by Carol Petersen (BPR Consulting)
I am passionate (almost obsessive) about educating others about the importance of leisure.
To be honest, I haven’t always consciously thought about how that came to be. Recent reflection, however, has made me realize this passion likely has its roots in family values and childhood experiences.
As one of four girls of two active and community-minded parents, I always had access to a variety of recreation opportunities. While there were some organized sports, most were informal, unstructured, low cost activities that reflected our family values.
I clearly remember playing hide and seek and creating elaborate go-carts and second homes in the garden and fields on my grandma’s farm, going tobogganing, baking, creating art, and extensive camping and exploring as a family.
In addition to introducing us to many activities, my parents encouraged and role modelled civic responsibility and leadership — my father through his rural development work in agriculture, and my mother as a Brownie leader and school volunteer. When my older sister chose recreation for university, I saw the unique opportunity to do work that I could relate to and saw the value of.
When I graduated from university, most of my friends were attracted to jobs that were tangible (and often better paid) in programming and facility management. As a nurturer, I felt it was important for people to understand more about leisure as a part of their life and how it could be used to develop skills, connect with other people, get fit, discover, and build community.
It helps that I am a curious person and have always asked “why”. I seek to understand, have a desire to help, and as a big picture thinker I enjoy the challenge of making meaning of situations and finding solutions. I also have a constant drive to connect things…. connecting people to information, people to places, programs to people, etc. This plays out in the form of leisure education, doing what I do best; bridging, connecting, promoting and enabling – enabling others to access and enjoy leisure. All of my jobs ultimately have been about the use of recreation as a vehicle to make things better.
I guess the revelation for me has been that leisure IS definitely a learned competency/capacity and not something innate to everyone. This must become a priority in the delivery of recreation and leisure services to build capacity and help people make conscious, informed choices regarding their leisure. The process of educating for leisure can be an individual journey, a group process, an organizational strategy AND should be a cornerstone of the field of Recreation and Parks.
The first step in this process is increasing awareness of the potential VALUE of recreation and leisure so people will be encouraged, motivated, and moved to do something about it. This can happen in many different ways and is an excellent place to start with both individual and organization level leisure education. The onus is on each and every practitioner to ensure an awareness of the benefits of leisure and the core elements of choice, experience, and outcomes.
To help facilitate this fundamental role of leisure practitioners, my colleagues are researching, studying, and defining the competencies required to for leisure literacy so we can systematically develop curriculum for leisure education and ensure comprehensive learning opportunities.
I am excited to see what comes out of this – weaving the best of both research and practice so we practice what we preach and preach what we practice in order to bring the very best of leisure education!
Leisure Education 