Educational Tourism and Nation Building: Cross-border School Trips in the Carpathian Basin

Abstract

Educational travel provides opportunities for participants to explore specific issues in unconventional ways. In Hungary, primary and secondary schools organise annual study trips as part of their curricula. The aim of these trips is to familiarise students with the main sights of the country, and to bring to life national narratives discussed in lessons. Furthermore, these trips often play a key role in students’ socio-psychological development, both as future tourism consumers and as future citizens. Recognising the opportunity to influence students’ worldview and way of thinking during their sensitive teenage years, the Hungarian government has created a national programme to financially support school trips organised to visit minority Hungarian communities living in the neighbouring countries. This paper is based on the content analysis of 256 detailed reports submitted by participants of school trips organised in 2013/14 with the aim to visit Hungarian minority communities in the Carpathian Basin. The analysis focuses on the detailed descriptions of the participants’ personal memories of their experiences, the social construction of the visited destinations, and the influences of their memorable experiences on their sense of national identity. The research disclosed that the trips made to Hungarian territories outside the borders contributed to shaping the national sentiment of the students participating in the programme. The findings suggest that participation in tourism is an effective means to experience nationhood and national identity, by financially supporting school trips abroad, the state is able to exert political influence over national consciousness.

Danube Cruise Tourism as a Niche Product—An Overview of the Current Supply and Potential

“…Participants in mass tourism use a relatively large number of relatively schematic services offering almost the same experience [7]. In the 1960s and 1970s, due to the emergence of the Fordist approach, travel companies started to focus on cost-effectiveness and offered standardised packages and services [8,9].…”

“…It is clear from the tourism literature [16,17] that ocean-going cruises are a superior segment of mass tourism, but the theoretical classification of river cruise tourism (especially on the Danube) is inadequate. Some typologies classify river cruises as a special type of entertainment [17,18], whilst others [7,19] mention cruises as 'soft' tourism activities (e.g., sightseeing). Consequently, river (Danube) cruise tourism is not part of mass tourism, but its exact classification is missing and so our study attempts to clarify the characteristics of the product.…”

Segments of the ancient cultural landscape in the “Hungarian Corner” of Moravia: A valuable pre-industrial heritage

“…The identified areas of such landscape heritage have been carefully recorded, but now it is necessary to inform the professional community, the territorial administration and the general public about the results of the research in order to be able to formulate society's relationship to such places to find suitable forms of its protection in the future and also to present them as very attractive objects of tourist interest, in the given case also of international tourism. They can serve as important object of public interests or educational destination (Rátz, T. et al 2020).…”

Class Trips beyond Borders: Reimagining the Nation through State-Sponsored Heritage Tourism

“…But broader pedagogical practices or extracurricular activities are rarely investigated within the framework of nation-building. Field trips, for instance, long a staple in primary and secondary education, have received little attention from this perspective (DeWitt and Storksdieck 2008; Michalkó, Rátz, and Keszeg 2016; Rátz, Michalkó, and Keszeg 2020). The only notable exception is Israel, where a “culture of trips” developed and has been understood as central to forming Israeli national identity.…”