Teaching tourism change agents

This article discusses knowledge, competencies and skills Master’s students should
obtain during their academic studies and particularly, the differences between
teaching about a topic and teaching to do. This is exemplified by experiential
learning theory and the case of a change management course that is part of a
Tourism Master’s program, where a major challenge is not only to teach students
about change and change agents, but to teach them how change feels and how to
become change agents. The change management course contains an experiment
inspired by experiential teaching literature and methods. The experiment seeks to
make students not only hear/learn about change agency and management, but to
make them feel change, hereby enabling them to develop the skills and
competencies necessary for them to take on the role as change agents and thus
enable them to play key roles in implementing change in tourism in the future.