Paper on skilling module development on 'travel and tourism' for middle school students accepted for international conference hosted by Karela

In response to the abstract submission and its review, the International Conference hosted by Karela informed, "Congratulations! We are delighted to inform you that your paper titled "DEVELOPING AND VALIDATING HOME GROWN SINGLE CREDIT SKILLING MODULE ON INDIGENOUS KNOWLEDGE SYSTEM- INTEGRATED TOURISM AT GRADE LEVEL EIGHT" (Paper Code: 1007) has been provisionally accepted for presentation at the ‘ICSSR Sponsored International Seminar on Integrating Indigenous knowledge Systems in Sustainable Tourism: Enhancing Livelihoods and Rural Development’ on 22/11/2024 & 23/11/2024 at Sree Sankara College, Kalady. The organizing committee has deemed your submission highly relevant and is confident that your presentation will provide valuable insights and encourage productive discussions during the seminar."

Here is the abstract of the accepted paper.

Title: Developing and Validating Home Grown Single Credit Skilling Module on Indigenous Knowledge Systems-Integrated Sacred Tourism at Grade Level Eight

Authors: Dr Lalit Kishore and Subhash Chauhan, Educational functionaries, Som Gurukul, Kuruksheta (Haryana)

Abstract

With approval and initiation of 33 skilling courses to be attempted at the middle school under the NEP-2020, ‘Travel and Tourism’ is one of them which has diversified into streams like cultural tourism, heritage tourism, indigenous tourism, religious tourism, spiritual tourism, sacred tourism, rural tourism, and many more. Kurukshetra being the land of advent of the scripture of ‘The Bhagavad Gita,’ an attempt was made by a local rural Gurukul to take up the challenge of developing a one credit-score module of 12 hours for grade 8 students. Methodology was the focus group led action research with three research participants of which one was the external expert who devoted 60 man-hours to develop and validate the module. The ‘sacred tourism’ module has four topics and four practical with 4 hours to be spent on theory and 8 hours on practical or practice of communication skills essential for a tourist guide. The paper describes the process of development of the validated module through triangulation as a flavour skilling module to be trialled in 2025-26 academic session as a part of in-house career development research and vocational education.

Keywords: Indigenous Knowledge Systems, sacred tourism, skilling courses, travel and tourism, vocational courses