Tourism Planning as a Discipline: a case study on undergraduate courses in Paraná, Brazil

Abstract

The following case study is the result of the authors’ participation and later analysis of the Tourism Higher Education Course Coordinator Forum report that took place in Curitiba in 2008 attended not only by course coordinators but also tourism planning lecturers from a number of regions of Paraná State. The meeting aimed at discussing, using a participative method, tourism planning discipline in Parana’s tourism higher education courses. This included its insertion in the course, methods applied and interactions with other fields of knowledge. Due to the fact that Tourism Planning teaching is not a very frequent theme on specific literature, the case study is useful to organise information which might even be empirically known, but is rarely part of tourism planning bibliography. The main conclusions were that the discipline tends to have both theoretical and hands-on approach, as well as close relations with policy-making, and a wide variety of areas that contribute to tourism planning class contents. The article opens discussions on using the same methodology to either assess other disciplines or tourism planning teaching in different places.