The Routledge Handbook of Tourism and Hospitality Education

Dianne Dredge, David Airey, Michael J. Gross, Dianne Dredge, David Airey, Michael J. Gross

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781135018948
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Industria dell'ospitalità e del turismo
• Index: Business

Tourism is much more than an economic sector, it is also a social, cultural, political, and environmental force that drives societal change. Understanding, responding to, and managing this change will inevitably require knowledge workers who are able to address a range of problems associated with tourism, travel, hospitality, and the increasingly complex operating environment within which they exist.The purpose of this Handbook is to provide an insightful and authoritative account of the various issues that are shaping the higher educational world of tourism, hospitality and events education and to highlight the creative, inventive and innovative ways that educators are responding to these issues. It takes as its central focus a dynamic curriculum space shaped by internal and external factors from global to local scales, a variety of values and perspectives contributed by a range of stakeholders, and shifting philosophies about education policy, pedagogy and teaching practice. A benchmark for future curriculum design and development, it critically reviews the development of conceptual and theoretical approaches to tourism and hospitality education. The Handbook is composed of contributions from specialists in the field, is interdisciplinary in coverage and international in scope through its authorship and content.Providing a systematic guide to the current state of knowledge on tourism and hospitality education and its future direction this is essential reading for students, researchers and academics in Tourism, Hospitality, Events, Recreation and Leisure Studies.

Part I Introduction to the Handbook

DOI: 10.4324/9780203763308-1

1 Tourism, hospitality and events education in an age of change

David Airey

School of Hospitality and Tourism Management, University of Surrey, UK

Dianne Dredge

Department of Culture and Global Studies, Aalborg University, Denmark

Michael J. Gross

School of Management, University of South Australia, Australia

DOI: 10.4324/9780203763308-2

Introduction

Taken together, tourism, hospitality and events (TH&E) in university education have now had about 40 years of fairly continuous growth and development. During this time they have attracted the attention of a number of researchers and officials who have sought to explain, rationalize, theorize and draw conclusions and predictions about their development. Notably the edited work by Airey and Tribe (2005) brought together some of the thinking at least about the tourism elements of education and more recently a major study in Australia has reviewed the progress, issues and challenges for these subjects (Office for Learning and Teaching, 2012). At the same time, three journals have been established dealing with educational issues for TH&E: the Journal of Hospitality and Tourism Education, Journal of Hospitality, Leisure, Sport and Tourism Education and the Journal of Teaching in Travel and Tourism. Notwithstanding these developments, the scholarly literature examining curriculum issues or the pressures and changes affecting this important education sector remains relatively limited. At a time of significant change in higher education when the role of universities and of different subject areas is increasingly being questioned, and decisions are being taken to reshape the system of higher education, a review of the issues for TH&E education represents an important addition to the literature. This is the purpose of this book: to provide an insightful and authoritative account of the various issues that are shaping the higher educational world of TH&E.

Perhaps the most important aspect of the background to this Handbook is that higher education itself has now entered a period of major change. After a few decades of expansion, higher education sectors in most countries have transitioned from elite to mass providers of programmes with significant implications for the consumption of public resources. Higher education has become increasingly intertwined with national policy goals with institutions expected to deliver on a range of economic and social objectives (e.g. improved education rates, increased accessibility for socio-economic disadvantaged groups, economic innovation) whilst at the same time being increasingly burdened with regulation, static or declining public funding per student and incentive-based funding. These changes have notably prompted a shift towards user-pays funding models in which increasingly students (or their parents) rather than the taxpayer have become responsible for financing education.

Alongside this, universities operate in a much more competitive national and international environment. Here internal and external scrutiny with consequent published rankings of institutions play a pivotal role in attracting students, and new providers, both commercial and from further and vocational education, put added pressure on the existing institutions in what has now become a marketplace. The response to this more competitive environment with less guaranteed public funding and with greater transparency of performance metrics is that institutions are increasingly reviewing and adapting their positions and their provision. Within this, decisions about programmes, about the curriculum and about course delivery all become central to the success and even survival of institutions. And, as an added pressure, while this is taking place, there is evidence that student demand for TH&E programmes in some parts of the world is beginning to falter.

