salus OT department had utilized to get through the pandemic. It involved bringing clinical preceptors together with mentor faculty members to create programs where there was a shared supervision of students. A cohort of nine students met virtually each week for several hours to participate in to participate in sessions.
It was a poster based on that fieldwork model that Dr. Tyszka and Anna Grasso, OTD, MS, OTR/L, CAPS, ECHM, fieldwork coordinator and associate professor in the University’s OT department, presented at the WFOT in France.
“I’m sure in places it might have happened before, but it wasn’t a commonly used practice model,” said Dr. Tyszka. “We had nine students do fieldwork that way. It was a lot of work, but the students got a lot out of it.”
The feedback from everyone involved was positive, according to Dr. Tyszka. The students gained program development skills and had the opportunity to work with faculty members who were paired with those in clinical practice. The external preceptors felt well-supported by the University and it gave them a chance to practice holistic OT services in the community, which was something they weren’t always doing at work.
Although Dr. Grasso was not able to attend the WFOT conference in person, Dr. Tyszka was able to go to France for the poster presentation.
“People were interested to know what others did during the pandemic. It wasn’t just something we were facing here in the United States, it was all over the world,” said Dr. Tyszka. “What we did seemed pretty novel and folks were interested in it. There was a lot of traffic at the poster and a lot of interest in how we had done things here.”
In addition to the students who participated in the fieldwork and her collaboration on the poster with Dr. Grasso, Dr. Tyszka cited the support from Lauren Sponseller, PhD ‘18, OTD, MSOTR/L, MEd, CLA, chair of the OT department at Salus, for helping spread the word on this innovative model to an international audience.
As an additional benefit during her time at the conference in Paris, Dr. Tyszka met a faculty member from St. Joseph’s University in Philadelphia and discussed how they might collaborate from a research perspective in the future. And, she also met a group from Denmark with an international student exchange program that offers opportunities for international students to learn about different OT practices around the world. That led to her and fellow OT faculty member Sharon Marcy, MSOT ‘16, OTR/L to start a program connecting Salus students with other OT students all over the world.
“Had I not been standing next to this faculty member and this poster, we would have no idea that this program was in place and that it would be an opportunity for us,” said Dr. Tyszka.
