BA International Tourism Management: Tourism, Planning and Development, level 3
The aim of this module is to enable students to understand a tourism plan, including both traditional factors such as markets, access, customer base, and also more recent trends such as the involvement of local people and environmental sustainability. Taking it a step further, lecturer Pete Burns encourages his students to think of how tourism can be used as a tool for achieving sustainability. He asks
‘How can we use tourism in order to help with the economic needs and at the same time be a driving tool for change in attitudes towards the environment?’
In order to engage students in this idea, Pete simply sits them down in front of Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth, which he describes as a ‘defining moment for them, they [buy] into it’
there and then.
Pete realised that the use of local case studies for this module would be more engaging to the students, so gave them briefs such as ‘How do you see Eastbourne in the 21st century?’ or just ‘Brighton 2020’. Pete keeps the briefs broad like this because he has found that ‘if you frame things to tightly it inhibits the student's imagination’
. A wider scope unlocks that creative potential in the students, although requires a rather more liberal marking criteria!
‘you have no difficulty getting the students to engage with Eastbourne and its problems because they all live here so they kind of, you know, they've got a stake in it’
The module finishes with a role play in which each group presents their proposed tourism development plans to the local council.
Another approach taken by Pete's tourism department to engaging students particularly in the social impacts of tourism is to get them to make a film about this very issue in a local context:
Students are asked to make a film about the social impacts of tourism - making a film teaches them how to look - understanding how to 'read' the world, the semiotics of vision, is very important to tourism. They bring back the video and lecturer asks questions - helps them to understand what they have filmed - what there is to value there.
See also: Pete Burns' presentation from the 2008 ESD Conference
Watch the class in action
Local case study as preparation for real world sustainability challenges
Local case study as illustration of complexity
Local case study as stimulus for sustainability critique
Holistic thinking: community participation
Holistic thinking: environmental factors
Maintaining environmental assets
Making the business case