Walk in My Shoes

Effective education for sustainable development requires pedagogies promoting transformative learning through active and cooperative practices, moving beyond traditional lectures. Encouraging students to discuss sustainability within tourism, critically analyse its multifaceted challenges, and actively share sustainable stories is paramount for educating responsible future professionals and travellers. Such classroom activities go beyond passive learning, by prompting students to consider the intricate relationships between tourism development, environmental preservation, sociocultural impacts, and economic viability. By debating real-world scenarios, identifying instances of greenwash, and weighing complex trade-offs, students sharpen essential critical thinking and analytical skills. Furthermore, thinking about and crafting sustainable stories, whether analysing existing case studies or devising innovative, imaginative solutions, encourages significant creativity and communication abilities. For instance, a classroom debate analysing possible successful sustainable ideas sparked a profound interest in one master’s student. This discussion directly inspired their subsequent master’s thesis research into community-led tourism development initiatives within cultural tourism destinations, demonstrating how such academic discourse can translate into impactful postgraduate investigation and future professional practice. This process not only deepens understanding but also actively empowers students to envision and champion sustainable alternatives within the industry. In this chapter, we share an example of a sustainable narrative, inspired in the classroom and written by a student. The title of the student’s sustainable narrative is Walk in My Shoes: A Platform for Co-created Cultural Tourism.