Leadership roles and responsibilities in a volunteer fire department are no different from those of a full-time, paid, career department. Yet volunteer fire officers and fire chiefs have the added challenge of leading unpaid volunteers in an organization that typically has few resources to invest in formal leadership development. In the absence of…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to study how learning within the fire and rescue services may be conceptualized, with special attention paid to tunnel fire safety. Previous studies have developed a model to understand learning in emergency response work. The concept of learning is extended from observed changes in relevant settings to also…

The United States fire service is at a critical crossroads. Can it continue relying on outdated educational methodology to teach the 21st century fire instructor, or does it enact change to create an innovative, modern approach to instructor education? Fire Departments are rapidly losing decades of knowledge through retirement of their senior…

Numerous fires during demonstrations in secondary schools, museums, and science centers have occurred while using flammable liquids. This calls to light the need to educate undergraduate students and educators in the safe handling and use of these flammable chemicals. Understanding the benefits and risks of flammable liquids should be an essential…

America's fire departments are busier than ever, responding to both emergency and non-emergency calls that have dramatically increased over the last several decades (National Fire Protection Association [NFPA], 2021b). This dissertation in practice analyzed the on-duty training model of a mid-sized fire department in the northwestern United…

Immersive virtual reality (VR) is a technology that can be effective for procedural skills training through game-based simulations such as serious games. The current study describes the instructional design, development, and evaluation of the FSCHOOL fire preparedness serious game in a cave automatic virtual environment (CAVE-VR) for elementary…

This review paper synthesizes peer-reviewed empirical research published between 2010 and 2021 about wildland fire communication practices. Our goal was to systematically review and provide an overview of how wildland fire communication has been empirically studied, and theoretical and methodological underpinnings and representativeness of this…

Fire and rescue operations in tunnels constitute unusual and complex working environments for first responders. The ability to make correct decisions, based on the tunnel's specific characteristics, demands welltrained incident commanders equipped with sufficient knowledge and skills. The potential catastrophic consequences of tunnel fires have…

Instructional design in a fire academy is essential for high academic achievement while students learn the basics of firefighting and hazardous materials. It is critical to explore concerns about balancing the students' cognitive load because of a significant decline in academic achievement. Students pursuing a firefighting career at a community…

This article explores school counselors' experiences of the 2017 Sonoma Complex wildfires. Thirty-eight school counselors completed a 20-item survey exploring impact and responses to the devastating wildfires. Results detail school counselors' insights regarding post-fire responses and the impact of the fires on students, families, and school…

In this essay the author recalls the process of organizing and interpreting an exhibition of art and language made in response to a catastrophic fire that devastated California's Sonoma and Napa counties in late 2017. The Sonoma Valley Museum of Art invited a group of artists and writers to be part of its small exhibition planning team to help…

The study aimed to statistically analyze forest fire perceptions and cognitive deficits of children through drawings. Results showed that children's perceptions on forest fire were under desirable levels. Also, perception levels were significantly impacted by gender and grade level, whereas impact of school type was not significant. Since…

Safety education aims to promote safe habits through experience-oriented education that combines knowledge, skills and attitudes. However, in situations where experience-oriented safety education is challenging, realistic content created through technological advancements can indirectly function as an excellent safety education tool that allows…

In this paper we propose the concept of 'becoming-with' in relation to the experience of the catastrophic fires in the summer of 2019-2020 in Australia, and their implications for research into young children's response to bushfires, and their learning about bushfire recovery, which resulted in the development of an arts-based project to explore…

Background: Video-based training has been widely adopted by private organizations and public authorities to educate occupants on various types of building emergencies. However, the effectiveness of video-based training for preparing occupants for building emergencies has not been rigorously studied nor has the impact of emergency type been…