Campus Guiding and Creative Drama

Tourist guiding education has some typical problems as a part of tourism education. The primary subjects in the related literature are the qualifications expected from a tourist guide. The curriculum provided in education institutions at university level appear to be inadequate in meeting the sectorial expectations and therefore there are attempts to eliminate such inadequacies through non-curricular activities. These activities; such as projects, practice tours, and workshops take place within or outside of the school days. This paper features a learning process that is aimed for creative drama-based education in the field of tourism, the learning outputs and opinions of the participants; and offers recommendations for drama-based studies in the field of tourist guiding. In the paper, the perceptions, knowledge and attitudes of tourist guiding students were questioned regarding the campus where they study, as a part of a project titled “tourist guiding”, and examined the relations between their lives and the campus history and especially the life of Yunus Emre, after whom the campus has been named, with a reflexive understanding. The creative drama sessions continued for 18 hours and the brochures, newspapers, student diaries, letters and participant opinions generated as a result of the drama process were subjected to descriptive analysis. The obtained findings are grouped under three headings titled positive attitude of students to the campus, effectiveness of the drama experience in the affective field and applicability of drama, together with the creative drama experience.