PRM Strategic Plan 2023

Mission | Vision | Commitment | Strategic Priorities | Student Learning Outcomes

Mission:

We aspire to be a recognized leader in preparing competent, inclusive, and life-enhancing parks and recreation professionals.

Vision:

We are dedicated to creating a student-centered environment by providing a uniquely personalized, equitable, high-impact education with scholarly activity and experiential opportunities for community and professional service.

Commitment:

We are committed to educating, empowering, and evolving the profession toward a more equitable, inclusive, just, and sustainable future by inviting curiosity through courageous and authentic inquiry within our community.

Strategic Priorities

1. Promote Life Enhancing Justice

The PRM Program will promote life enhancing justice by using a transgressive approach to education that supports students, faculty, and communities ~ both human and other than human ~ to achieve the freedom to live fully in the world by:

• Creating a learning environment that cultivates critical thought and reasoning.
• Enticing students to think critically about the social and ecological worlds.
• Providing an authentic approach to education that liberates and challenges forms of oppression in the world.

2. Deliver Equitable Learning Experiences

The PRM Program commits to providing accessible, equitable, and affordable educational opportunities to all students to the best of our ability by:

• Incorporating equitable design principles into course materials, structure, and communications.
• Evaluating curriculum for opportunities to provide diverse materials and resources, and inclusive content.
• Investigating systems to reduce barriers to student success by making affordable choices available for textbook costs, minimizing unexpected additional fees, stream-lining internship experiences, and reducing curricular roadblocks.

3. Foster Curiosity

The PRM Program will foster curiosity by encouraging students to build relationships with self, community, and our world by:

• Cultivating and celebrating partnerships that increase student options for experience and learning outside of the classroom.
• Promoting impactful engagement to foster interdependent relationships that increase individual, communal, and natural vitality.
• Offering experiential learning opportunities to enhance students’ educational breadth of understanding in the topic area and contribute to broad social impact.

4. Support Reflexivity

The PRM Program will support critical self-reflection for students and faculty to evolve the field of parks and recreation, in part by tending to issues of diversity and wellness by:

• Helping students develop critical thinking skills to assess the interdependency of actions.
• Exploring a diversity of perspectives to evaluate parks and recreation concepts.
• Actively Seeking to uncover our culturally dominant assumptions within the field of PRM.

5. Develop Competent Career Ready Professionals

The PRM Program will prepare students for careers serving diverse communities within parks, recreation, tourism, and related fields by:

• Incorporating trends and practices by monitoring and actively participating in associated professional organizations; and encouraging students to pursue participation in organizations of career relevance.
• Supporting the career development of students by partnering with career services, practitioners and alumni, and other support services.
• Assessing student competency levels throughout academic progress; e.g., student portfolio development and employment of career application skills and materials.
• Designing curricula to build career-ready skills through scaffolding pedagogies and curricula.

Parks and Recreation Management Program Relation to Flagstaff and Northern Arizona:

The Parks and Recreation Management program of NAU is tied to the Flagstaff region through both the surrounding environment and the Arizona economy. The Flagstaff location is uniquely situated to provide an outstanding learning laboratory for Arizona’s future recreation providers, outdoor leaders, outdoor educators, and park rangers.

Furthermore, the Flagstaff area models the economy of Arizona which is driven by tourism. The close relationship between park and recreation provision and tourism allows the program to train students who are cognizant of the importance of recreation to the people of an area for both personal benefits and economic gain and the constraints to recreation development related to environmental concerns.