Traversing hills and valleys: Exploring doing, being, becoming and belonging experiences in teaching and studying occupation

Research findings in occupational science and occupational therapy education can be mutually informing, yet this mutual benefit is seldom explored. A secondary analysis of data from a study of how occupation is addressed in US occupational therapy curricula explored this question: what latent meanings within education research data are pertinent to occupational science? Data were selected that richly described the tandem occupations of teaching and learning where the focus was occupation-related content. Three processes adopted from Ricoeurian hermeneutic interpretive analysis-explanation, understanding, and appropriation-revealed the occupational experiences of doing, being, becoming and belonging as a dynamic web among instructors and students who participated in the study and the researchers. Further, the analytic process united the occupational experiences of research participants and researchers, and prompted researchers to reflect on and engage emotionally with their teaching and other occupations, facilitating appropriation of the research for their classroom practices.