Stirring up smiles

Hippotherapy barn provides unique experience for university students

All health-related fields require students to complete observation and clinical hours, but Harding’s physical therapy and communication sciences and disorders students have the unique opportunity to do so in a barn. Stirrups and Smiles is a nonprofit organization founded to provide occupational, physical and speech therapy to children using equine therapy treatment strategies. Harding students are able to volunteer, observe and complete clinical hours with the organization.

A win-win opportunity Assistant professor for communication sciences and disorders Jennifer Fisher is current president of Stirrups and Smiles board of directors. She also is a certified speech-language pathologist with training in hippotherapy. Coming from a family that grew up around horses and already having an equine interest, Fisher said the opportunity to build a bridge between Harding and Stirrups and Smiles looked like a win-win.

“We acquired a facility to rent — a barn and some land from a gentleman about eight miles west of town,” Fisher says. “Once we got that established, we got our horses and found a horse handler. All the pieces started coming together, and we began operating.” That was nine years ago, and at that time, occupational therapy and physical therapy were available. In August 2017, Fisher attended a training, and Stirrups and Smiles was able to start offering speech therapy services as well.

“I thought, if I could do hippotherapy, then I could have Harding student clinicians work with me, and they could have a clinical practicum setting doing hippotherapy, which is very unique,” Fisher says. “We are always looking for ways to make our program unique and marketable to our students. We saw this as a great opportunity.”

Since 2017, seven students, both undergraduate and graduate, have conducted their clinical practicums under Fisher’s guidance. However, clinical experience is not the only way to get involved with Stirrups and Smiles. The nonprofit relies heavily on volunteers to operate at its best.

Vital components While many volunteers are Harding students working on their undergraduate or graduate degrees in communication sciences and disorders or physical therapy, anyone is welcome to volunteer at the barn after completing volunteer orientation typically held once at the beginning of each semester. The volunteer program is completely student led. Currently, junior CSD major Mary Austin is volunteer coordinator. She heard about Stirrups and Smiles before she ever set foot on campus her freshman year and has been involved ever since.

“I grew up riding horses, working with horses,” Austin says. “When I read the email, I ran into the kitchen and was like, ‘Mom! You’ll never believe this email I got!’ My whole freshman year, I was a side walker and just went out and did normal volunteer work a couple times a week. Then at the beginning of my sophomore year, I became the volunteer coordinator.”

Austin says she has seen upwards of 75 people rotate in and out as volunteers, with a consistent eight to 10 per week. As volunteer coordinator, she is responsible for leading the orientation to talk about safety, protocol, horse safety and roles during a therapy session, and she also does scheduling each week for the volunteers.

“We always talk about how we really couldn’t do anything without our volunteers,” Austin says. “We have to have two side walkers per session — it’s a mandated protocol. They do a lot more than just walk beside the horse during sessions. They greet our clients when they arrive. They help us clean the barn and help us get the horses ready for sessions. We have a great operational system in place, but they do so much work that really helps everything run so much smoother.”

Fisher expressed similar sentiments of the value of volunteers. In addition to cleaning the barn, grooming the horses and organizing materials, Fisher considers side walking one of the most important jobs as a volunteer.

“During a therapy session, you’ve got the therapist, the horse handler, and then you have two side walkers who walk alongside the horse during the session as a safety measure,” Fisher says. “Those two people are always volunteers, and they’re essential — we can’t do the session without that component. Harding students have really and truly made this happen.”

Inna Swann, Ph.D., DPT, is an assistant professor of physical therapy and has volunteered as a side walker. She explains what it is like to serve in the role.

“We guard the child to make sure that they are safe,” Swann says. “We interact — for example, we would throw a ball, and the child catches the ball while they’re on the horse, so as the child rotates, they work on trunk rotation. Students can learn from reading articles and different information, but it’s nothing like going there and experiencing it firsthand.”

Benefits in the barn “The goal of hippotherapy is not for the client to learn how to ride a horse or gain horsemanship skills,” Fisher says. “The goals of hippotherapy are the same goals that I would have if I was in a traditional setting for speech therapy.”

Fisher goes on to explain that the equine movement is simply a treatment strategy to achieve functional outcomes desired by the client and their family. From a speech therapy perspective, Fisher explains, the horse’s movement contributes to the client’s attention and sensory system, providing input that position the client to achieve speech goals.

“The setting is very conducive for speech and language therapy,” Fisher says. “We know from research that in order for behavior to change, there’s got to be motivation. It’s just a naturalistic setting that lends beautifully to language enrichment.”

