Chapter 8: The Role of Pleasure (Joy) in Enhancing Pregraduate Students’ Creativity

Classic education is mainly marked by what experts dubbed as “Cartesian dualism,” which punctuates the rational planning (mind) should subordinate emotions (body). In tourism education, Cartesian dualism occupies a central position populating in the academic curricula. Of course, over the recent years, some voices have alerted on the problems of tourism education in training the new tourism staff. Pregraduate students are often subject to excessive working hours, low-paid salaries without mentioning the lack of answers to respond to the global risks the industry often faces. This suggests that classic tourism education should be at least revisited. PANCOE is a successful experiment with basis on Joy Labs (University of Palermo, Argentina) that combines pleasurable techniques and practices to stimulate students’ academic performance while reducing drop-out rates. PANCOE alternates with digital technologies, smelling and tasting dishes, to enhance creativity and entrepreneurship. Originally designed to be applied to foreign students coming from neighboring countries who live alone in Buenos Aires, PANCOE shows promising results to be conducted over psychologically deprived students. Lastly, PANCOE centers efforts in consolidating local food heritage while cooking local dishes or baking pieces of bread or cookies where students come from.