Role-playing in the classroom: a tourism experience

This paper focuses on a role-play exercise incorporated into a first year tourism subject within the B.Admin (Tourism) degree at James Cook University. The semester long exercise was designed to be carried out during the tutorial / practical component of the subject. The program aimed to teach students not only the fundamentals of the Australian Tourism Product, but also generic skills in areas of written and oral communications, logical and analytical thinking, research, and teamwork. Students were presented with the scenario in which funds were made available through a central body and for which each state or territory tourism authority could bid in relation to a special project. Students worked in groups and developed a tourism marketing or development project for their allocated state. Funding documents were prepared instead of traditional academic reports, and each group made an oral presentation of their funding bid to the rest of the class. The role-play exercise was designed in four stages: stage one introduced the class to concepts such as working in groups, teambuilding and written and oral presentation skills; stage two comprised the group work and idea development component of the projects; stage three saw the students presenting their projects, and; stage four included an evaluation of the subject design