Gender education in higher education is often confined to specialized courses or treated as an abstract social issue detached from students’ everyday experiences. In contrast, tourism and travel are widely perceived as leisure activities, rarely recognized as pedagogical resources for critical reflection. This study explores an interdisciplinary general education course that brings gender education and cultural tourism into dialogue, positioning tourism experiences as meaningful learning materials for gender awareness and social reflection.

The research is situated in a team-taught general education course that integrates gender studies and tourism studies. The course was designed around a photo-narrative pedagogy, encouraging students to engage with gender issues through their own tourism-related experiences. Students were invited to document cultural tourism sites through photography and to construct narrative reflections that articulate their observations of gender roles, stereotypes, power relations, and social inequalities encountered in tourism contexts. These photo narratives were further discussed through structured classroom dialogue and peer interaction, allowing students to collectively reflect on how gender is socially constructed and performed within cultural and touristic spaces.

The study addresses the following research questions:
(1) How does an interdisciplinary “gender × tourism” general education course contribute to students’ gender awareness and reflective capacity?
(2) How do students construct and articulate gender-related meanings through photo-narrative learning activities based on tourism experiences?
(3) What pedagogical possibilities and constraints emerge when photo-narrative methods are integrated into gender education within general education curricula?

Conceptually, the study draws on theories of informal and experiential learning, viewing learning as an interpretive process emerging from lived experience, dialogue, and reflection rather than from content transmission alone. Gender is understood as socially constructed and continuously negotiated through everyday practices, including tourism and leisure activities. By situating gender learning within tourism contexts, the course seeks to bridge students’ personal experiences with broader social structures, enabling gender education to move beyond abstract concepts toward embodied and situated understanding.

This study adopts a teaching practice research approach combining qualitative and quantitative methods to examine the implementation and effects of the interdisciplinary course. The research participants were undergraduate students enrolled in the general education course at a comprehensive university in Taiwan. The central pedagogical intervention was a photo-narrative learning activity. Students were guided to take photographs during tourism or travel experiences that they perceived as relevant to gender issues, and to produce written narratives explaining their observations and interpretations. These materials served as both learning artifacts and research data. Ethical considerations regarding image use, consent, and representation were explicitly addressed in the course design, with students instructed to avoid identifiable faces or sensitive imagery when necessary. Quantitative data were collected through pre- and post-course questionnaires measuring changes in students’ gender awareness and attitudes toward cultural tourism. Descriptive statistics and reliability tests were conducted using SPSS to assess overall trends and learning outcomes. Qualitative data included students’ photo narratives, reflective writings, interview transcripts, and teaching journals. These data were analyzed using thematic analysis, focusing on recurring patterns related to gender stereotypes, role expectations, power relations, and reflective learning processes. Triangulation across data sources and collaborative coding within the research team were employed to enhance analytical rigor and credibility.

As a teaching practice study, this research is expected to demonstrate that integrating gender education into tourism-based learning environments can effectively enhance students’ gender awareness and reflective capacity. Preliminary analysis suggests that photo-narrative pedagogy enables students to recognize gendered assumptions embedded in cultural tourism practices and to critically engage with issues that might otherwise remain unnoticed in everyday travel. The study is expected to show that tourism contexts provide accessible and meaningful entry points for gender education, allowing students to connect abstract gender concepts with lived experience. Through photography, narration, and dialogue, students move from passive observation to active interpretation, developing a more nuanced understanding of gender as a socially constructed and context-dependent phenomenon. Pedagogically, the study contributes insights into the possibilities and limitations of photo-narrative methods in general education, particularly regarding time constraints, ethical considerations, and students’ varying levels of visual literacy. Overall, the findings aim to inform the design of innovative intercultural learning environments in higher education and to offer practical guidance for educators seeking to integrate gender issues into interdisciplinary curricula.

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