My husband, Dan, and I have birthdays a few days apart in December. This year, they overlapped with the Children & Youth conference in NOLA (New Orleans, Louisiana) so why not combine the trip with birthday fun and the conference?! Not to mention, I presented at the pre-conference, presented a poster, and had my first-ever exhibitor booth at an AOTA conference!
I had more than a few pounds of booth materials in tow, so he came in very handy!
Applied Behavioral Analysis (ABA)
I attended an awesome session presented by Deanna Bourgeois, OTD, OTR/L & Gina Benavente, DHSc, MPH, OTR/L, called, “Creating a Virtual Educational Resource to Promote Neurodiversity Affirming Sensory Interventions.”
I was eager to learn more about neurodiversity and the interventions that were recommended.
During the session, the speakers reported some info about ABA that I was surprised to hear.
They spoke about Autism “masking” and how ABA was a Non-Occupational
Therapy Approach with “ableist expectations.”
- Leadbitter, K., Buckle, K. L., Ellis, C., & Dekker, M. (2021). Autistic self-advocacy and the neurodiversity movement: Implications for autism early intervention research and practice. Frontiers in Psychology, 12 https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.635690
ABA is no longer deemed the “Go-to” way to work with children with Autism. The American Medical Academy changed their recommendations on the technique—because autistic adults are advocating that ABA is traumatic. WOW.
The American Medical Academy received a proposal to consider the removal of ABA therapy but they did not remove support for ABA. They expanded their endorsement so that instead of endorsing ABA specifically, they endorse use of “evidence-based treatments.”
- You can read more about that here: https://www.casproviders.org/news/correcting-the-record-the-ama-did-not-remove-support-for-aba##
Both of these articles were new to me—and I highly recommend that you read them if you work with the autistic population.
I was honored to present on AOTA’s Vision 2025—Are We There Yet? And the group was vivacious and worked on action plans for advocating for our profession to map out a strategy to reach AOTA’s Vision 2025 this coming year.
It’s a topic I feel very passionate about. And school-based OT has a ways to go before we’re there. We can do it—together!
Equality, parity, pathways to leadership, and R-E-S-P-E-C-T! Those are the key ingredients required to get us there.
It takes all of us working in tandem.
▲ Here’s the poster I presented! It’s about the School Leadership in NY State, and how OTPs and PTs are treated. This is a topic my NY/Touro colleagues worked hard on. Our article in is the publishing pipeline, so stay tuned for that announcement!
Working the Booth
Spotting OTs!
