Listers-
As though I don’t already have enough on my plate, I have accepted an adjunct professorship offer to lecture to doctoral level PT students at a local university as part of their O&P class. They have requested 4 lectures of 2 hours each to focus on 1] principals of prosthetics (knee, foot and gait mechanics mostly); 2] UE prosthetics and orthotics; 3] spinal and 4] LE orthotics. I am hoping to not reinvent the wheel and that perhaps someone already has a PowerPoint made that I can modify or use a section of. My lectures have mostly been to 6th graders for career day, so this is a huge step up now teaching to PTs with a degree higher than my own. 😊 I don’t think the prosthetic “coolness factor†alone will cut it with this group. Now I’ll have to make PTs understand the biomechanical principals of various types of knees/feet so they can understand how to gait train amputees wearing them.
I am also hopeful to receive/borrow some demos from manufacturers that I can use for teaching the students. These might be a variety of spinals that they can fit on each other or demo feet/knees that can be put onto check sockets to show alignment principals and mechanics (we have only a few demos). I’ve seen various feet attached to platforms at conventions that nonamputees can strap on to get a feel for the movement of the prosthetic feet. Perhaps a manufacturer might let me borrow one of those? Any teaching tool or demo would be sincerely appreciated. I will be teaching the Fall term- mid Sept to mid Dec- and will have specific lecture dates soon. I anticipate teaching this class yearly indefinitely. Although I did give one of the lectures last year (as a test to see if I liked teaching), this teaching thing is all new to me. Demos, teaching tools, presentation materials, videos, photos, website links and suggestions are all welcomed and will be sincerely appreciated as I begin my preparations.
Joan K. Cestaro, C.P.
Rehabilitation Practitioners Inc | 333 W Cork St | Suite 30 | Winchester VA 22601