Swann spoke to similar values from the aspect of physical therapy and the way a horse’s movement mimics that of a human gait. She explains how as the child sits on the horse, their postural muscles are forced to engage, and as a result, the client’s balance, posture control and motor control benefit simply from riding the horse.

“Besides being on the horse, just being in the fresh air or in the barn is a different surrounding versus being in a therapy gym,” Swann says. “Sometimes they even bring the child — before they would even get them on the horse — to have the child interact with the animal. There are so many benefits to hippotherapy.”

Aside from the individual therapy goals for each child, Swann and Fisher agree that the exposure to interprofessional practice is a major benefit to student volunteers.

“I think any type of opportunity the students get in that interprofessional setting is always beneficial because we can always learn from each other,” Swann says. “I know that learning from occupational therapists and speech therapists is always a benefit to me personally. I just think any type of interprofessional direction is so beneficial for our improvement and our professional learning.”

Fisher says she enjoys seeing students take ownership of their volunteer efforts and watching as they learn more about other areas of therapy and how their chosen discipline fits into it. Her excitement may in part stem from her personal experience working with an occupational therapist during a big moment for a client.

“We ended up collaborating during the session,” she says. “[The OT] is working on fine motor control and balance and things, and I realize [the client] has gone 30 minutes in the session and has never said a word. So I start targeting speech and language, and we start working together, which was beautiful because it was just a perfect scenario for interprofessional practice. We teach interprofessional practice because we want our students to conduct interprofessional practice.”

As a student, Austin says the entire experience has opened up a possible future opportunity and that hippotherapy certification is definitely not out of the question. Regardless, she says her observation of professionals in occupational and physical therapy has been beneficial as she will work closely with them as a future speech-language pathologist. She describes the therapy setting as creative.

“I’ve seen where a client has started and where the client is now, and it’s such a huge difference,” Austin says. “That really made me see the bigger picture of the program. I work in the clinic [on campus], and it is such a creative program, but when we’re out at the barn, you have to be creative in a whole different sense.”

Where a traditional therapy setting is one-on-one interaction between therapist and client, hippotherapy at the barn requires so many moving parts — the horse, the client, the therapist, the horse handler and two side walkers, at minimum. The dynamic of this social atmosphere provides clients, therapists and volunteers with a unique alternative to a traditional clinic.

“From a volunteering perspective, you always feel like you’re involved,” Austin says. “From the perspective of someone who is learning about the profession, you get to see how multidimensional and how flexible the therapy process can be, and that’s something that has taught me a lot about being a clinician.”

Looking to grow As a nonprofit, and with so many pivotal pieces to each session, Stirrups and Smiles relies on more than volunteers to succeed — they also need donors. Fundraisers are part of their annual calendar, and as volunteer coordinator, Austin helps out with the planning and execution of various efforts. Their largest annual event is a rodeo and silent auction held each spring.

Last year’s rodeo featured a new twist as Austin put her creativity to the test. On a whim, she decided to create authentic horse paintings for sell in the silent auction.

“I pitched this idea of getting our horses to basically paint pictures,” Austin says. “[Fisher] was like, ‘If you can make that work, run with it, and let’s see what happens.’ From [the horses] moving and being interested in the canvas and wanting to see what it was, they ended up painting a lot of things on canvases.”

The result included 10 works of art, complete with small business cards highlighting the horse’s name followed by the title “equine artist.” The art featured work done with a paintbrush attached to the horse’s halter as well as original pieces using a horse’s mane, tail and hoof print.

While there are no current plans for an art exhibit this year, the rodeo and silent auction will still be on the calendar. In the winter, they hold a gift-wrapping drive to raise money and help people get ready for the holidays. From a volunteering and fundraising perspective, the goal is simply to get more people aware and involved in the good that is happening at Stirrups and Smiles.

“We are wanting to grow the operation,” Fisher says. “We have many kids on the waiting list. It’s simply a matter of growing in terms of [our number of] horses and the facility — we’re at capacity and wishing we could do more because we certainly have the clientele.” One thing is certain: The organization hopes to continue to stir up smiles for years to come, and Harding’s Center for Health Sciences students have a grand opportunity to help make it happen.

— Jantzen Haley, editor

If you are interested in learning more or getting involved with Stirrups and Smiles, find them on their Facebook page, Stirrups and Smiles, or visit their website, stirrupsandsmiles.wixsite.com/searcy.