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LEARNING TO LABEL daily activities is a major focus of USC’s occupational therapy curriculum. OT students are expected to understand and personally explore the nature of human occupation on the road to understanding the health and healing process.
On an August afternoon at USC’s Health Sciences campus, about 50 entering OT students have just finished taking their last quiz in the introductory course “Occupational Therapy Skills Theory I,” which includes, among other things, an immersion in the handicrafts that were initially and, at USC, still remain fundamental to the profession.

Linda Fazio helps student Suzanne Taylor with a T-shirt stenciling project in an introductory OT skills class.
Displayed around the classroom are the students’ earlier projects: mosaic tile trivets, wood carvings and joint stools, stenciled T-shirts, copper-tooled etchings, paintings, even mop hats cunningly fashioned out of coffee filters. This afternoon’s workshop is devoted to leather tooling. After a brief presentation by professor Linda Fazio on the different grades of hide and the curing process, the students pound their own designs into dampened leather bookmarks, wallets, keychains and hair barrettes; the more ambitious attempt intricate leather lacings.
Well and good, but this kind of craft production shouldn’t carry college – let alone graduate – credit, should it?
“That’s not at all an uncommon view,” Fazio says, “and there are many OT programs that have no craft in their programs at all. They have purposefully dropped it out. But USC has always maintained this interest. Our goal is the application of theory to practice.”
Crafts such as the leather work Fazio is teaching her students today have had a place in mental health since psychiatrist William Rush Dunton Jr., the so-called “father of occupational therapy,” first fitted a metalworking shop for the treatment of patients at Sheppard and Enoch Pratt Asylum in Baltimore in 1895. By 1906, Harvard psychiatrist Herbert J. Hall was using handweaving, woodcarving, metalwork and pottery to treat his neurasthenia patients (albeit less with the goals of assessment or therapy than on the theory that “an idle hand is the devil’s playground”).
Over time, OT theorists realized that craft actually opens a window into the soul. Through “task analysis” – a set of OT principles used to break down any activity into its most basic components – a trained therapist observing someone at work on a craft can cull vast amounts of information not only about that person’s fine-hand control but also about his ability to categorize, to sequence, to focus, to use tools and to accomplish goals – in short, his ability to think.
It isn’t hard to see how crafts play a central role in the training of occupational therapists. As the students learn to manipulate the different media, they gain awareness of an inner orchestra of sensory instruments that these “simple tasks” variously pluck and strike – and they come to realize that most human tasks are, in fact, diabolically complex.
“For a student to come out of an OT program and not have any background in any craft is now almost an oversight,” says Fazio. “There are many arenas where OTs are using it to make therapy appealing developmentally.”
The storytellers also wrestled with the way the Army works, according to ICT deputy director of technology Randy Hill, a West Point graduate. “All military operations have certain similarities,” he says. “There’s command and control. Soldiers follow the chain of command. I’d often find myself in a surrogate-Army role in meetings with both creative and technical people. Then, when I was with the Army, I had to communicate the technology to them.”

CRAFT WORKSHOPS are just one side of an OT’s education, however. Earlier this morning, in their “Foundations of Occupation/Kinesiology” class, the same 50 students now banging away at rawhide were dipping their hands in formaldehyde, running their fingers over the network of nerve fibers that make up a human spinal cord. Handling cadavers is nothing new to them. Before they entered the OT program, undergraduates and graduates alike completed prerequisite lab courses in anatomy and physiology, as well as psychology, sociology and anthropology. Some, like Amy Bardin, a senior double-majoring in occupational therapy and psychology, had contemplated a career in medicine (she still dreams of being a coroner someday) before settling on OT.
Students are drawn to occupational therapy for a wide variety of reasons. Fazio, who specializes in occupational therapy for the mentally ill, entered the
“Americans don’t fully understand the profound effect what they do every day, what they eat, how much they exercise, their level of happiness has on their health."
profession as a way to bridge her seemingly incompatible interests in psychoanalysis and weaving. Others are drawn to the field by a personal brush with calamity.
“I originally had exposure to OT when my grandmother had a stroke,” says Los Angeles-based pediatric OT Amy Siebert MA ’98.
“What was really important was the way the OT brought the family in, trained us and made us a part of the rehab.”
Diane Rose was blithely charting a course to become a middle-school Spanish teacher when random tragedy changed everything. In her junior year at Vanderbilt University, Rose watched one of her best friends die after he was crushed by a tree in a tornado. A two-week bedside vigil in the ICU prompted Rose to devote her life to therapy. Now a second-year master’s student in OT, she looks forward to finishing her professional education and going back home to Plano, Texas, where she hopes one day to open her own OT practice.
But it isn’t easy to sketch a typical OT beyond the stereotypical features of a female who is naturally nurturing, empathic and able to motivate others to become fully engaged in a world of activity. Although over 95 percent of occupational therapists are currently women, each year more and more males are attracted to the profession, says Clark. Of the 50 students in Fazio’s introductory skills-theory class, four are male (and in recent years, Clark says, the percentages have been higher).
One of them, 32-year-old R.J. Navarro, has a background in policing, having spent the last seven years as an officer in USC’s Department of Public Safety. Navarro dreamed of being an OT since he was 9, inspired (he admits with embarrassment) by one of those uplifting made-for-TV movies about an athlete paralyzed in a motorcycle accident and the therapist who helps him rediscover joy in life.
“It was kind of dumb, but I was like: ‘Oh yeah, that’s what I want to do,’” recalls Navarro, now a senior and planning to go on to master’s and doctoral studies in OT. Being in the gender minority doesn’t trouble him. “The way I see it is, it makes me more marketable,” he says.

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