Overview - Each year thousands of secondary and post-secondary students from Europe and North America travel to countries in the global South to engage in “international service learning” (ISL) programs (Eyler et al, 2001). Typically these students spend anywhere from a week to several months, often in rural villages, often living with host families, and engaging in any manner of volunteer work – playing with children in preschool programs, building school houses or other community structures, assisting with farming activities, etc. These programs are increasingly popular with educational institutions in the global North, with continuing calls by universities, government and non-government agencies to increase participation in various forms of international experiential education ranging from very short-term, tourist oriented voluntourism (Elliot, 2013; Van Deusen, 2014; Wearing & McGehee) to both short- and long-term international service learning and study abroad (Lewin, 2009). Not surprisingly, there has been a parallel rise in research in the area (see, for example, Andreotti, 2015; Jefferess, 2012; Pashby, 2011; Tiessen, 2013; Tarc, 2013; Jackson, 2011) as well international conferences devoted specifically to disseminating and critiquing this research (see, for example, http://www.polyu.edu.hk/CoP/service _learning/Docs/List%20of%20SL%20Conference.pdf).
While much of earlier research on these programs seemed glorify their value, both for the visiting students as well as for the communities they visited (see, for example, Keilberger & Keilberger, 2009) more recent literature has raised important questions in this regard. For example, while there is evidence that at least some of the participants from the North have undergone “transformative” experiences in relation to their understandings of North-South power relations and the underlying causes of under-development in the South (Crabtree, 2008; Cameron, 2014; Kiely, 2002; Heron, 2011; Jackson, 2011), for many others it would appear the program has served mainly to assuage their own guilt, their beliefs in a “poor but happy” syndrome, and/or the need for more charity (Thomas & Chandrasekera, 2014; Van Deussen, 2014; Epprecht, 2004). Similarly, while some site research reports very positive responses to ISL by village residents in the South, questions are raised about their longer-term effects - with suggestions that, in some respects at least, they serve as instruments of neo-colonialism (economic or cultural) and/or instilling new dependency relations (see, for example, Jefferess, 2012; Andreotti, 2015, Pashby, 2011). Concerns are also raised about the increasing dominance in ISL field by private corporations promoting a trivial “voluntourism” approach (Elliot, 2013; Van Deusen, 2014).
This panel of paper presentations will serve to continue the explorations of these seeming contradictions.
