Food for Thought: Investigating food and beverage curricular in Australian hospitality degree programs

Abstract

introductionFood and beverage (F&B) curricular content in hospitality management degrees is generally thought to be essential but how much, and the way it is presented to students, varies considerably. Even a cursory examination of hospitality degree curricular will reveal considerable variation in the F&B approach from the 1970s to the present day. On top of this, temporal variation illustrates considerable differences depending on the nature of the providing educational institution, such as research intensive universities, vocational colleges and hotel schools. Higher education internationally is an aggressive marketplace, where increased electronic accessibility to program and course details allows tertiary institutions, prospective students and industry globally to compare and benchmark their products.The authors of this paper recently undertook an Australia-wide benchmarking exercise to ascertain how F&B curricular has been approached over the years from the development of the very first hospitality degree program in the early 1970s to the present day. The results of this exercise threw insights into how the industry, educational institutions and prospective students viewed F&B study over the last four decades. The temporal variations in philosophy and approach observed in this analysis conformed broadly to the delivery model discussed in the literature by Baker, Cattet and Riley (1995).A further exercise was then undertaken to examine all current hospitality degree programs on offer in Australia for 2008 to determine if the model held up when applied to all current program providers. The results of this second exercise, involving universities, hotel schools, and vocational colleges, required the earlier F&B model to be amended to fit all current Australian practice. The results of this exercise and the newly refined model will be of interest to all hospitality academics involved with hospitality curricular development. food and Beverage studiesHospitality education curricular, at degree offering institutions, has previously been a topic of scholarly debate. The rapid growth of offerings in hospitality programs since the 1980s has been the catalyst for considerable diversity (Williams, 2005) and this has been reflected in the literature Rimmington, 1999). Perhaps axiomatic to the debate, vis-à-vis the inclusion and extent to which F&B studies are incorporated into hospitality curricular, is the issue of 'vocationalism' . Whilst historically universities were established to train professionals (Tribe, 2003), the blossoming of the state-funded and private higher education sectors in the latter part of the twentieth century has accounted for some jostling, such that certain training is deemed more vocational and certain training is deemed more academic -or grounded in rigorous discipline. Tourism, and indeed hospitality, has existed on the margins of academe, with its practical components being generally deemed as vocational whilst practical components of, say the veterinary sciences, are considered as more aca...

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