Sustainability in hospitality education: A conceptual viewpoint on situated learning

This conceptual paper focuses on sustainability education (SE) in hospitality management degree programmes. As sustainability is gaining global recognition as a prominent socio-economic agenda, it is increasingly finding its place in higher education also (Deale, Nichols and Jacques, 2009). The report discusses the
complexity of teaching sustainability, as learning about sustainability is geared more towards changing attitudes and behaviours (Dale and Newman, 2005; Cotgrave and Kokkarinen, 2010), rather than acquiring skills and knowledge, per se. SE therefore is not consistent with traditional models of learning, teaching and assessment (LTA). With this reasoning, this paper argues that SE can only be effective if such agenda forms the context within which hospitality education is delivered. By extension, theory of situated learning (Lave and Wenger, 1991) is introduced to support the idea of sustainable campus (SC), effectively a learning laboratory, where learning of sustainability related matters is not confined to the classroom, but extends it to all aspects of the student learning. The preliminary findings, based on secondary research support the idea that hospitality management courses be located within the overall context of sustainability, with SC as the physical embodiment of such education.