Northern Michigan Voices is a series by 9&10 News reporter Olivia Fellows in which she interviews a person in the community about a story or experience from their life. Everyone has an interesting story to tell, and we want to give you a voice, Northern Michigan! To submit your own story pitch, see the bottom of this article for more details.
In this edition, Olivia talks to Emily Aslakson, a Ferris State University and Michigan College of Optometry professor who was recognized as one of 16 Fellows in the American Academy of Optometry to have earned the title honor of Diplomate of Optometric Education for 2024.
Hear from Aslakson about how she uses her expertise to help shape the optometrists of tomorrow through education on the connection between early-education student success and vision.
Q: Tell me a bit about yourself and your background.
ASLAKSON: I grew up in Cadillac, not too far from where I’m at now and that’s really nice. My parents are still there, so it’s good being close to them, but I kind of took the scenic route to get to optometry. I didn’t really know what I wanted to do, and as an undergrad was kind of all over the place with a theater major and in psychology. Once I graduated, I worked in a number of different avenues mostly in education, and got interested in the links between vision and learning. From there, that’s what really spurred my interest in going into optometry.
While I was working in the schools, I was also taking the prerequisite courses to get into optometry, was accepted, did my residency in pediatrics and binocular vision and always anticipated going into academia. I didn’t necessarily plan on going into academia so soon after completing my residency, but they happened to have a faculty opening here at Michigan College of Optometry in one of the areas I specialized in which was neuro rehabilitation, was hired, and the rest is history.
Q: What were the key milestones along the way in your educational journey to the prestigious recognition, and can you speak more to the focus on early childhood vision and education?
ASLAKSON: Education has always been kind of one of the guiding themes of this. I want to be an educator in some way, shape or form. What that looks like, I didn’t work out until I made it into optometric education. What kind of spurred it was working in elementary education, and seeing some of my students that were really struggling. It wasn’t a learning disability, it wasn’t anything like that. You could tell there was just some barrier. I went to a training as part of my in-service, and it was starting to look at the link between vision and learning.
It makes perfect sense if there’s something wrong with our visual system, whether we can’t see or we’re having double vision, or things are coming in and out of focus, or words are moving around on the page, obviously learning is going to be impacted. Unless the child gets a formal evaluation from an eye care provider or an optometrist who specializes in this area it may be missed or it’s certainly not going to get picked up on a vision screening.
Seeing that manifest in the students I was working with and wondering if we got these kiddos either the glasses or the treatment that they needed to help could their academic performance be improved both anecdotally and In the literature. When that visual barrier is removed, academic performance can be improved. If that is one of the possible barriers to their academic success, then if we’re able to address it, that’s just one less thing that they have to devote energy to and they can devote it to learning instead.
Diplomate designations are a specialized section in the American Academy of Optometry, and they’ve got a number of different sections. Depending on what your specialty is or your area of expertise, you can pursue the diplomate designation. I chose optometric education because education has always been such an important value to me.
My mentor throughout this process, Dr. Daniel Taylor, is another diplomat in optometric education and he encouraged me to pursue this path as well. Much of my work has been focused on developing teaching interventions in the classroom to help with overall student well-being. That is another important theme for me, social work was one of the areas that I did look at as I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do with my life.
Health, well-being and happiness are things that I value. I very much think that if we’re not happy, if we’re not well, amped up, panicking, anxious or scared we’re not going to learn our best. I chose to focus on different types of teaching strategies to help foster student well-being, so most of those activities are focused on designing classroom activities that allow students to interact with information in a way that was a little a little less scary than doing it on a patient.
When you’re doing something on a patient for the first time, or even when you’re still very new working with patients, there’s a lot of fear of, ‘Oh my gosh, am I going to say something in front of this patient that’s going to, you know, cause them harm? Am I going to do something to this patient that’s going to, you know, cause them harm, or something like that?’ I designed some activities that allowed students to practice thinking about or delivering information to patients outside of a setting where an actual patient was involved.
The workshop that I designed involved using trained actors to serve as standardized patients to deliver bad news. That idea actually came from when I was a student. I am also a trained actress, so we had a small workshop on delivering bad news, and when I sat as a patient, several of my classmates said, ‘Wow, it’s really helpful to have you be the patient, you exhibit some of the emotions that a patient might have if they’re being told that they’re losing their vision or they can no longer drive, or some of those big, big events where a patient would understandably have a lot of emotions.’
Even as someone who’s seasoned in practice, it’s hard to tell somebody that news, but giving students an opportunity to practice giving that news to an actor who can convey some of that emotional response and letting the student just sit with that person and let that patient go through the emotions they need to go through. The response from the students has been overwhelmingly positive and they’re thankful that they get this experience before they have to say it to an actual patient who’s actually going through this.
Q: How have you seen the field of optometry evolve over the years, and what are some of the challenges and big topics that are being discussed right now?
ASLAKSON: Optometry as a profession has changed quite a lot. Obviously, we started just dispensing glasses, eventually contacts, and then moving into more of a medical role or sub-specialties. I think one of the challenges is access to care for people. Optometry is the primary eye care provider, and ophthalmology is there for patients who have advanced medical conditions and need surgery or more advanced medical intervention. Optometrists are at the forefront of being the first person who might recognize many of these eye conditions.
Even practicing in Big Rapids, which is a fairly rural area, I’ll have patients travel from hours away because there isn’t access to care. There are just not enough providers, which I think is a common theme in healthcare in general. Especially in rural regions, it can be difficult for patients to find care if they need more advanced care.
For example, I’ll have patients that come from different states because Ferris State University and the Michigan College of Optometry might be the only place that offers this specific area of optometry that a patient needs.
