The Role of Tourism Education in Promoting Sustainable Tourism Awareness, Attitudes, and Behaviour among Secondary School Students in the Maldives

Abstract

This study examines the role of tourism education in promoting sustainable tourism awareness, attitude, and behaviour in the islands of the Maldives among secondary students. Education represents a significant rank in nurturing sustainable tourism. Among the other courses, travel and tourism cultivates the majority of concepts about sustainable tourism. This study utilizes a mixed, descriptive, cross-sectional research design. This study contributes to tourism education literature by providing insights from a small island developing state. In addition, purposive sampling techniques are used to collect data from five schools via the tourism teacher. Figures were collected from 46 students in Grades 9 and 10 from schools in the Maldives, utilizing descriptive statistics, particularly mean, correlation, and linear regression. Open ended questions were analysed by thematic analysis. Responses from the 46 participants were carefully reviewed, coded, and grouped into themes. The questionnaire has five components: demographic information (gender, grade, and tourism subject studied), awareness of sustainable tourism (AST), the role of tourism education in sustainability awareness (TESA), attitudes and behaviour toward sustainable tourism (ABST), and an open-ended question about the participant’s opinions. Four components have questions quantified by the likert scale and interpreted. The last component is analysed by the thematic method. This study is to determine the relationship between Tourism Education in Sustainable Awareness (TESA) and Awareness, Attitude, and Behaviour towards sustainable tourism (AST & ABST). The results illustrate a positive correlation, indicating the impacts of TESA on AST & ABST, who adopt travel and tourism courses. This study also proposes that tourism lessons need to increase student awareness about climate change. Hence, tourism education should focus more on climate change and its impacts. School projects require augmenting relations with sustainable tourism, these can be secured by including these findings in the tourism education curriculum. The protection of natural resources should be encouraged in tourism education. Moreover, tourism education has the potential to transform the tourism industry in the Maldives into something more sustainable and responsible, supporting environmental protection and socio economic development. The results from the inductive thematic analysis shows that tourism education not only enhances the awareness among the students but also influences the behaviour pattern, making it a powerful tool for achieving sustainable tourism in the Maldives.

The limitation of this investigation is that this study is specific to four inhabited islands in the Maldives, which can affect the generalisation of the findings. The convenience sampling may introduce systematic distortion. However, Qualitative data provides deep insights that strengthen the findings. This study contributes to recognizing the importance of tourism education in the curriculum to develop a sustainable future. Evidence is limited to only tourism students; the research gap is to carry out further studies on the impacts of sustainable tourism among the secondary students, who can be distinguished as being in tourism courses and non-tourism courses.