Why I want to be an educational psychologist

This is the first of a series of posts going back over some of my notes from my postgraduate studies in educational psychology in 2018. As a part of our course, we were asked to engage in Online Learning Tasks (OLTs), which generally involved reading one or more particular article/book chapter(s), possibly doing a mini-literature review, and then responding to the material on the course's online forum, often in the form of a "reflection."

The first OLT called for a personal introduction. I entitled mine "Why I want to be an educational psychologist." This is a snapshot of my attitude at the beginning of 2018 (1 year ago, almost to the day), and is still a fair summary but leaves some things unsaid.

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Hi everybody,

My name is Patrick and right now I'm very content to call Katikati - about half way between Waihi and Tauranga - home. That said, I was born in Christchurch and spent the second half of my formative years living on Waiheke Island. I am married and have two beautiful sons.

School was in some ways a struggle for me. My parents moved quite a lot, and somehow I usually ended up being a target for bullying. The faces of bullies varied from setting to setting, so I soon came to the realisation that something I was doing made me a target (I always took the bait!). Moreover, something else wasn't quite right. Though I was a very quick study (I'm humble too), I found that I had trouble staying on task, doing homework, bringing materials to class, or maintaining focus on material once the initial novelty had worn off. In the back of my mind, I started suspecting that something was wrong with me.

I guess you can see where I'm going with this; but it wasn't until I started studying psychology at the University of Canterbury that the possibility I may have ADHD dawned on me, and it wasn't until I had already spent over a decade in tertiary education that my suspicions were officially confirmed...

By that point, I already had an on-again, off-again relationship with education. Bursary in the hard sciences lead to an aborted attempt at a B.Sc. in computer science. I then tried my hand at a trade, figuring I could daydream all I want, talking philosophy with my workmates while doing honest labour. Believe it or not, it didn't work out that way, and the next year I re-enrolled at UoC, determined to work hard studying a new subject - philosophy - which appealed to my appetite for abstract ideas.

Towards the end of my philosophy degree I discovered psychology, was won over by its applied, pragmatic nature (at least when compared to, for instance, meta-ethics), and transitioned into psychology postgraduate research, starting with a Grad.Dip, followed by Honours and Masters. Following my academic curiosity, I soon enough found myself not only embarking on a PhD in evolutionary/social psychology, but also an expectant father.

To my credit, I had aced both my previous postgrad qualifications and had my way paved with a Canterbury Scholarship, but things were only going to get more challenging. PhDs are serious business, like, for real! As the urgency to be a good provider and father grew, I felt I really needed to take stock of where I was at to prepare myself as best I could for the challenges ahead. 

It was only at this point that I started seriously considering that I might have ADHD. I sought help from a counselor, and during a single, brief interview attempted to tell my story, share my suspicions and my reasons for them. The interview was indeed very brief. I was told in no short order that it was pretty much unheard of for PhD students to have ADHD - that there was just no way somebody suffering from ADHD would ever manage to get themselves accepted into a PhD programme. Though I had my doubts about the professional advice I'd received, I felt I had to concede - it'd be epistemically irresponsible to pretend that I knew better than a trained professional! So I buried these concerns for a full two years.

Fast-forward a couple of years, and I found myself in Auckland, struggling to juggle the demands of a rather large and complicated research project with parenting my beautiful, mildly autistic son. Ending my self-imposed moratorium, I sought help from a specialist with experience with adult ADHD. He unreservedly diagnosed me the first day we met.

Soon I came to terms with the fact that an academic career wasn't the best fit for me.  My wife and I engaged in some creative problem solving and we swapped roles - She went back to work and I reinvented myself, adjusting to my new role as a stay-at-home dad, and our new home in Katikati.  Thanks to some timely encouragement from my son's daycare teachers, I started ECE relieving. Why not turn my occupation into a career? Very soon I discovered that teaching children provided me a kind of fulfillment on a day-to-day basis that drawn-out research projects were incapable of providing me. Having found a career that was both intellectually stimulating and immediately gratifying, I filed away my qualifications and spent 3 years working as an untrained caregiver in the nearby town of Waihi.

Before very long I found myself working alongside children I suspected may have unrecognized, unaddressed needs. Staff weren't trained to spot psychological or developmental issues, nor did there seem to be an effective means for a referral to be made even if an issue was correctly recognized. I found myself thinking about what was at stake for a little girl who to me, seemed to be showing pretty strong signs of autism. For this to go unnoticed for months or even years would be a tragedy. If she was indeed autistic, early intervention could be life-changing.

Why do I want to be an educational psychologist? I want to help enable children and adolescents to face those challenges fate may have dealt them and to overcome them, so they may flourish. Looking back at what I've observed as an ECE teacher, I can't help but think there is a lot of good to be done. And I'm hopeful that my experiences as a student - successes and failures both - give me some perspective and insight that may be valuable as I try to do just that.