OTA/PTA and Journalism students collaborate on annual newsletter

A quick hallway chat between two Durham College (DC) faculty members sparked an annual partnership, benefiting students from both the Occupational Therapist Assistant and Physiotherapist Assistant (OTA/PTA) program and the Journalism – Mass Media program.

The partnership produces the Rehab Matters Newsletter – which just published its sixth edition – where the OTA/PTA students focus on writing about a rehab matter in the Canadian context while the journalism students mentor them on writing and provided editorial support and leadership.

“The newsletter project was a nice opportunity to work on both student’s program requirements at the final stage of their of their academic careers and to achieve a number of different learning outcomes,” said Faculty member Teresa Avvampato. While the initial project was just a pilot, “we just kept going because we had such good feedback from the students involved,” she said.

Shun Naito, an OTA/PTA student really valued the opportunity to have experts help improve the quality of his work and was grateful for the support. “It’s a great opportunity as the role of an OTA/PTA needs to be advocated and the journalism students are the best at writing,” he said.

“An extra set of eyes was great to have for my project,” said Naito, who worked with Journalism student, Simran Deb, on his article. “She helped with structure and how I should persuade and inform the audience. The flow of paragraphs was way better after she gave me hints and ideas. Both parties were respectful about time and communicated effectively.”

Naito gained a significant confidence boost and did things he never imagined he would be able to do with the help of the Journalism students.

Clayton DeMaine, a Journalism student, said the opportunity to edit content he had limited knowledge of was beneficial.

“I might want to be an editor one day, so, it’s cool to be able to edit someone else’s work that we don’t know anything about,” said DeMaine. “It just gave us a really well-rounded experience overall to have editing to add to our portfolio.”