First year students’ experience of learning: How do our future recreation activity leaders learn?

Abstract

Teaching within a tertiary institution reveals that many students are able to adopt a behaviourist approach to learning. That is, they seek to learn in order to ‘know the facts’ and to be able to apply relevant processes to set situations. However, for students to become good practitioners in their fields and develop work-based skills, they need to engage actively with professional content and be able to apply learning in different contexts. This paper reports findings of the subjective meanings first year students in an activity leadership skill subject attach to their experiences of learning and leading. Interviews conducted with students revealed three qualitatively different but inter-related ways of experiencing leadership as technique, as process and as relationships. The findings suggest that the differences are progressive in complexity and their variation may be accounted for by students’ learning orientations, their personal experience and their developing meanings of leadership.