Keynote address: searching for and identifying signature pedagogies in occupational therapy education.

Patricia Schaber, PhD, OTR/L, FAOTA, is Associate Professor, Program in Occupational Therapy, MMC 368, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN 55455; schab002@umn.edu In higher education, we are approaching a crossroads in the preparation of occupational therapy professionals and being challenged from many sides. Trends in higher education are toward interprofessional education. This can, on one hand, be positive in enhancing professional skill development or, on the other hand, be negative if it reduces the core content to a universal common denominator. Trends in open access to curricular content, such as massive open online courses, make it easier to share the growing body of knowledge in our domain of practice. The positive side is opening access to more stakeholders, and the negative side is professional encroachment, when others take knowledge and apply occupational therapy practice under a different guise. Trends in expanding educational delivery models, including online, hybrid, or blended formats and satellite programs, can serve the profession positively by minimizing geographic barriers to train students where they live, be it in rural or geographically isolated areas, or they can be negative by removing opportunities for active learning in a supportive student community. One response to these challenges is to better understand the impact of change by empowering the stakeholders of occupational therapy professional education by stimulating faculty to accelerate the journey from educator to scholar—specifically, a scholar in teaching and learning—to continue to serve the larger profession, the teaching institution, and individual professional career development. The journey has served me—through promotion to associate professor, induction into the Academy for Excellence in Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, and a seat at the table on larger university committees— but, more important, it has revitalized my enthusiasm for the challenging job that I do daily. Let me back up and tell my story as a way of illustrating the importance of scholarship of teaching and learning. InMinneapolis, our “9/11experience”— referring to the notion that every person can remember what they were doing when the news of the terrorist attacks broke—was the collapse of the Interstate 35W bridge. I crossed that bridge 20 minutes before the collapse. An unthinkable tragedy of this magnitude gives pause for thought and changes one’s life’s trajectory from that point forward. Our occupational therapy program had a similar experience in 2003. Imagine going to work one day, sitting at a conference table with the dean of your school, and being told your program does not fit the school’s mission (the education ofmedical students) and that your program is under review for a newhome (also known as closure). Fast forward 1 year. Then imagine that the academic health center’s vice president receives a milliondollar grant to move your program to a new Center for Allied Health that will house programs with innovative, technologyenhanced teaching and learning platforms with satellite sites across the state. Strong vision, major change, and both stunning in scope: closure or transformation. With the move from classroom-based delivery to Patricia Schaber, PhD, OTR/L, FAOTA