News & Photos
TEFI World Congress, hosted at Temple, activates change in tourism education
This May tourism educators and industry professionals from around the world traveled to Temple University’s Main Campus to hear 37 presenters from 11 countries speak at the Tourism Education Futures Institute (TEFI) World Congress.
For three days, the 2011 World Congress attendees heard from internationally renowned tourism educators and professionals, worked together to develop programs and initiatives in the forward-thinking spirit of TEFI, and enjoyed themselves in Philadelphia.
The 2011 theme, Activating Change in Tourism Education, directly addressed the forces of flux that School of Tourism and Hospitality Management (STHM) Professor Daniel Fesenmaier, who co-founded TEFI with Hawaii University Professor Pauline Sheldon, said drove TEFI’s creation.
Fesenmaier said the initiative, which “seeks to provide vision, knowledge and a framework for tourism education programs,” grew out of an industry-wide recognition that “there are many challenges to a high-quality education in tourism” and that “the forces of change seem to completely dominate higher education.”
To help universities around the globe adequately address the problems these forces create, Fesenmaier said, TEFI was born.
Today TEFI encourages the development of value-based tourism education centered on the five principle values of ethics, stewardship, knowledge, professionalism and mutuality.
Since TEFI’s 2007 launch, its members have traveled to Vienna, Austria; Honolulu, Hawaii; Lugano, Switzerland and San Sebastian, Spain for an annual summit. This year, STHM was the proud host of the fifth-annual conference.
The event drew perspectives and opinions as diverse as the attendees themselves – providing for thought provoking debate, analysis of current TEFI case studies and ideas for future integration of TEFI into global tourism education.
Gianna Moscardo, a professor at James Cook University in Australia, moderated a panel on “The Failure of Higher Education – Staying Relevant in a Time of Change” and posed the questions: Have we fallen into bad habits? And, who are we failing?
“I think we have been lazy and sloppy through good times, and I think we have squandered a bit of our potential,” Brian King of Australia’s Victoria University admitted, but like most, King was optimistic.
“We are in a wonderful sector that has huge potential, and we are very fortunate,” he added.
While attendees, such as Marion Joppe, a professor at the University of Guelph in Canada who has attended the TEFI World Congress meetings each year since they launched in Vienna, said they would like to see more of a focus on industry standards in tourism education, others believe there is already too much focus on current industry practices.
“I think many times, we focus too much on jobs,” said Bing Pan, an assistant professor and head of research in the office of tourism analysis at Charleston College in South Carolina.
Joppe explained that, “the dilemma that we face is that we are pressured to be industry relevant… On the other side we are pressured to broaden students’ thinking and widen their minds in such little time.”
Both Pan and Joppe agree, though, that tourism education is indeed changing drastically.
“Fifty years from now the university will be totally different,” Pan said.
Initializing debates and preparing tourism educators for this change is exactly what TEFI set out to do and what Fesenmaier says it will continue to do.
“We have to push the boundaries in all directions,” Joppe said. “We have to keep pushing.”