Mary Lawlor, Sc.D. OTR/L, FAOTA

I enjoy teaching students about the way narratives provide occupational therapists a methodology for developing treatment and for understanding how to help clients construct an understanding of themselves and how to be in the world. My research involves studying how children, families, therapists, and other practitioners use narratives to come to know enough about each other to "partner up" and collaborate in promoting healing and development.
To engage children, and sometimes parents, therapists use narratives in organizing activities and include imaginative characters and action. They might pretend to compete with Michael Jordan, for instance, or have dinosaurs become part of the action to do dinosaur dancing. In this way, the child's world becomes a part of his or her engagement with adults and with narrative embellishments, therapy is often more enticing for children. In addition, therapists and parents often use narratives or story telling to share perspectives about children's talents, likes and dislikes, and personality features and strengths. These stories can matter deeply in changing how families think about their children's futures and how therapists use narratives in the action of therapy worlds.
Therapists also use narratives to good advantage when they listen to client stories about family, career, and personal interests and carry threads of these stories into the focus of their therapy. Stories about home life enable therapists to access what is most important to their clients, and when therapists see the values clients previously emphasized in organizing their lives at home and with family, they can better understand how to help families during periods of healing, recovery, or transformation.
In addition to listening to client stories and helping clients introduce narrative into therapy, occupational therapists also use narrative theory when they imagine possible endings for therapy and direct therapy towards those future outcomes. Stories help us study how as people live their lives, they undergo change, and how as therapists, we can help them and those they count on.

Biography
Mary Lawlor is known for her work in the areas of pediatric occupational therapy, maternal and child health, family-centered care, interdisciplinary models of service delivery, and ethnographic research. Her interests are in examining the meanings of illness and disability in family life, the social nature of therapeutic experience, and cultural influences on health care and developmental processes. She graduated magna cum laude from Boston University in Occupational Therapy and received her Masters Degree in Education from Harvard University. She earned her Sc.D. in Therapeutic Studies from Boston University and is a Fellow of the American Occupational Therapy Association. She is currently Principle Investigator for an interdisciplinary longitudinal ethnographic research project funded by National Institute for Child Health and Human Development, National Institutes of Health. The study involves African American children with special health care needs, their families and the practitioners who serve them. She has also received grants from the Maternal and Child Health Bureau, the US Department of Education, and the American Occupational Therapy Foundation.

Research
Boundary Crossing: A Longitudinal & Ethnographic Study, National Institute of Child Health and Human Development

Boundary Crossing: Re-situating Cultural Competence, National Institute of Child Health and Human Development