This document discusses a digital storytelling project aimed at exploring difficult concepts in occupational therapy education. The project involves developing an online mythical story collaboratively with occupational therapy students worldwide. Students can contribute stories reflecting their own experiences or provide illustrations. The story will feature an OT student protagonist who goes on a heroic quest. It aims to help OT students better understand complex ideas through creating shared myths. An evaluation will assess what, if anything, participants gained from actively or passively engaging with the story. The project draws on concepts from Zen in the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and the Kawa Model to incorporate Eastern philosophy into occupational therapy.

1. Using Digital Storytelling to explore difficult concepts in the occupational therapy curriculum Dr Greg Kelly

2. Background 20 years ago Zen in the Art of Occupational Therapy, Part 1 and 2 British Journal of Occupational Therapy, March and April 1991 Proposed that development of OT has been influenced by Eastern philosophy Inspired by cult novel Zen in the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (Persig, 1974)

3. The Kawa Model developed in response to need for a more culturally sensitive model encorporates Eastern beliefs and philosophies

4. Figure 1: Life is like a river, flowing from birth to end of life

7. Andrew Lloyd Webber’s

10. The Project Development of a digital story in which central character is an occupational therapy (OT) student who sets out on a heroic quest. Existing, familiar storiesused as a template to create a mythical world. OT students worldwide invited to contribute with metaphorical stories reflecting their own experiences, or by providing illustrations to the stories.

11. Aims By exploring difficult concepts through creating digital myths, based on shared experiences, OTs may be better able to understand and interpret these concepts with reference to their own experiences. Online discussion forum will be used to determine what, if anything, has been gained from the experience from those who have actively or passively (as readers) engaged in the collaborative story.

12. Digital Storytelling the use of computer-based tools to tell stories usually contain some mixture of computer-based images, text, recorded audio narration, video clips and/or music (Alexander and Levine, 2008).

13. Anticipated Outcomes By exploring difficult concepts of OT through creating digital myths based on shared experiences, students may be better able to understand and interpret these concepts with reference to their own experiences.

14. On the day she was due to travel to OS she arrived at the train station and suddenly realised that she had misread her travel schedule (her dyslexia occasionally still caused her some problems) and that she had missed her flight. Being late on her first day would create such a bad impression, she thought, and she burst into tears.

15. Then a strange thing happened. Dorothy whirled around two or three times and rose slowly through the air up, up and away into the sky. She felt as if she were going up in a balloon and as if she were being rocked gently, like a baby in a cradle. It reminded her of the feeling she had when her occupational therapist had rocked her on a platform swing as part of her therapy.

16. She noticed three young Japanese men coming toward her. They were all dressed in colourful costumes. “Just like Hiro!” one of them exclaimed, referring to the popular television series, Heroes. “Where am I?” she asked. “Los Angeles Airport”, explained the second man.

17. Kawa-no-Kami had spent too much time in the West. He now looked more like an American comic book superhero than a Japanese River God. He had persuaded three Japanese students to abandon Western models of OT and to find their own Japanese model of OT. Their audacity had been frowned upon by their tutors and they had been sent on a Journey to the West to find the true meaning of occupation.

18. Progress-to-date Article published in BJOT attracted interest from OT practitioners in England and an OT educator in New Zealand Editorial team formed to develop, and edit, the evolving story Website taking longer than expected to develop…but nearly there now Moving away from a “graphic novel” to a traditional story book look for website Paper presented at All Ireland OT Conference in Dundalk in April 2011. Link to website