Re-imagining leisure education with Canadian hope: will the caravan of American individualism keep rolling?

ABSTRACT

Leisure education needs to move beyond an American individualistic model focused on changing or fixing individuals and can be used to change ecological factors and be used in a system-directed and social policy perspective, such as addressing social problems facing Canadian families and communities. Individualistic development models of leisure education are often associated with a person-centred approach – which is when an individual person is placed at the centre of a program or intervention and human services workers look to the person to identify and express leisure needs, interests, goals and strategies to meet goals. In contrast, an ecological approach to change, also known as system-directed change, occurs when strategies are put forth in order to improve communities or other environmental factors in providing human services. Leisure education approaches, linked to Canadian society, are outlined in order to showcase system-directed and social policy-based leisure education.

KEYWORDS:

• Leisure education
• individualistic development models of leisure education
• social policy leisure education
• system-directed leisure education
• ecological approaches

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Utah is one of only a few states in the United States that requires therapeutic recreation to be a licensed profession.

2. This is a pseudonym. The name of the client I worked with has been changed, along with any identifiable features.

3. According to Sivan (2007), formal leisure education is an explicitly designed leisure education program, whereas informal leisure education is when participants learn about leisure and society or develop leisure skills secondarily or implicitly through a leisure experience.

4. The other 27 learning objectives in this leisure education model, which were derived from six leisure education components, focused on having the client change internal attributes, such as changing personal values, attitudes, skills, and knowledge regarding leisure.

5. This was the first Canadian textbook published in the field of leisure and persons with disabilities.