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Part 1
Concepts and development
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1
Lifelong learning and tourism education
David Airey, Violet V. Cuffy and Georgios C. Papageorgiou
Introduction
During the period since 1945, the context within which education for tourism has been developing has, for the most part, been very positive. Education itself has been increasingly recognised as a source of competitive advantage by countries across the world, and, as global competition has increased, so the focus on education has increased (Airey, 2015). At the same time, tourism itself has shown almost continuous growth, with international tourist arrivals now well over one billion (World Bank, 2017), up from 70 million in 1960 (Burkart and Medlik, 1974), giving growth in employment opportunities and demand for a trained labour force. The outcome has been a huge growth in education provision related to tourism at all levels with the result that tourism is now recognised as an important subject for study. However, while the growth and development of the education provision for tourism have been fairly consistent and geographically ubiquitous, they have not been fully present or indeed particularly coherent at all levels of education.
For formal education, most of the development has been at two distinct levels. The most prominent is at the level of higher education normally for those over 18 years of age, typically leading to higher awards, often at degree level, and typically delivered on a full-time basis. In many ways, the developments in higher education have been among the main the drivers for putting tourism on the education map. Tourism and tourism-related programmes are also found in further education, typically for school leavers aged about 16â18, leading to the award of certificates, and, often, these relate to specific aspects of tourism, such as food production and service, and accommodation, travel agency or visitor attraction operations. Much more rare have been tourism programmes provided during the ages of compulsory schooling, up to about 16 years, although, as noted in one of the reports on this topic relating to Europe (Centre for Strategy and Evaluation Services, 2016, p. 62), âIn a few cases, schools offer specific educational pathways to tourism occupations, within the general school systemâ. Earlier than that, tourism hardly appears at all as a subject for study except, for example, as an element of geographical studies. After full-time formal education, the provision tends to be much more complex, with overlaps with training, and, in many cases, it involves employers, professional bodies, trade associations and trade unions, as well as government and examination bodies in addition to universities and colleges (Airey and Tribe, 2015).
Taking lifelong learning to mean learning that takes place throughout a personâs lifetime and as Cuffy et al. (2012, p. 1403) put it, ânot limited to a specific number of years of exposure to institutional educationâ, this clearly represents a complex range of provision. It is also one where documentation is patchy. For full-time, formal education provided by colleges and universities, the provision is generally clear and indeed fairly well documented. As Cuffy et al. (2012, p. 1402) suggest in their paper on lifelong learning for tourism, âmost research on tourism education and training focuses on higher educationâ. Outside this, the provision is either very scant, because it hardly exists. This is true of the early years of schooling. Or, as in the case of post-formal provision, much of which is more accurately described as training, its complexity seems to have deterred systematic examination and documentation. As Airey and Tribe comment (2015, p. 204) in relation to tourism training âits development is little documentedâ. Such education and training is offered by a wide range of providers, both in the public and private sectors, it is conducted in a wide range of premises, from the work place to the classroom, and it is run over varying time periods from extended full-time courses to short and intermittent training programmes and sometimes it leads to formal qualifications, sometimes merely to certificates of attendance, or even no certification. What this means is that while we can fairly readily identify the progress, development and patterns of higher education for tourism it is much more complex in relation to further education and even more difficult outside these two areas such that lifelong learning per se becomes difficult to identify or assess. This provides an important rationale for the collection presented in this book. The various chapters begin to document the ways in which those interested in tourism can extend and develop their knowledge. This may be for reasons of furthering careers or simply for reasons of interest in an important area of world activity through opportunities for learning presented at all stages whether through formal, often full-time programmes offered by schools and colleges, or through other less formal routes.
