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Discussion Paper Index PageA CHALLENGE BEFORE US
Karla Henderson, Chair; Curriculum in Leisure
Services and Recreation Administration,
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
(originally published in the SPRE Newsletter, Vol. 19, Number 1, Winter 1994/95, p. 5)
I have been thinking lately about what it means to strive to be an
effective educator in this field. More of us are becoming specialists
rather than generalists in a field that is becoming more difficult to
define because of the "product" diversity that exists. They say that
information is doubling every five years and l am frustrated by the
quantities of information needed to be an effective professor in the
field of recreation, park, and leisure studies today. On the other
hand, I am further frustrated that our overall field is weakening
because of our narrow foci on specialties.
Some of my concern about needing a broad knowledge base stems from the way higher education encourages specialization regarding knowledge. In many colleges and universities, the generation of specialized knowledge is a requirement for promotion and tenure. To generate new information, it is necessary to become an expert in a small slice of the recreation and leisure pie." As one becomes more and more specialized, fewer opportunities exist to sample other slices of the recreation pie.
In our field, we are cutting the pie into many slices with our specialties and subspecialties. My growing concern is that fewer faculty and students are able to appreciate and make use of the whole pie. I am particularly concerned about this predicament when l realize that accreditation standards require our students, regardless of specialization, to have a core background in philosophy, programming, leadership, and administration that is usually taught in courses that include all recreation majors. As a faculty member who teaches in these broad recreation areas, l feel I am losing my ability to see the big picture. I feel as if I know about only a few slices of the pie; further I feel that our students are becoming more concerned about a specialty than about the commonalities we in the field have regarding the meaning and importance of leisure in people's lives. As I attended two recent national conferences, one about therapeutic recreation and the other about natural resources, l also became aware of how educators and practitioners in some specialties of the field sometimes do not know how to talk to each other about the broader profession.
I believe that one important function an organization like SPRE can have is to help each of us renew our efforts to hold the field of recreation, park, and leisure services together under one umbrella. The alternative, which waxes and wanes from time to time in our profession, is to dissect the field into allied disciplines that reflect our specialties - e.g., therapeutic recreation into allied health, tourism into business administration, outdoor recreation into forestry, community recreation into public administration. This dissection is theoretically sound for those faculty who value the specialty more than the broad framework of leisure behavior and leisure education that ties us together. Dissection is the only alternative if our field becomes so diverse that we, as faculty, lose sight of the slices of the profession. I hope this dissection does not happen.
Educators are at a crossroads; how we teach the core of the field may reflect where the profession goes and whether or not we continue as a pie or as separate slices searching for other kindred pies. For example, many of our TR students could not care less about the examples I use about outdoor recreation; community recreation students have little appreciation of clinical protocols and leisure education. We as faculty may be partially to blame for the lack of understanding and unity that currently occurs in our field. We have divided ourselves into special-ties and haven't always made our common goals evident to each other or to our students. Further, students have picked up on these divisions and have often modeled our behavior.
I am not sure what the solutions are, or if in fact, we as educators are alarmed by the growing trend toward dissecting this field. Most of us are overworked with our teaching loads, research expectations, and service commitments. l feel I can barely keep up on the literature in my specialized research area, let alone any other specialties. On the other hand, I think those of us who teach in recreation, park, and leisure studies curricula, particularly in the core areas, need to represent the broader field. Further, I believe that as professionals in this field, those of us who have the luxury of teaching only specialized courses need to also reinforce with our students that a bigger pie exists.
If we are committed to a broader field beyond our own specialty, then we need to translate those behaviors into action. We can't all attend specialized conferences, but we can attend those conferences like NRPA and our state meetings that continue to provide sessions that address most of the pieces of the pie. Attendance, however, requires choosing sessions to attend outside our specialty. We can read journals such as Parks & Recreation and peruse articles that we normally would not read because they are no apart of our specialty. l also learn much about the field by supervising student interns. Unfortunately, we tend to divide internship supervision by specialty rather than by some other criteria that would allow us to learn more about all areas of the profession.
I offer these ideas for your consideration. I have tried to reflect my concerns about the common goals of the profession, how we as educators need to understand the profession as a whole, and how we need to communicate that understanding to students and practitioners. SPRE has a number of challenges to address in higher education and I believe fostering the unity of the profession is one important calling. I am interested in your ideas and hope that you will respond through this newsletter or in some other way.