The perceived superiority of western worldviews in occupational therapy education: the experiences of Indigenous occupational therapists
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Introduction As a response to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canadas Calls to Action, Indigenous students are increasingly being recruited into occupational therapy programs. However, the occupational therapy profession relies almost exclusively on western worldviews and does not sufficiently consider the value of multiple ways of knowing and doing. How Indigenous students fare in these western educational systems is largely unexplored and undocumented. This work is part of a larger study exploring the experiences of Indigenous occupational therapists in Canada. Objective This manuscript explores the retrospective educational experiences of Indigenous occupational therapists. Methods This study was collaborative in nature with Indigenous occupational therapists across the country, using both Indigenous and western methods of inquiry. Stage 1 used individual storytelling sessions (n=13) to hear about participants everyday experiences. Stage 2 consisted of an in-person sharing circle gathering (n=8) to build relationships and community, and to refine data from Stage 1. Results Indigenous occupational therapists experienced imposed isolation, lack of support, exclusion, a devaluing of merit and skill, and ‘jagged worldviews colliding’ in their programs. These experiences are underpinned by the cultural imperialism perpetuated by the profession. Conclusion To truly fulfill our commitment to reconciliation, the occupational therapy profession must move beyond Indigenous inclusion in programs towards decolonial Indigenization, which asks for a divesting of colonial privilege and ideologies towards something dynamic and new. Deeply considering the value of, and need for, multiple perspectives (Two-Eyed Seeing (Etuaptmumk)) and drawing on the expertise and experiences of Indigenous students, occupational therapists, researchers, and educators for this work is urgently needed.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".