Wisdom for Traveling Far: Making Educational Travel Sustainable

Abstract

Educational travel has been demonstrated to be an effective means of education to develop sustainable and pro-environmental behaviors. However, as this paper reviews, recent scholarship has revealed that educational travel may harm the communities that host it even while it is achieving gains for students. This paper encourages educational travel providers (institutions, staff, and faculty) to leverage the need for a broader perspective towards sustainability in educational travel programs so that their host communities also benefit. The programs can accomplish this by engaging students in the process of making the programs and their participants more sustainable. The paper ends with several examples from the author’s own experience as an educational travel leader and several recommendations to reduce the negative impacts on host communities.

Past, present, and future of pro-environmental behavior in tourism and hospitality: a text-mining approach

“…The mixed method approach usually considers surveys and interviews (Pham, Tuckova, & Jabbour, 2019;Gupta, Dash, & Mishra, 2019). The conceptual papers present theoretical frameworks (Hale, 2019;Kim, Filimonau, & Dickinson, 2020).…”

Internationalisation of Higher Education and Climate Change: A Cognitive Dissonance Perspective

“…Primarily, additional studies building on existing calculations of GHG emissions from the international higher education sector are needed. Research in this area could refine and expand existing calculations of global emissions by exploring specific country contexts, domestic and international travel patterns during study, emissions from visits from friends/family, and differences in host-home country emission consumption patterns (Davies & Dunk, 2015; Hale, 2019; Shields, 2019). Moreover, a holistic understanding would require an in-depth analysis of many areas such as emissions from faculty and staff travel, recruitment efforts, buildings, technology, marketing techniques and emission differences between traditional and alternative internationalisation modes, such as transnational education with local staff or virtual mobility (Versteijlen et al, 2017).…”

“…Notable works include Shields’ (2019) article which estimated emissions from international student mobility in the range of 14–39 megatons in 2014. Others have taken account of the sector's GHG emissions in specific country, institutional, or mobility contexts (c.f., Arsenault et al, 2019; Hale, 2019; McDonald, 2015). When considering all human induced emissions of around 50 gigatons annually or the global aviation footprint in 2019 of approximately 915 megatons (ATAG, 2020; Ritchie et al, 2020), emissions from international student mobility may be considered marginal.…”

Educating for the Environment: The Role of the Host Destination in Education Travel Programs

“…Lastly, ETPs can also affect the host, as well as the global environment. Perhaps one of the clearest impacts is from the greenhouse gas emissions from transport to, from, and within the host destination [29,41]. As climate change disproportionately harms countries of the Global South and vulnerable communities, which are not responsible for historic or current emissions, the emissions created by ETPs from the Global North represent an unfair burden on these communities and one that must be dealt with.…”