Pat O’Connor
My daughter has always had learning challenges, first diagnosed when she was six years old. I sometimes think it was kismet that I, with my unique understanding as an educator, educational therapist, and artist was able to bring all of these skills to my role as her mother. Over the years, through my education, my career as a teacher, and my work as an educational therapist, these skills, combined with my personal and professional understanding of the different challenges facing these children, have deepened my ability to provide the needed remediation. I have had the gratifying experience of being my students’ partner through their developing abilities and maturing minds. I have had the gift of observing them become independent learners and successful aspiring students. I also hope and believe that I have alleviated their parents worries and concerns for their children’s self-esteem and success, worries and concerns that I understand also as a parent with a child living with learning challenges.
I began my training as a teacher at a public middle school in San Francisco where I had an opportunity to observe classes of learning-disabled students. My intuitive, instinctual impulse was to create an art-oriented curriculum to augment their learning remediation lesson plans. I was given permission to do this and thus began development of my integrated approach to working with challenged students. My initial instinct to treat art as a potential learning tool was validated years later when I received the Power of Art award. This honor was based upon a curriculum I submitted to address dyslexic learning issues through the combination of art, language, and writing. This resulted in the thrilling opportunity to visit The Lab School in Washington D.C., a school for students living with dyslexia, that integrates art into the language skills curriculum. Other educators and I met during three days at the school to observe class rooms, meet with faculty members, and spend time with the artist, Robert Rauschenberg, who was a patron of The Lab School.
The philosophical arc of my work as an educator and educational therapist has been to use all of the research based tools at my disposal, including my academic training, imagination, and kindness to “meet the students where they are” and bring to each an approach to remediation that is optimistic, individualized, and intended to enable growth and accomplishment. Collaboration with my students’ educational evaluators is often invaluable because it provides a context for their diagnosis and enables me to conceptualize the various approaches that may be helpful. However, a formal educational evaluation is not a condition to working with my students because I usually am able to assess their needs and attune my approach accordingly. Nevertheless, I will recommend an educational evaluation if I think it would be helpful. The learning differences presented by my students are wide-ranging and have included, for example, dyslexia and related reading disorders, dyscalculia, dysgraphia, auditory processing delays, visual processing delays, executive function challenges, receptive and expressive language delays, and ADHD, along with various co-morbidities such as Lyme disease, TBI, anxiety, and more. I am able to cull from my deep experience as an educator, my academic training as an educational therapist, and my intuitive understanding of each child to formulate and continue to adjust an approach that “meets that child” and finds the way to unlock their minds.