EPISODE 068 | The Ongoing Journey of a Rogue Scholar

This is the beginning of an introspective mini-series of episodes – combining theory and lived experience together in conversation. 

Join Melissa as she reflects on her journey as an occupational therapist, educator, entrepreneur, and now, graduate student. 

Pursuing a master's degree means facing logistical and emotional challenges. Melissa opens up about what pushed her to apply years later, and shares how adult education theory has reshaped her professional life and identity, especially as she navigates new territories in midlife, business, and learning.

Key Takeaways in today's episode:

• Nonlinear Paths are Powerful: You don’t need a traditional journey to be an effective scholar or practitioner.
• Reflection is Action: Taking time to reflect—privately or publicly—can offer clarity, direction, and meaningful professional growth.
• Learning Should Fit Who You Are Now: Adult education is about learning in ways that align with your current life, skills, and brain—not forcing old habits that no longer suit you.
• Embrace Identity Shifts: Disruptions in identity can lead to innovative paths, deeper self-awareness, and expansive professional possibilities.
• Integrate Theory and Experience: The most powerful learning comes from integrating theoretical frameworks with lived, practical experience.
• Build and Find Your Community: Seek out mentors, peers, and communities that support your curiosity, growth, and integrity.

Up Next: We’ll take a deeper dive into the influential Mi’kmaq guiding principle of Two Eyed Seeing and its impact on Melissa’s work in prenatal, postnatal health, and community partnership.

Tune in, stay connected, and keep learning in the ways that feel true to you.

For more stories and reflections, subscribe to the OTGR Podcast and join Melissa on this continuing journey of growth, learning, and leadership.

Transcript

Melissa LaPointe [00:00:03 - 00:01:03]

Welcome to the OTs Gone Rogue podcast. I'm your host, Melissa Lapointe. Over the years, I've worked closely with thought leaders, changemakers, and OTs who are ready for something more. And now I'm inviting you behind the curtain where you'll hear stories about overcoming adversity, challenging the status quo, and finding the courage to do things differently. Let's dive in. Welcome back, everyone, to another episode. As you may have already heard in the intro, I'm your host, Melissa Lapointe, and some of the hats I wear include occupational therapist, coach, educator, program director, and as I've been reminding myself throughout my master's program, a rogue scholar in every sense of the word. In today's episode, I want to bring you a little deeper into my world as an adult educator and a graduate student.

Melissa LaPointe [00:01:05 - 00:03:01]

One of the courses that I'm taking right now— so I referenced this in the previous episode— so it's a course on continuing professional education, and this course has been a well-received bridge between my work as an entrepreneur and my work as an educator and program developer. The course looks at how professionals learn across the span of their careers, how identity and professionalism evolve over time, and how our work is shaped by ongoing reflection, collaboration, and context. We have been exploring everything from professional identity and authenticity to communities of practice, mentoring, ethics, power, and some of the emerging formats, including technology, that are reshaping how adults learn. So for the final assignment, we were asked to create a continuing professional education plan with the option of pairing it with a creative artifact, something that would bring our learning to life in a way that feels authentic to who we are as practitioners. The idea of this was to reflect on ourselves as lifelong learners, and then to ground that reflection in theory and express it through a medium that feels meaningful. So some of the examples that my professor was giving us— at the beginning of each class, she would share a different example of something that her students had done in the past. And these examples included sculptures, Poems, drawings, photographs, and in one case, a student even baked and decorated a cake. In other words, our professor was very much encouraging us to think outside the box.

Melissa LaPointe [00:03:03 - 00:04:22]

As I started mapping out my plan and thinking about the kind of artifact I wanted to create, I realized that this assignment was offering me a chance to reflect in a way I hadn't done publicly in a long time. And that's how this episode and this reflective stretch of episodes became part of my creative artifact for my continuing professional education plan. Now, before we go any further, I do want to name something upfront. So in this episode and in the next one for sure, but in a few of these episodes, you're going to hear parts that definitely sound more polished or academic. And that is intentional. So there are going to be moments where it sounds like I'm reading, because what I'm doing is I'm, I'm literally pulling from sections of some of my written assignments, and I'm bringing them here as part of my creative process. So this course has helped me to connect the dots between the different layers of my work. So the entrepreneur, The educator, the program designer and director, the community partner, the consultant.

Melissa LaPointe [00:04:23 - 00:05:30]

And it sparked something for me. I realized that this podcast could be part of my creative process and part of my community of practice. So a place where I can think out loud, where I can integrate theory with lived experience, and where I can invite you, my listeners, into that reflection with me. So I'm killing two birds with one stone, so to speak. So over the next handful of episodes, you are going to notice a slightly more reflective tone. So these are conversations shaped by the questions I'm exploring through my coursework, through my own learning, and through the evolution of my work behind the scenes. So today, I want to start by sharing the real story of why I returned to grad school. So not the polished version, but the honest version, and how adult education theory has shifted not only the way I teach, but the way I understand myself.

