Lessons In Lifestyle Redesign AIC Occupational Therapy Students Create A Healthy Dialogue
True or False: a blueberry muffin is a good breakfast-on-the-go.
According to four occupational therapy graduate students at American International College, the answer is an emphatic false. And while a muffin will likely never be blamed for a student’s inability to earn a college degree, these budding OT professionals are creating a greater understanding of the variables that can contribute to attrition rates on college campuses, by working with underclassmen to identify sources of stress and difficulty.
That blueberry muffin is just the start.
Each year, OT graduate students enrolled in Leadership, a required course at AIC, perform a community service project based on the tenets of occupational therapy, which is defined by the American Occupational Therapy Association as a “treatment that gives people the ‘skills for the job of living,’” which can include helping individuals gain or regain everyday activities lost due to lifestyle changes, illness, or injury. OT practitioners work with all types of people in various environments, and are often called upon to create customized treatment programs, perform home and job site evaluations with adaptation recommendations, and provide guidance for patients, families, and caregivers.
AIC’s Leadership course takes all of these aspects of the profession into account, and charges its students with creating unique programs that will incorporate several different facets of the OT discipline. In the past, projects have taken place in nursing or assisted living facilities, businesses, schools, or other community organizations, and have included classes in healthy and economical nutrition for seniors or diabetics, backpack safety for girl scouts – which led to one troop’s members earning their health and safety badges — and a consultation with Home Depot stores, assisting management in identifying products that could potentially be marketed as home safety devices.
This year, however, four students enrolled in Leadership – Chris Ouderkirk of Solvang, Calif., Elizabeth Corash of Northampton, and Toi Moses and Meaghan Sypek of Springfield, chose to perform their project on campus, and developed an eight-week course for undergraduates titled ‘Sixty Minutes to a Better You.’
The course is also taught by the four graduate students, who outline various healthy living practices during the college years, but also address the much broader issue of student retention, particularly among freshmen and sophomores.
“We conducted research on the needs of college students in general and their quality of life, and created a questionnaire,” said Ouderkirk. “Based on their responses to the questionnaire, we identified areas of discussion, and have been teaching more than a dozen AIC students how to reach personal success with healthy lifestyle choices.”
Topics have included ways to improve personal habits, such as the propensity toward using ‘like’ or ‘um’ when speaking, which if improved upon can lead to better outcomes during presentations. Others deal with nutrition – the healthier alternatives to high-fat blueberry muffins in the morning, for example (whole wheat bagels and English muffins are two options) – or knowing the many hidden sources of caffeine – low-fat mocha-chip frozen yogurt, anyone? – that can lead to insomnia.
So, How Are You, Really?The following is a sampling of some of the questions four AIC occupational therapy graduate student instructors posed to their undergraduate students as part of the course they developed, ‘Sixty Minutes to a Better You.’ How well do you know your health and wellness facts?
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Answers:
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“First- and second-year college students in particular struggle with getting enough sleep and eating correctly, and also experience stress when preparing assignments and presentations,” said Ouderkirk, adding that in turn, those problems are major factors contributing to drop-out rates.
With some simple interventions, though, she said many students can make manageable changes in their lives that will help curb the problems created while adapting to college life.
“We hope our teachings will travel with the students so they will have the essential tools to help themselves all throughout their college experience,” she said.
Eat, Drink and Matriculate
The student-instructors are using a number of teaching tools to work with undergraduates to identify common problems that many college students face, and ways in which they can remedy them.
Sue Ordinetz, professor of Occupational Therapy at AIC, said that while the program is currently offered to only AIC students, she is hopeful that it could serve as a model for similar programs in the area.
“This has already become a sort of pilot program,” she said. “If successful, it could develop into part of the curriculum here, or even at other colleges.”
Ordinetz noted that the course is an excellent example of an effective OT practice – one that teaches and offers examples of lifestyle redesign.
