Recently, after two years of enforced lockdown, I had the opportunity to travel abroad to a wonderful destination, Machu Picchu. This allowed me to reconnect with what travel represents for me and many humans: a pause for reflection and reconnection with ourselves, where each journey leaves invisible but profound marks on our life trajectories. In this sense, those of us who work in higher education institutions have a great responsibility in training professionals who will manage a sacred period for humans: the time they dedicate to enjoying their free time through tourism.
We are living in a historical moment of crisis with a profound global impact on humanity, such as climate change, the pandemic, the food crisis, the absurd war imposed by Russia on Ukraine, violating all the treaties and agreements that had been achieved after the great lessons left by the two world wars of the 20th century, among others. The world has changed, as stated by the German philosopher and sociologist Jurgen Habermas, referring to the current crisis: “In our complex societies, we are permanently faced with great insecurities, but these appear locally and not simultaneously and are resolved in one or another subsystem of society by experts. Now, however, existential insecurity is global and simultaneous and is even in the minds of individuals connected to communication networks” (La Vanguardia, 2020).
During this period of uncertainty that we were forced to live through, I was able to distance myself from my professional activities and reflect on some challenges and the role academia plays in the training processes of several generations of young people who pass through our halls. They entrust us with the great responsibility of training them to face, four or five years after starting their studies, the construction of their life projects in the fascinating and at the same time complex world of tourism.
In the field of tourism, a holistic education is increasingly necessary, allowing us to be more sensitive to other human beings, those with less access to opportunities, and other political and social subjects of rights, sentient subjects, whom we must respectfully incorporate into our interaction through tourism practices with the planet: nature, culture, the LGBTI population, ethnic minorities, and people with disabilities, all of whom have historically been excluded from political, economic, and social dynamics. It is therefore a duty of academia to address these processes through the design of protocols and management models that incorporate, in a transversal manner, good practices of sustainability and inclusion in companies, enterprises, and destinations.
Likewise, we have been forced to debate and reflect on how to train more supportive individuals, how to strengthen humanistic education that combines knowledge but also values the emotional, the affective, the sensitive, where the ethical commitment remains the most important reference of training, given circumstances that have shown us how vulnerable we can be as a species. All this has shown us the need to train individuals who play more with their intuition, who aim to build a sense of happiness, not only based on having but on being, but a “Being” constructed from the collective.
Additionally, a profound transformation in the lifestyles of global citizens has significantly impacted the focus of education and how to design tourism practices: micro-segmentation, the increasing mix of leisure travel with business (Bleisure), the blurring of boundaries between free time and work time; the search for deep immersion in the nature and culture of the places visited, where some travelers want to leave a positive legacy in the territories and their inhabitants; as well as the search for extreme experiences linked to fantasy, the desire to experience extreme emotions, with the risks this may entail for the visited destinations.
The circumstances we face as higher education institutions have invited us to renew and be creative in our daily teaching practices, mediated by technologies. Our challenge is how to achieve increasingly horizontal, democratic education, where we assume that learning is a continuous process, to be led autonomously by students, enhancing other forms of collaborative work among peers and where we only participate in a few in-person meetings, which will have to be synchronized with our good guidance.
Moreover, in our academic endeavors, we are trying to harmonize the work lines of our research professors, given the requirement to meet national and international recognition and accreditation criteria for research groups, to achieve the standards imposed by the global academic model; synchronizing them with the time dedicated to teaching, participation in academic events; strengthening international exchange links to build collaborative networks that enrich our perspective and help us understand, from various latitudes, how to solve common problems or localized situations from our own realities, such as those of Latin America and its various tourist-oriented territories, but in meeting with other researchers, we can nourish ourselves from diverse perspectives.
The efforts must be directed from a professional and ethical commitment so that tourism is understood from public policies and the private sector as a phenomenon of profound dimensions, as it is one of the most important social practices in which humans seek their happiness and in which, unsuspectingly, we can travel to impossible places to meet those others, different from us. This should undoubtedly make us more tolerant of differences, learning to recognize in them one of the greatest opportunities to grow and advance as a society and where we can contribute from our work to the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals, the most important challenge as humanity that cannot wait any longer.
Finally, we must further strengthen and lead initiatives that visibly articulate teaching, research, and social extension to have a more active role in solving concrete problems demanded by the planet and the various tourist territories of our rich geography in Latin America.
Reference
Cited in La Vanguardia: “Habermas: nunca habíamos sabido tanto de nuestra ignorancia”. Feb 4 de abril de 2020. Taken from:
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