This background suggests it is essential for both academics and university managers to have a better understanding of what they offer and teach and how the environment within which this takes place is changing. For their part the students have the right to understand what is offered by their programmes and the subsequent TH&E career pathways, and employers also have the right to understand degree structures, content and choices, especially when they are employing graduates of these programmes or if they are providing student support and mentoring during students’ study.

Aim and objectives

Against this context of rapid and sustained change, the aim of this Handbook is to identify and critically examine the challenges for those offering higher education programmes related to tourism, hospitality and events. In achieving this aim, the Handbook is guided by the following objectives:

• (1) To explore the philosophical foundations of TH&E education, current debates and future directions.
• (2) To review and appraise the current state of the art and future development of TH&E within the global higher education context.
• (3) To explore empirical knowledge and accounts of reflective practice in TH&E education with particular focus on the curriculum space.
• (4) To provide empirical knowledge and stories of reflective practice about TH&E curriculum delivery.
• (5) To encourage dialogue across the disciplinary boundaries about current issues and challenges in TH&E education.
• (6) To confront future challenges and discuss potential directions for TH&E education in the short, medium and long terms.

In addressing these objectives, the Handbook focuses particular attention on the development and delivery of the curriculum, which is seen here as the crucial heart of the educational endeavour. It is in shaping, forming and delivering the curriculum that the academic community meets the needs of the students and society at large, including employers. Further, in the current environment, the curriculum plays a key role in the highly international and competitive world of higher education. Particular attention is paid to the balance between professional and liberal education in the higher education environment and to the needs and expectations of educators, industry, students and university managers.

Recognizing that the TH&E curriculum does not exist in isolation, this Handbook also seeks to place it within its wider setting. Notably it seeks to explore the philosophic foundations of the curriculum and to examine its rapidly changing context. Here the global environment and increased competition, the opportunities and threats presented by technology, the changing needs of industry, the pressures on the academic workforce and the dynamic nature of student markets are some of the challenges currently facing worldwide TH&E education. Skills shortages are also a significant issue that affects the capacity of the tourism industry to develop and innovate. TH&E education programmes have an important role in addressing this issue, by producing graduates with the knowledge, skills, creative problem solving and adaptive capacities to operate in increasingly complex and challenging environments.

Across the world, calls have been made for a ‘paradigm’ shift in the TH&E education curriculum, and for greater attention to be placed on the mix between vocational skill building and ‘higher order’ knowledge associated with critical and reflective tourism, hospitality and event practitioners. As the editors of this Handbook, we appreciate and fully support this call, but we also note that this debate, if interpreted narrowly as a call to transition from one paradigm to another, has the potential to limit the scope of what TH&E education could be and the societal contributions it could make. Therefore, this Handbook is framed as an opportunity to identify, explore and confront multiple paradigms and values that can underpin TH&E education (Macbeth, 2005).

In doing so we critically examine and build upon the idea of the philosophic practitioner education (Tribe, 2002) and its later development applied to the curriculum space (Dredge et al., 2012), conceptualizing it as socially constructed, dynamic and flexible. In these developments, the TH&E curriculum space is one in which there is commitment to the development of both graduate capabilities and knowledge to varying levels, and that institutions can occupy different positions in the curriculum space depending upon the particular sets of factors to which they are subject. These theoretical underpinnings are explored in the first chapters of the Handbook and provide a foundation for the chapters that follow.

The book deals with higher (university-level) education relating to tourism, hospitality and events. These are normally presented as distinct and discrete areas of study, albeit often provided in the same academic department. For this reason some of the chapters here deal with them separately. However, they often display more similarities than differences. Notably, as summarized below, all of them are relative newcomers to university education, with the implications that this has for establishing themselves in the academy, and they face similar issues, for example in the balance between their vocational and academic orientations. As a result many of the chapters have relevance to all three subject areas.

