First holidays abroad: authenticating the learning environment through memories and storytelling

Authentic learning has gained prominence as a pedagogical strategy educators can adopt to address concerns regarding curriculum effectiveness. While support for the development of an integrated approach to the curriculum is evident, especially in tourism education, concerns regarding a lack of congruence between business practice and the curriculum are apparent, with claims that tourism education has little relevance for practitioners. This has resulted in an encouragement to ground tourism education within authentic learning through a community of practice, concerned with collaborative engagement. The purpose of this paper is to explore how storytelling can contribute to authentic learning in tourism education. Our findings reveal how authentic learning through storytelling contributed to the educational development of students through facilitating self-reflection, supporting an empathetic understanding of tourism development concerns and knowledge transfer. It also provided opportunities for remembering, conversation and reflection, facilitating positive social change amongst those stakeholders engaged in the project.