This blog post has been sitting in my drafts folder for some time now, since ‘decolonisation’ became a “new” buzzword for the occupational therapy profession via The 2018 WFOT (World Federation of Occupational Therapy) Congress in Africa which catapulted the concept into the spotlight, causing murmurs of controversy in the international occupational therapy community. The long delay from idea to…
So on the back of people asking excessively generic questions which were hard to answer without context, today someone asked me: How to choose a college? That was all. The person was asking on behalf of someone else. I didn’t even know who the someone else was. But you know what? It’s not a bad question. I think more people…
Social media platforms. So many. Hard to keep up. How are we ever going to be able to teach everything? My answer to this dilemma is: let your students take the lead and leverage on their experiences. It’s impossible to always be using the same social media platforms as your students. I know because I’ve encountered this. I use Facebook…
I’ve encountered a fair number of people who get incredibly defensive when the word “privileged” is used to describe them. I think a lot of it boils down to misunderstanding of the word, or perhaps they lack awareness of how they are situated in the world relative to everybody else around them. I have also encountered people who perceive the term…
So I have been tinkering around with Quora lately because I find that I tend to write better content in response to people asking questions. I must say that I’ve been quite exasperated though, because a lot of the questions asked (particularly those to do with career advice in occupational therapy) generally require some form of context. Registration in each…
Underemployment among Malaysian graduates has been an issue for some time now, yet we don’t seem anywhere close to resolving the issue. I used to teach B40 students, some who were ineligible to study in government higher education institutions. I also used to hire staff who are from this population. There are several young people from this population I continue…
I personally think it is much harder for people from the B40 communities to start businesses due to having less insulation from risk. They would also typically lack the means to acquire the social capital needed to make a business succeed. So when our Entrepreneurship Development Minister made comments about the B40 community as per the headline, I decided to…
Talking about mental health and illness is starting to be a thing in Malaysia, people are becoming better informed and our government is also actively talking about the matter. I *was* of the opinion that the more we talk about these topics the closer we would be to developing some solutions. I was wrong. Recently a friend of mine starting…
I have been reflecting on the Case of the Misogynistic Medical Student as fitness to practice issues have been a long time concern of mine due to my work in the health professions. What would I have done if I were his educators or the administration at his university? Is it right for the Malaysian public to circulate petitions calling…
When I first got to the UK, I was shocked to meet international students who were hardly able to express themselves in English. I am used to working with people who use English as a foreign or second or third language, but I was rather confused when I saw fellow grad students struggle to keep up with a group activity / discussion. I suppose…