The Handbook draws together a range of authors from various countries and educational systems and backgrounds. Some are emerging scholars and educators and others are well established. Such an approach allows us to explore the range of influences faced by curriculum planners and designers in considering the future of TH&E education and from a range of perspectives. The Handbook obviously has direct relevance for such planners and designers, but it will also appeal to wider audiences including those in recreation and leisure studies, and in other professional fields.

Development of TH&E education

It is difficult to identify a precise point when the study of a particular subject begins. In the case of tourism, hospitality and events, they are all relative newcomers to university higher education as distinct subjects. For hospitality, Cornell University’s School of Hotel Administration in the United States is something of an outlier with a foundation date of 1922 (McIntosh, 1992). For the most part, until at least the mid-1960s, hospitality higher education was provided mainly by vocational schools, led by the Ecole Hôtelière de Lausanne founded in 1893 (now a part of the University of Applied Sciences of Western Switzerland). For tourism, while elements were included in programmes in geography and trade, and there were some early tourism programmes at the University of Rome in 1925, the University of Vienna in 1936, and at the universities of St Gallen and Berne in Switzerland from 1941 (Medlik, 1965), it was not until the early 1970s that tourism began to appear more generally in the repertoire of higher education, again with a distinctly vocational orientation. As for events, these programmes are even more recent with most appearing after the turn of the twenty-first century and strongly influenced and often operated alongside programmes in hospitality and tourism.

Once established, the programmes grew massively in number and spread geographically. This was influenced in part by the growth in scale and awareness of tourism, hospitality and, more recently, events, as global activities and also by the growth of higher education itself; by the expansion of existing, and by the creation of new, universities. The latter in particular have appeared to be keen to introduce new areas of provision such as TH&E. So, for example, between 1970 and 2010 student enrolments in higher education in the UK increased from about 600,000 (Office for National Statistics, 2002) to 2.4 million (Higher Education Statistics Agency, 2011). The equivalent growth in Australia was from 161,455 in 1970 to over 1.2 million in 2011 (Department of Education, Training and Youth Affairs, 2001; Department of Industry, Innovation, Science, Research and Tertiary Education, 2012). Using tourism enrolments as an example, these grew in the UK from about 20 in 1972 (Airey, 2005) to 9,000 in 2011 (Walmsley, 2012), while in Australia, based on numbers of tourism programmes from the very first in 1978, there were 61 by 2005 (Breakey & Craig-Smith, 2008). Similar developments have now taken place elsewhere in the world, for example in China; with its first tourism programme in 1978, there were 967 degree-level institutions by 2010 recruiting 596,100 students (Xiao, 2000; Yang & Song, 2011).

Apart from growth and geographic spread the other key aspect in the development agenda for TH&E has been played out in the formation of the curriculum. Initially the programmes were distinctly vocational (Airey, 2005; Nailon, 1982). This in many ways matched the rising managerialism evident across the university system (Ayikoru et al., 2009) in which the development of higher education was judged in the context of national economic competitiveness and prosperity. As TH&E grew and developed the key question revolved around the balance between a vocational and an academic orientation to the curriculum and the extent to which industry and employers on the one hand and the academy on the other should influence the curriculum. This is a theme that has appeared in a number of studies (Dredge et al., 2012; Lashley & Morrison, 2000; Lynch et al., 2011; Tribe, 2002). In some ways, even though the issues are the same for all the three areas of study, tourism, hospitality and events have in fact pursued rather different emphases. Hospitality has generally retained a stronger vocational orientation, witnessed particularly in the provision of training restaurants and even dedicated hotels as a part of the academic enterprise, providing the students with opportunities to develop vocational skills. Events programmes also often pick up this vocational theme in providing students with opportunities to stage and manage training events. For tourism, the vocational elements have some prominence in field trips but beyond these programmes tend to have a greater classroom focus.

These headline issues related to the curriculum have been brought into rather sharper focus by the two key changes, already noted, that are affecting higher education: the shift in university funding away from the taxpayer and toward...