Paul Bailey

The classroom should be one of the places where theory gets challenged by the real world.

I teach because I believe there is enormous value in bringing current industry practice into the classroom — and taking the questions students ask back into professional practice.

Across Dalhousie University and Cape Breton University, my teaching has focused on tourism, hospitality, destination development, sustainability, and the decisions that shape them.

But the objective has never simply been to teach students about an industry.

It is to help them learn how to think when the answer isn't obvious.

Learning to make decisions, not just remember answers.

Why I do this (and what I believe):

Tourism and hospitality are wonderfully messy: Economic development collides with community interests. Sustainability collides with growth. Visitor expectations collide with resident experience. Technology changes behaviour. Politics changes mobility. A decision that looks sensible on a spreadsheet can look very different when people, place, culture and consequence enter the equation.

That makes these subjects particularly useful places to learn how to think.

My classroom approach combines academic theory with real situations, current industry issues, case discussions, guest perspectives and decision-making exercises. Students are expected to question assumptions, weigh competing interests, defend their thinking and recognize that reasonable people can sometimes reach different conclusions from the same information.

Increasingly, that also means considering how tools such as artificial intelligence change the work. AI can produce information remarkably quickly. That makes judgement, curiosity, verification, argument and original thinking even more important.

The question becomes less “Can you find an answer?”

And more:

“What do you think we should do — and can you defend why?”

What I'm not...

I’m not a career academic, and I don’t pretend to be. I’m a practitioner who teaches. I'm someone who brings current industry experience, imperfect decisions, real consequences and a healthy respect for theory into the classroom. My goal isn’t to turn students into versions of me. It’s to help them become sharper thinkers, better decision-makers and more thoughtful professionals in their own right.

Where I Teach:

Dalhousie University - Faculty of Management

MGMT 3003 — Tourism Management
Fall 2024 | Fall 2026

Tourism Management examines one of the world's largest and most interconnected industries through multiple lenses: business, economics, leisure and recreation, destination development, sustainability, community, culture and public policy.

Students explore not only how tourism works, but who benefits from it, what pressures it creates, how destinations make choices and what responsible growth actually looks like in practice.

For Fall 2026, I redesigned the course around a more decision-oriented learning model. Rather than treating AI as something that can simply be prohibited or ignored, the course asks students to use contemporary tools thoughtfully while demonstrating the human reasoning behind their work.

The result is a classroom built around analysis, discussion, decisions and consequences rather than the reproduction of information.

Cape Breton University - Shannon School of Business

Bachelor of Hospitality and Tourism Management
HATM-3508
2023–2024

At Cape Breton University, I taught within the Bachelor of Hospitality and Tourism Management program, connecting tourism and hospitality theory with the realities of destination management and an increasingly global visitor economy.

Drawing from work in destination marketing, international business development, conferences and events, sustainability and economic development, I used industry examples and contemporary issues to help students understand how decisions move from a textbook concept to something affecting an actual destination, organization or community.

Cape Breton also provided a particularly relevant setting for those conversations: a place where tourism is economically significant, community identity matters deeply, and questions around growth, seasonality, infrastructure, sustainability and resident experience are very real.

What Students Can Expect:

The Practitioner in the Classroom:

I don't believe my job is to stand at the front of a classroom and spend three hours proving that I know the material.

My job is to create the conditions in which students engage with it.

That can mean discussion. Debate. Cases. Current events. Guest speakers. Data. Uncomfortable trade-offs. Industry examples. Failed ideas. Successful ones. And occasionally changing the direction of a class because someone asked a better question than the one I had planned. There is academic rigour behind the work, but there should also be relevance.

Students should leave understanding the theories and frameworks expected of a university course. They should also be better equipped to walk into a meeting, examine an imperfect situation, ask better questions and contribute something useful.

The Practitioner in the Classroom:

One advantage of teaching while remaining active in industry is that the material rarely stays theoretical for long.

My professional work involves attracting international conferences to Halifax, working with academics and industry leaders, developing destination strategy, evaluating economic and community impact, facilitating leadership conversations and thinking deeply about the future of meetings, tourism and place.

Some weeks, something discussed professionally on Tuesday becomes a classroom question on Thursday.

The exchange works in the other direction too. Teaching requires me to explain assumptions I might otherwise take for granted. Students challenge conventional wisdom, bring different experiences to familiar problems and regularly ask some variation of the most useful question in strategy:

Why?

That makes teaching part of my professional practice rather than something separate from it.

Where Teaching Fits:

The Practitioner in the Classroom:

Where Teaching Fits:

Facilitation helps groups think together.

Speaking introduces ideas that can change a conversation.

Writing gives those ideas somewhere to develop.

Teaching puts them under pressure.

They are different disciplines, but I see them as connected parts of the same work: helping people make sense of complexity, challenge assumptions and make better decisions.

And the classroom may be the place where I get to do that over the longest arc.

A keynote might give me an hour.

A facilitated session might give me a day.

With students, I get a semester... That creates room not simply to introduce an idea, but to watch someone question it, test it, change their mind and eventually make it their own.

TEACHING:

The classroom should be one of the places where theory gets challenged by the real world.

Learning to make decisions, not just remember answers.

Why I do this (and what I believe):

What I'm not...

Where I Teach:

Dalhousie University - Faculty of Management

Cape Breton University - Shannon School of Business

What Students Can Expect:

The Practitioner in the Classroom:

The Practitioner in the Classroom:

The Practitioner in the Classroom:

The Practitioner in the Classroom:

The Practitioner in the Classroom:

Where Teaching Fits:

The Practitioner in the Classroom:

Where Teaching Fits:

Bring the classroom and industry closer together.

TEACHING:

The classroom should be one of the places where theory gets challenged by the real world.

Learning to make decisions, not just remember answers.

Why I do this (and what I believe):

What I'm not...

Where I Teach:

Dalhousie University - Faculty of Management

Cape Breton University - Shannon School of Business

What Students Can Expect:

The Practitioner in the Classroom:

The Practitioner in the Classroom:

The Practitioner in the Classroom:

The Practitioner in the Classroom:

The Practitioner in the Classroom:

Where Teaching Fits:

The Practitioner in the Classroom:

Where Teaching Fits:

Bring the classroom and industry closer together.

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