With this background in mind this chapter seeks to explore some of the characteristics and key developments in education for tourism with a view to positioning lifelong learning for tourism in a wider setting. The limited documentation for some of the provision obviously means that coverage is not always even and while it tries to take a broad non-country specific approach almost inevitably given the differences in the level of development and in the available sources of information the chapter does concentrate on the experience of western developed countries for many of its examples. After a brief comment on the role and importance of lifelong learning for tourism in general the chapter starts with higher education, which in many ways has been in the forefront of the development of learning opportunities and indeed many universities play an important part in lifelong learning provision by admitting mature students, by providing part time courses and by preparing students to learn how to learn which itself is a key to continuous education. It then moves to further education which plays a similar role but much less well documented. It briefly touches on tourism in the early years before sketching some of the background to the complex provision outside the formal education sector. The chapter concludes with an overview the themes related to lifelong learning that are covered in the following chapters of the book.
The importance of lifelong learning for tourism
As already noted, one of the drivers of the development of education in general and for tourism in particular is the perceived link between an educated workforce and economic prosperity. Ayikoru et al. (2009) draw attention to the extent to which the expansion of university education in the UK in the 1960s was driven by the need for an educated work force. This is as true for tourism as it is for any sector. But tourism also presents some characteristics which make this link with an educated workforce both more important and more challenging than in many other sectors.
It is important for a number of reasons: the tourism sector is generally labour intensive; there is a close, often face-to-face, link between the employees and guests; and the tourism environment is particularly competitive between different destinations, or hotels, or airlines. In this context the talents of the individuals employed in tourism take on a particularly significant role. They need to be able not only to follow set procedures but also to be adaptable and creative in responding to new situations brought, for example, by every customer encounter and they need to be able to spot alternative solutions to problems and above all to be able to innovate. Obviously these characteristics can be developed during formal education and their need provides a rationale for the development of tourism education of a type that encourages creative thinking. But given the changes in the working environment formal education before employment is often not enough. Ongoing education and training also takes on an importance. In other words the need for lifelong learning comes to the fore. McKenzie (1998) emphasises the importance of the lifelong dimension of learning in the light of the complexities of modern societies and the need to be able to anticipate and adapt to change. This is certainly true for tourism and the point is echoed by Austin (2012, p. 58) who, writing about higher education, suggests that âthe primary responsibility of those who teach [âŚ] is to prepare students for an uncertain and changing worldâ. If this is true for those entering the work force, the speed of change makes it even more true throughout their working life.
Beyond tourism as an area of employment, of course, there are other important reasons for providing knowledge and understanding about its development, roles and influence as a significant world activity. The respondents to the research by Cuffy et al. (2012) highlight, for example, the benefits of providing an understanding at primary school level of the economic value of tourism and of environmental protection and of the idea, at the level of adult education, that âtourism was everybodyâs businessâ (2012, p. 1418) and hence needed in general public education. This could be in relation to encouraging a positive view of tourism at the destination, a course pursued by many tourism authorities, or developing moral, cultural and sustainable values in relation to tourism.
Turning to the challenges, many of these stem from the very nature of employment in tourism. Riley et al. (2002) have explored the extent to which tourism is relatively labour-intensive and the jobs in tourism are often highly seasonal, part time and casual, with relatively low barriers to entry and with a high proportion in small and medium-sized enterprises. Partly as a consequence, labour turnover is relatively high; employers, with limited budgets for staff training, are often reluctant to invest in education or skills development for their employees, many of whom will leave at the end of the season, and as a labour-intensive sector, there is inevitably an emphasis on keeping costs down, which influences expenditure on training and development. All of these characteristics tend to work against the recruitment of the most talented and typically the most expensive members of the work force, but in the context of lifelong learning, this does little to encourage widespread demands or funding for on-the-job, mid-career or other types of training.
So, one of the starting points for understanding lifelong learning in tourism is that potentially, it can play a very important part in the success of what is likely to remain a sector which is not only labour-intensive, but one where labour plays a key role in achieving competitive success. But at the same time, it is a sector where the development of labour, through the provision of opportunities for lifelong learning, is often relatively limited. This goes some way to explain the extent to which the developments in higher education, which are driven by a rather different dynamic to those of post-employment education and training, have taken the clear lead in the development of tourism as subject for learning.
