Disruption Needs an Anchor: A Resource-Fit Re-Anchoring Framework for Transformative Sustainability Learning and Its Tourism-Specific Extension

Transformative sustainability education often uses disruption to unsettle learners’ assumptions, but the claim that disruption fails when “demands exceed resources” gives teachers little guidance. This conceptual paper introduces re-anchoring: the support a teacher plans to follow a disruption. Such support varies in amount (resource sufficiency), in whether its kind matches the problem created (functional congruence), and in timing and order (temporal sequencing). The propositions are theoretical and untested. The framework is useful only if it predicts what existing accounts of support amount, scaffolding, and fit do not: that order matters when content and amount are equal; that early closure may bring relief now but weaker reflection later; and that different mismatches produce different outcome patterns. Four anchors—meaning and values, responsibility and complexity, relational and future orientation, and feasible action—are linked to four types of post-disruption demand in a table of expected effects. Moral licensing, need for cognitive closure, and task completion are treated as competing explanations of “false resolution.” A tourism extension proposes consumer–professional identity overlap (CPIO) as an unvalidated moderator. The paper ends with testable propositions, failure conditions, and a longitudinal testing strategy.