Cruise and Learn: Reflections on a Cruise Field Trip

Educational tourism and experiential learning: students’ perceptions of field trips

“…While research on field trips has flourished in the context of elementary education, it has not permeated the context of tertiary education with the same impact. In fact, within tourism education, the topic has only gained traction since the early 2000s with various scholarly efforts emerging, as then (Xie, 2004;Gretzel et al, 2008;Wong and Wong, 2008;Arcodia and Dickson, 2009;Ettenger, 2009;Kelner and Sanders, 2009;Goh and Ritchie, 2011;Weeden et al, 2011;Arcodia and Dickson, 2013). Research on this topic has mainly explored the extent to which such experiences assist strong learning outcomes, student attitudes and motivations, as well as perceived constraints of engaging in such experiences.…”

Learn While Cruising: Experiential Learning Opportunities for Teaching Cruise Tourism Courses

“…Part of the framework used in this article reflects the same as that employed by Weeden et al (2011), particularly in terms of the reflection on the experiential learning opportunity while cruising and the development of a "field trip-based learning community," a term coined by Skop (2009). Another topic also analyzed in this article is the HR aspect of a career onboard a cruise ship.…”

“…Albeit the importance of the cruise business to the tourism industry and the recent growth of tourism in Australia and worldwide, the literature is scarce on reporting the benefits of cruise ship field trips, either to teach tourism-related (Papathanassis, Matuszewski, & Havekost, 2013;Weeden, Woolley, & Lester, 2011) or nonrelated (McClellan & Hyle, 2012) content. Some of the broader advantages of learning while cruising include the opportunities for engaged learning, where students can blend vocational and liberal aspects that characterize tourism, hospitality, and events management degrees LOHMANN Thirdly, a focus group reunion meeting was also carried out with a group of four students, which took place about 15 weeks after the field trip.…”

“…As usual, bringing large numbers of students onboard is challenging from a pedagogical and logistics point of view, in comparison to other similar experiences. This research reports on a larger sample of students (n = 24) in comparison to the work of McClellan and Hyle (2012) and Weeden et al (2011), which had, respectively, samples of 16 and 8 respondents. Papathanassis et al (2013) are one exception as their research analyzed 34 internship reports.…”