Higher education for tourism
Notwithstanding some programme developments dating back to the early years of the 20th century (Airey, 2015; Kozak and Kozak, 2017), higher education for tourism really started in the 1960s. Apart from the remarkable growth in tourism itself, Airey (2005) identified three other changes that prompted the emergence of tourism in the academic repertoire. The first, as already noted here, was the growth in higher education itself with the awareness of the link between an educated work force and economic prosperity (Ayikoru et al., 2009). Airey gives the example of the growth of higher education in Australia with a sevenfold increase in student numbers between 1970 to 1.2 million in 2011 (Airey, 2015). Similar growth rates have been experienced in other parts of the world. Secondly, this growth was supported by the creation of new universities, which typically took a less traditional approach to the programmes of study that they offered. These included the relatively new area of tourism, which was recognised as an area of study that would attract students, foster links with a growing sector of potential employment and was relatively low cost (Airey, 1995). The close links with employment were confirmed in a subsequent study by Airey and Johnson (1999, p. 233) who identified âCareer Opportunitiesâ and âEmployment/Employers Link/Workâ as the top aims of tourism programmes as presented in course catalogues. The third change identified was in the funding for higher education in which increasingly students and/or their parents became responsible for paying for their studies. This had the effect of creating a competitive marketplace in which money directly came with the students. The response of the universities was increasingly to focus on study areas that would attract student numbers, and tourism was identified as one of these. The increasing commercialisation of higher education and the more recent creation of new private and commercial universities have continued this trend.
Given this background, it is not surprising that tourism grew substantially as a programme for teaching and research in the university sector. Airey et al. (2015) report that enrolments on tourism-degree-level programmes in the UK grew from about 20 in 1972 to 9,000 in 2011. In Australia, from the first, such programmes in 1978, there were 61 in 2005, while in China, from the first programme, also in 1978, there were nearly 1,000 tertiary-level education institutes offering degree-level provision in tourism by 2011. Given this level of growth, together with the concomitant increase in the number academics and associated books, journals, conferences and associations, it is hardly surprising that not only did tourism in higher education develop as a subject, but also that those working in higher education set the boundaries of the curriculum and the content to tourism programmes. In other words, the understanding of what it meant to study tourism was created in the university sector and published in some of the early textbooks on the subject. Notably, in the initial stages, importance was given to the vocational dimensions of tourism studies with the inclusion, for example, of professional placements for students with up to one year of their studies on supervised periods in tourism-related employment (Airey and Johnson, 1999). Later, especially following the so-called cultural turn (Airey, 2008b), more attention was given to tourismâs wider environmental, social and cultural dimensions, emphasising the more liberal and reflective elements of the curriculum as described by Tribe (2002). It is these sorts of developments, together with the significant development of tourism-related research (Tribe and Airey, 2007), that have raised the idea that tourism has reached a form of maturity to take its place alongside other social sciences (Airey, 2008a).
The development of tourism in higher education has interesting implications for tourism lifelong learning. First, it clearly represents the completion of one step in the lifelong provision of learning for this significant activity. There are now plenty of programmes available at universities throughout the world from undergraduate to doctoral levels. Most of these are delivered on a full-time basis to students aged between 18â22 years. In other words, while there are plenty of programmes, they are for a relatively small cohort of potential learners. The provision of the programmes by universities on a part-time or distance-learning basis or in other forms suitable for those at later stages in the learning lifecycle is still fairly limited, notwithstanding the development of Massive Online Open Courses, the so-called MOOCs. However, universitiesâ contribution to lifelong learning is not limited to the duration or limited age range of their reach. The nature of university provision, with its focus on helping students to think for themselves in a critical way or to learn how to learn, is instrumental in developing individuals who become lifelong learners. In this way, they potentially help to develop the sort of individuals identified earlier in this chapter, who are able ânot only to follow set procedures but also to be adaptable and creative in responding to new situati...
