Lela Llorens, Ph.D., OTR, FAOTA

I graduated in 1953, and in all the time that I have practiced occupational therapy and participated in academia, no two days have been the same. The problem solving, creativity and one-to-one interactions with patients, clients, and colleagues have been, and continue to be, exciting.
When I entered occupational therapy, I worked with adults in mental health and became interested in working with children when we had a child admitted to an adult facility because there were no mental health facilities for children at that time. I was intrigued with what could be done, and in my next position, I spent 50% of my time working with children. Before long, children with mental health problems constituted 100% of my practice. At Western Michigan, one of my first groups included children with cerebral palsy. Beginning our work with the children at a level at which they could be successful-a hallmark of occupational therapy-made our work effective and the principle of starting where clients can be successful began to make sense as a way to approach our work. In 1969, I wrote about the way that occupational therapy could be used to move clients from where they were to where they needed to be to function in everyday life.
Earlier, we had worked primarily from symptoms. For instance, if patients were depressed, we might try activities to divert their attention. Now, we provide activities to ameliorate depression rather than divert attention. Working with children with cerebral palsy, we used to try to simply motivate them to grasp spoons or straws. Now we facilitate independent living through motivation using activity that has meaning related to the child's functional developmental level.
Over the years, I also worked with well children and children with learning disabilities and expanded my perceptions to include adult development. In the early '90s, my work, along with the work of Lorna Jean King, became instrumental to the development of the theoretical construct underlying the concept of occupational adaptation developed by the faculty at TWU for their doctoral program. In a nutshell, the construct holds that occupation makes it possible for people to adapt to changing developmental requirements brought about by illness, dysfunction, disability or other life events.
Today, I am honored to work with the USC occupational therapy faculty, including several who studied with me while earning their degrees, and join in continuing to influence the growth and development of this exciting field.

Biography
Lela A. Llorens holds her BS in Occupational Therapy from Western Michigan University, her Master's Degree in Vocational Rehabilitation from Wayne State University and her Ph.D. in Education and Occupational Therapy from Walden University. She is a Professor Emeritus from San Jose State who has consulted extensively for Maternal and Child Health Services, demonstrating how occupational therapy can make a difference in community health. She was on the faculty at the University of Florida for 11 years, six of them as chair of the Occupational Therapy department. She received the AOTA/AOTF Presidential Commendation in Honor of Wilma L. West in 1997. At San Jose State, she coordinated the graduate program, was elected department chair for two terms until she became Associate Academic Vice President of Faculty Affairs and served for three years. As a CORE faculty member at Stanford University's Geriatric Education Center, she participated for 12 years in an ethnogeriatric grant project, which serves in part as a clearinghouse for ethnogeriatric literature and curricula she helped write and develop. Since retiring in 1996, she has continued contributing to the field of occupational therapy as a USC guest lecturer and consultant to the Department Chair. At USC, she participates in graduate seminars in occupational therapy and helps create a developmental cross-cultural therapy perspective. Since 1969, when she delivered a groundbreaking Eleanor Clarke Slagle Lecture concerning developmental theory and adaptation over the life span, her work has expanded and was ultimately adopted as part of the theoretical aspect of the doctoral program at Texas Women's University. Today her publications as well as biographical sketches about her are housed in the Special Collection of the Blagg-Huey Library at TWU.