Melissa LaPointe [00:05:31 - 00:06:18]

If you've been following my work for a while, you know that I've spent just over the last decade building programs for therapists, for organizations, And for communities in rural British Columbia. But what many people don't know is that returning to graduate school wasn't a sudden decision. This was something I've been quietly wanting for years. About 4 years ago, I came close to applying to this very program. I had my references lined up. I had my application letter started. I had already jumped on a call with the director of the program to talk about if it would be a good fit for where I was in my career. I was ready to hit submit.

Melissa LaPointe [00:06:20 - 00:07:24]

And then something in me hesitated. It didn't quite feel like the right time. I had some big opportunities in front of me, and my company hadn't yet reached a stage where I was consistently on salary and where I could step back without honestly feeling like I was totally messing everything up. But the desire didn't go away. It simply needed space, space for the business to grow, but also space for me to grow. Underneath that timing was something deeper. I was also going through a period of identity disruption. When I first started on my journey of going rogue, I was stepping out of traditional OT practice and into this messy, beautiful, unconventional work of prenatal/postnatal health, entrepreneurship, and coaching.

Melissa LaPointe [00:07:26 - 00:08:19]

Meaningful work? Yes. But I couldn't always see where I fit anymore in the big picture. At one point, I even dropped the OT title entirely. So I had let go of my clinical practice, and I had fully immersed myself into the world of coaching and consulting. That year, I registered with our provincial regulatory body as a non-practicing OT. And with that, came both an email and a lengthy voicemail from our college, making it very clear that I was not to call myself an occupational therapist, I was not to refer to myself as an occupational therapist, and I was not to identify as an occupational therapist in any capacity. That was a bit of a wake-up call. And I still moved forward with the decision.

Melissa LaPointe [00:08:21 - 00:09:38]

Not because I didn't value the profession, but because I wasn't sure if the title still belonged to the work that I was doing, or if it was quietly holding me back. So that year that I was registered as a non-practicing OT, because just to fast forward, I did end up re-registering the year after as an OT, but that year— was disorienting. It was exciting and it was expansive, but it was also isolating. I didn't know which parts of my identity were coming with me and which parts I was leaving behind. Looking back, I now see it as one of those moments that Jack Mesarow might describe as a disorienting dilemma, the kind of experience that cracks things open, And invites you into a different way of seeing yourself. And this is where the story starts to come full circle. So as many of you know, because I often showed it from the rooftops, I grew up on Prince Edward Island, so Canada's smallest province on the East Coast. And I went to OT school at Dalhousie University in Halifax, where the director at the time was none other than Dr.

Melissa LaPointe [00:09:38 - 00:10:31]

Elizabeth Townsend. Years later, during a trip home to PEI, I learned after a little bit of sleuthing that Dr. Townsend had moved back to Prince Edward Island as well. And something in me, I didn't even know if she would remember me, but something in me, the part craving connection and a sense of belonging, nudged me to reach out. She did remember me. And she agreed to meet. So we met up for coffee, we went for a walk, and I shared everything that I was navigating: the evolution of my work in prenatal/postnatal health and how that was leading to more work in women's health, the identity questions, the pull towards something I couldn't yet articulate. She listened deeply, as Dr.

Melissa LaPointe [00:10:31 - 00:11:39]

Townsend does, And then asked me a question that I just didn't forget. She asked me, have you ever considered doing a master's degree? She didn't say it to legitimize my work or fix my uncertainty. She said it because she could see something I couldn't yet see, the threads running through everything I was building, community, leadership, women's health, adult education, learning, and identity. Then she told me about the Master of Adult Education program at St. FX, the same program where she completed— excuse me, I should say the same program that she completed before her PhD. So she talked about St. FX and this master's program, as a place where experience mattered, where identity could be explored, and where learning was grounded in real communities and real contexts. She planted the seed.

Melissa LaPointe [00:11:41 - 00:12:50]

And while it took a few years for the timing to align, that seed stayed with me through every program I built, every partnership I nurtured, every question I wrestled with about who I was becoming. So when I finally applied, St. FX wasn't just a choice. It was actually the only program I researched and the only program I applied to. It felt like this return to my East Coast roots and to my values. Coming back to graduate school though, in my mid-40s, That's been really eye-opening. And to be fully transparent, I was a little nervous about navigating school at this stage of life with my ADHD. So the strategies that I used to survive university in my 20s are not the strategies that support me now, not with a business to run, A family, and a neurospicy brain that works very differently than it did back then.

