The Tourism Education Futures Initiative: Activating Change in Tourism Education

As the world faces many serious challenges informed, courageous and mindful leadership is needed for a better future. The Tourism Education Futures Initiative (TEFI) is the collective effort of a group of innovative, thoughtful and committed scholars and industry leaders seeking to provide vision, knowledge, and a framework for tourism education programs that promote global citizenship and optimism for a better world. This book consolidates some of TEFI’s work as it seeks to be the leading, forward-looking network that inspires, informs and supports tourism educators and students to passionately and courageously transform the world for the better. It makes the case for why change is needed, and how tourism educators can respond to that change with strategies and values-based tools. The book contains papers published in special TEFI issues of the Journal of Teaching in Travel & Tourism (JTTT), which question and explore some of the most important theoretical, conceptual and practical issues facing tourism education now and into the future. The book concludes by integrating the special issues’ key contributions with a brief conceptualisation of education futures before it outlines TEFI’s framework for action over the coming years. Tourism educators worldwide will find that this volume serves two important purposes. On the one hand, it challenges educators to think both critically and proactively about tourism education, while on the other sharing examples of teaching and learning tools that seek to prepare our students for the future and to be global citizens that live lives of consequence.

This book is a collection of articles from the Journal of Teaching in Travel and Tourism.

Darko Prebežac, is full professor of Tourism Marketing Management and Transportation Management at the University of Zagreb, Faculty of Economics & Business (Croatia). His research interests include marketing management (services, tourism, air transportation, airline companies, airports), transport and tourism and airline industry trends (globalization, consolidation, alliances, strategies and business models).

Christian Schott is a Senior Lecturer in Victoria Business School at Victoria University of Wellington (NZ). His current research interests span: youth travel and self development, sustainable tourism with a particular focus on climate change, and teaching and learning.

Pauline J. Sheldon is a co-founder of TEFI and is Emeritus Professor of tourism at the School of Travel Industry Management, at the University of Hawaii, USA. Her areas of research are sustainable tourism, corporate social responsibility in tourism, wellness tourism, and knowledge management in tourism.