Dr. Bryon Martin, assistant professor of recreation at Henderson State University, was invited to participate and present his research paper at the Eighth International Social and Applied Gerontology Symposium at Akdeniz University located in Antalya, Turkey, last fall.
Martin’s paper, “Recreational Boating and Lifespan Enhancement: Strategies for Practitioners,” focuses on community recreational boating programming for aged citizens grounded in the Gemeinschaft-Gesellschaft theory by Tonies. Martin was the sole invited participant representing the United States.
Upon return, Martin linked the scholarly, multicultural experience with his Henderson program and course teaching. In class, Martin facilitated visual messaging and dialogue, some in Turkish, which was exchanged between Leadership in Recreation class students and students from Akdeniz University in Turkey. The students had much in common.
Also, Martin’s furthering of the objectives of his Introduction to Outdoor Recreation and Sport class, which includes global perspective on boating, history, design, and function was aided by dialogue experienced and the information and images gathered during two boating site visits in Turkey.
The invitation to submit and ultimately present the research in Turkey was made possible through multi-cultural scholarly dialogue and collaboration. The forthcoming book Perspectives on Happiness stemmed from a conference on the same theme in Budapest, Hungary.
The maintaining of a scholarly network of support and friendship yielded a recent collaboration with Henderson art department students. As one of the four co-editors of the book, Martin suggested the request for submissions from the art students, and, at the direction of faculty member Kasten Searles, cover submissions were submitted by students and a finalist selected by Martin and fellow editors. The student, Amanda Cordell, will now have a book cover credit to add to her portfolio.
Although the Perspectives on Happiness project originated at his previous institution, the final product has included Henderson. Future collaborations are ongoing.