Melissa LaPointe [00:12:52 - 00:14:10]

Coming back to school as not only an adult, but an adult woman in perimenopause, this has required a completely different kind of self-awareness, structure, and compassion. What surprised me though, is how much adult education theory actually supports me. So instead of trying to force myself into old systems and old productivity habits, this program invited me to learn in ways that align with how my brain actually works today, not how it used to work. And that alone has been incredibly freeing. I'm not starting from the beginning. I'm coming into this with decades of lived experience, trial and error, and identity work. I'm also wearing many hats: CEO, educator, consultant, community partner, parent, and I am navigating real-life responsibilities. And when I look back over my career, I can see that I've been an adult educator for a very long time, long before I had the language for it.

Melissa LaPointe [00:14:11 - 00:15:20]

I started tutoring when I was 14, and I continued tutoring throughout high school and university. I've been a workshop facilitator, a trainer, a consultant, a mentor to other clinicians. I've spent years teaching parents, practitioners, leadership teams, and community partners. Graduate school simply gave me the frameworks to understand what I was already doing. So when I started this master's program, adult education theory quickly became more than content. It became a mirror. Andragogy affirmed what I'd always believed, that adults learn best when learning is relevant, practical, meaningful and grounded in real-world experience. Transformative Learning helped me make sense of the identity shifts I've been guiding clinicians through for years, helping OTs move from therapist to entrepreneur and from clinician to CEO.

Melissa LaPointe [00:15:22 - 00:16:25]

I could see how so many of my clients were working through their own disorienting dilemmas. And how my role was to hold space for those shifts. Self-Directed Learning validated the way I've always structured my programs, offering choice, agency, structure, and flexibility. It reminded me that adults don't just need information; they need autonomy, scaffolding, and room to move at their own pace. Critical adult education deepened this even further. It gave me language for something I'd felt for a long time, that learning is not neutral. That power, privilege, structures, and lived experience shape what is learned and how it is learned. For me, working in rural health, in Indigenous communities, in women's health, This wasn't theory, it was lived reality.

Melissa LaPointe [00:16:26 - 00:17:44]

At the same time, this program has challenged me to think about my own patterns of learning, the ways I sometimes use learning expansively as a way to grow and stretch, and the ways I sometimes use it avoidantly as a way to delay action or stay in research mode a little too long. And I know that some of you can relate to that. And naming that, yes, it's been uncomfortable at times, but also incredibly useful. It's helped me to see failure less as a verdict and more as feedback, a way of understanding what's working and what isn't working and adjust accordingly. Graduate school has given me the language, the ethics, and the grounding to articulate work I had already been doing intuitively for years. It helped me understand that I wasn't outside the field of education. I was very much immersed in it. Now, this identity, this idea of being a rogue scholar, That didn't come from academia.

Melissa LaPointe [00:17:44 - 00:18:35]

It came from the community I built. Over the years, I've connected with OTs who think differently. Therapists who question traditional models, who crave creativity and purpose, who resist hustle culture, and who want autonomy and alignment. Therapists who learn through reflection, Conversation, story, community, and experimentation. These OTs didn't fit neatly into the boxes they were handed. And through this master's program, I realized that neither do I. I learned through curiosity and cycles of trial and error. I learned through human connection and real-world application.

Melissa LaPointe [00:18:36 - 00:19:37]

That is adult learning. And that's what it means to be a scholar, not in this ivory tower sense, but in this grounded, integrative, relational sense. A rogue scholar, in my mind, is someone who learns deeply, who teaches generously, and who refuses to separate theory from lived experience. Someone who brings their whole self to this work. Someone who cares about evidence and ethics and also cares about context, nuance, and humanity. For me, claiming the identity of rogue scholar has been a way of naming what I was already living and a way of honoring the clinicians, the thought leaders, and changemakers I work with. who are doing the same. Returning to school hasn't pulled me away from my business or community work.

Melissa LaPointe [00:19:38 - 00:20:33]

It's actually sharpened it. It's helped me design programs with clearer intentionality. It's helped me to integrate learning theory into business coaching. It's helped deepen my work with Indigenous partners. through frameworks like Two-Eyed Seeing. It's helped me to build systems that honor how adults grow and sustain change, and to strengthen my role as a facilitator of real-world transformation. In many ways, this master's program has been a process of naming what I've been intuitively doing for years. And naming it has brought clarity, clarity that's helped me navigate this last year of growth in a way that feels more grounded and sustainable.

Melissa LaPointe [00:20:34 - 00:21:38]
 
It's also given me a more solid foundation for my continuing professional education plan, not just in terms of what I want to learn next, but in terms of who I'm becoming as an adult educator, As a leader and a scholar. If there is one thing I hope you take from today's episode, it's this: you don't need a traditional path to be a scholar. You don't need a perfectly linear career or a neatly packaged identity. You just need to stay curious, stay reflective, and stay rooted in your purpose. Even when that purpose leads you outside the lines of traditional practice. In the next episode, we're going to move more deeply into one of the frameworks that has shaped my work in prenatal/postnatal health and community partnership, the Mi'kmaq guiding principle of two-eyed seeing. Until then, take care, everyone, and keep learning in the ways that feel true to you. Thank you.