“It comes down to how you live your life,” she explained, “and lifestyle redesign is used with all sorts of populations – from people with disabilities to people in the workplace, as part of wellness initiatives.”
She added that lifestyle redesign not only uses various approaches to teach new strategies and ways of doing things on a daily basis that are healthier and, in the case of college students, more conducive to academic success, but are also practical, and take into account that what might work for some might not work for everyone.
“There are fewer ‘shoulds’ and more ‘hows,’” she said. “We all know that eating right, getting enough sleep, and reducing stress are healthy ways to live life, but it’s not that easy for people with busy lives. This course is teaching students small modifications they can make to improve their unique situations, that will be easy to incorporate into their daily lives and easy to sustain.”
Throughout the course, for instance, instructors choose various topics – a recent class focused largely on eating and sleeping well at college – and discuss first some of the facts and fiction surrounding that topic. A murmur of surprise filtered across the classroom, for instance, when Moses told her students that it is a myth that everyone needs eight hours of sleep. Some need more, some less, she explained.
“Learning more about things like that makes us more aware of our own habits and how healthy or unhealthy they are,” she said. “We know these students are young now, but the sooner we get them thinking about healthy habits, the better.”
Dorm Dos and Don’ts
Moses said that after the nuts and bolts are covered, she and her fellow instructors take the discussion a step further, addressing some of the barriers that the undergraduate students face when trying to modify their habits; getting enough sleep, for instance, isn’t always easy in a noisy dorm. She added that one reason that aspect of the course seems to be effective is because she and her fellow graduate students are well-acquainted with the challenges of college life. That eliminates the fear some younger students have of saying the wrong thing, or being misunderstood, and also further opens the lines of communication and, ultimately, discussion of possible fixes.
“I’m not preaching here,” Moses said. “While I was researching some of the things you should do to develop healthy sleep patterns for this class, I realized I don’t do any of them.”
In regard to the recent discussion of healthy on-campus eating habits, eating on the run and assignment-based stress topped the list of foils, but the restrictions of dorm life also raised some important points that went beyond grabbing a candy bar in a rush or during a cram session.
While The Hive, said one student, referring to AIC’s newly redesigned cafeteria, serves as a supplement to the traditional dining commons and offers a wider selection of dinners and snacks, purchases subtract dollars from a student’s pre-paid meal plan.
“You run out of money faster,” he said, noting that sometimes that leads to less expensive, and less healthy, snack options.
Ouderkirk, a California resident who resides in one of AIC’s dorms, could relate to her students’ concerns. She said adjusting to both the volume and choice of foods in a dining hall setting can be a high hurdle for many students, as can transportation and financial restrictions that make it difficult to make trips to the grocery store or the gym.
“At home, I eat a lot more protein, and a lot more vegetables,” she said. “But that’s just not possible while living in a dorm; all college campuses have that basic kind of institutional food. It’s hard to get around that.”
After discussion of specific barriers, though, the underclassmen are asked to pinpoint one goal for the week, and to report on their level of success at the next meeting. The instructors join in the task.
Following their discussion of nutrition, for instance, Corash said she would try taking a longer route to class in order to incorporate five extra minutes of physical activity. Other students were planning to take advantage of AIC’s ‘recipe suggestion box’ in the dining commons, in order to have an extra push toward the DC and away from the bad habits of eating ‘dorm food’ – Cup O’ Noodles, mac n’ cheese, and peanut butter sandwiches – for dinner each night.
“We can also try to flip into some better habits over the break, and then try to bring some of those new habits back with us to school,” Corash said. “You can’t change overnight and do it all, but we can all definitely change one or two things.”
Graduated Steps
Ouderkirk added that through the course, she realized there were several facts about overall wellness at college that at first seemed simple, but are often more complex at second glance and even harder to implement on a daily basis.
“I think a big thing we have all realized is that we have a lot to learn,” Ouderkirk said. “There’s a lot we don’t know, and you can’t change everything.”
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