A Portrait of Connection through Consultation: Tasmanian Senior Secondary Sport and Recreation Management Students—Cross-Sectoral Partners and the Role of Authentic and Meaningful Pedagogy to Impact a Small Island Community

Abstract

ABSTRACT In the 21st century, the need for curricula and student-centered inquiry to be authentic, meaningful and transformative is widely accepted by the primary, secondary and tertiary education sectors. To achieve this, participation of high-school students in university curricula is an approach that should be considered, as it could extend the education and societal opportunities typically available. However, so far there exists a shortage of literature discussing this approach or evaluating its long-term impacts. The island state of Tasmania (Australia) is a small embryonic-regional-economy in which the youth are often held back from navigating their way into prosperous adulthood by long-established societal and financial challenges, including seventh (7th) generation unemployment, the highest youth suicide rate in the country, an inert labor market, reduced numbers of fulltime jobs, an increasingly growing dependence on welfare, and one of the country’s highest school drop-out rates. Combined, these issues appear overwhelming. Since 2014, the state’s only university, education department and local industry have collaborated to deliver deeper learning to senior secondary students. Data suggest the “deeper” approach has been meaningful because it meets the immediate and longer-term needs of those the pre-tertiary and tertiary education systems are attempting to serve. Given the collaboration and longer-term needs, a university 100 level Sport & Recreation Management (SRM) course delivered to senior secondary school students (years 11 and 12) through the lens of a community of emerging practice has merit because the university is well placed to facilitate complementary thinking for sophisticated phenomena.