At a key transition point in their studies, occupational therapy students across all USAHS campuses participate in a meaningful ritual, witnessed by family and friends. The OT pinning ceremony marks the end of the classroom portion of their studies and the beginning of their fieldwork. For Residential MOT and OTD students, this happens in their fourth term, and for Flex, in the seventh term.
A longstanding tradition in OT practice, the pin celebrates the diversity of practice areas, the client-centered nature of our practice and the values of our profession.
“It’s an opportunity for faculty to acknowledge our students’ transition from classroom learning to clinical learning,” says Mary Zadnik, ScD, MEd, OTR/L, director of the entry-level OT programs on Read more
PhD - Communication Sciences and Disorders, University of Texas at Austin
MS - Communication Sciences and Disorders, University of Texas at Austin
BS - Biochemistry, The University of Vermont
Research Interests
Assessment and intervention of developmental language disorders (DLD) for children who are English language learners (ELLs)
Transfer of learning across languages
Dynamic assessment of language ability
Developing tools for the accurate diagnosis of DLD and reading disorders in ELLs
Techniques to maximize transfer of learning across languages for intervention of ELLs
Diagnosis of fluency disorders in multilingual speakers
Developing local norms for language sample analysis
Dr. Christine E. Fiestas is a Core Faculty member in the Speech-Language Pathology program at St. Augustine University for Health Sciences-Austin campus. She joined the program in the spring of 2020 as an Associate Professor. She received both her Ph.D and M.S. from the University of Texas at Austin in Communication Sciences and Disorders. Her clinical specialty areas are in the assessment and treatment of developmental language disorders from birth through school ages as well as the assessment of reading and fluency disorders. Her lines of research include the assessment and treatment of language and literacy disorders for individuals who are bilingual, multilingual and speakers of dialects which are not mainstream English. Dr. Fiestas was awarded an ASHA multicultural project grant award developing language assessment norms for Hawai’i Creole English and with colleagues she developed the Narrative Assessment Protocol-Spanish which is a language development progress monitoring measure for preschool-aged Spanish speakers. Dr. Fiestas has published research in the areas of dynamic assessment to discriminate children with language impairment from children who are learning English as a second language, assessment techniques which consider typical disfluencies from stuttering-like dysfluencies for bilinguals, bilingual early literacy screening measures and language intervention techniques which will support the transfer of learning across languages for bilingual learners. Dr. Fiestas teaches the Early Language Disorders and School-Aged Language Disorders courses in the SLP-Master’s program.