We are always redefining the role of optometry, especially as we’re growing into all these different sub-specialties and learning more about the impact of our vision on our day-to-day lives.
One area that I’m particularly involved in is traumatic brain injury, and we’re learning a lot more about it. Even when I was a student 10 years ago, we didn’t know a whole lot about it. Now, we’re learning about the impacts of brain injury on the visual system. We’re learning so much about it, and so many patients who’ve had these brain injuries can verbalize, No, my eyes aren’t working and I’m not seeing right,’ even though they may be reading 20/20 on the eye chart. There may be something else going on that’s impacting their perception, some of that higher-order processing and aspects of vision.
Q: What more can you tell me about your approach to mentoring future optometrists, and what are your hopes of what they’re going to take away from your courses?
ASLAKSON: I view good-quality learning as a vulnerable process. You have to be in a place where you feel that you can make a mistake and learn from that mistake. When I work with students and when I mentor potential future students, I strive to create an environment where they don’t feel judged if they make a mistake. I want them to feel comfortable coming to me and saying if they didn’t see a finding in a patient. I need to know that because I need to know how I can help them see it next time. I would say the biggest thing that I try to do when I work with students is just kind of create an environment where they feel challenged. You know, not to say that they don’t feel challenged. I hope they feel challenged, and they should feel challenged, but where they also feel that if I make a mistake, they are not going to be judged and it’s not going to kill a grade so that they can learn from that and then get better.
Q: What is your advice for parents who might want to know more about what they can look out for in their child as they’re going through education to maybe be able to catch some of those signs of vision challenges early on?
ASLAKSON: Teacher rapport is very, very important. There are obvious things like if a student is squinting, or if they have to sit really close to the board, or if they’re looking at a book and they’re kind of moving it back and forth like they are trombone-ing it. Those are, I think, pretty obvious signs that they’re they’re probably struggling to see some less obvious signs.
One that I see a lot is students who write, but they have a hand over an eye, so they’re covering an eye because maybe one eye doesn’t see as well and it’s kind of getting in the way of the other, or maybe they’re having double vision intermittently or constantly. It might not look obvious, they’re not necessarily closing their eye but if they’re covering an eye that can be a sign that something is certainly going on. Even something as simple as using a line or using their finger to kind of keep their place, maybe their eye movements are not able to follow along on a line. Things like getting a headache after reading work or saying that their eyes feel sore or tired. Another common one is what I call the reset blink, a student will look at something and every minute or two, they’ll have to do these big, big blinks to kind of reset their vision if it’s going in and out of focus.
Even some less obvious things like poor handwriting or sloppy handwriting can indicate issues with visual motor or spelling, indicating a there may be a visual memory problem or a student not able to remember things that they’ve seen.
Another question I ask parents a lot is something like, ‘If you read your child a text at whatever level is appropriate for them, are they able to understand and answer questions about it if you read it to them, versus if you or if they read something at that same level? How does the performance compare? Because if they’re able to do well when they’re read too, it’s going in auditorily through their ears, and they can answer questions about it. It’s getting it’s getting to the brain that it’s making sense to them. But if they’re not able to do that when they read it themselves, then that’s a problem with information coming in visually, that maybe it’s just not making sense, or it’s not, you know, getting processed in that way.
Q: What are your goals for the future of optometric education and work with your students?
ASLAKSON: I’m really proud of the Academy for recognizing that being a quality educator is a skill in and of itself, and I hope to continue this momentum. There are relatively few diplomates in optometric education, only nine in the world, and it’s been in designation for about a decade now. I’m hoping that as we continue to gain this traction, that being a quality educator will be valued.
Optometric education, or medical education in general, is unique in that most people don’t have formal training as educators. I’m a little bit of an exception having some of that background, but most people are trained for optometric education and they’re very, very good at optometry at the top of their field. Many of them are good educators because they know their content very, very well.
That’s not to say there aren’t evidence-based methods that have been shown to help students succeed. There’s a pedagogy to it. I really hope to use this as traction to highlight the importance of quality education. I think the fact that the Michigan College of Optometry and Ferris State University have two of the nine diplomates in this area really shows how much being a quality educator is valued here, and how seriously we take the education of our students.
Q: What advice would you give to aspiring optometrists who are just starting their educational journey?
ASLAKSON: It’s a great field. Maybe I’m biased here, but optometrists tend to be to be pretty happy people. I would say, if you’re interested in optometry, definitely start talking to optometrists. Find an optometrist that you can shadow or ask questions about kind of the day-to-day. It is a really exciting profession in that it’s changing and growing and we don’t really even know what it might look like in the next 10-20 years, but it’s a really exciting profession. It’s a great profession for people who are interested in helping people.
Obviously, most of your interactions are going to be with your patients, and it’s kind of a nice profession because you’re helping people see. Most of your patient encounters are going to be very, very positive. Patients come in with a complaint, and most of the time you’re going to be able to give them glasses or contacts or some device and they’re going to leave being able to see or maybe feeling hopeful about their vision and what they’re able to do. It’s kind of a feel-good profession, not to say that there aren’t difficult encounters— there certainly are.
But it’s a great profession if you want to work with people and if you want to help people, there are a lot of different things you can do in optometry. There are a lot of different sub-specialties if you have a very specific interest. I have the optometric education, but there are all sorts of different sub-specialties.
Q: When you’re not teaching or working in the optometry field, how do you like to spend your time?
ASLAKSON: I‘m still pretty involved in our local community theater scene, so if there’s a show going on that I’m interested in oftentimes I’m working on that. Otherwise, I like to spend time with my family. I’ve got a young son and my husband and our cats. I also enjoy cooking.
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