Department of Occupational Therapy

Mission and Philosophy

The Department of Occupational Therapy at Rush University Medical Center and Rush University is committed to teach, investigate, and provide the very best quality health care. The department is grounded in the practitioner, teacher, investigator model with an emphasis on leadership and relationships with professional and societal communities. The Department promotes excellence in addressing diversity in health care.

Occupational therapists recognize humans as persons engaged in and organized around occupations. When dysfunction prevents doing, occupational therapists enable doing in a variety of ways. The practice of occupational therapy involves individuals, their attributes, and the multiple environmental components that comprise the performance of occupations. Occupational therapy interventions are directed at these variables to ameliorate and enable occupational performance.

The faculty members are practitioners-teachers and researchers, a combination that infuses the curriculum with a contemporary and scholarly perspective. Graduate courses are designed to build on past knowledge and experience as well as encourage transformative learning. The critical self-reflection of the transformative learning process encourages the examining, questioning, validating and possible revision of prior knowledge so that new perceptions and meanings may be constructed. It results in the learner being able to wholly and freely participate in critical dialogue and the resulting action, thus empowering the learner (Cranston, 1994). By basing the program on transformative learning, it is possible to build on the student’s past, connect it to their activities of the present, and predict a future in which they are competent and capable to respond to the needs of the profession.

These learning experiences, occurring within and outside the classroom, promote independence in conjunction with faculty mentorship, problem solving, and critical thinking. Because of the graduate’s experience in self-directed learning, he or she is able to be responsible and responsive to the needs of the increasingly dynamic profession. The graduate is a potential learner in the field who is able to work in the traditional and diverse occupational therapy settings, but more importantly, the graduate is flexible, autonomous, and informed so as to adapt to the changing demands of practice.