Although International Service Learning is not a phrase commonly used in the UK (with the exception of Liverpool Hope University, Bamber, 2011), university students across the UK have multiple opportunities to take part in service learning type activities that involve working with communities in Global South locations with an orientation to provide a service of some kind or another. In this paper I draw on research conducted as part of a three year economic and social research council funded project, Global Partnerships as Sites for Mutual Learning (Martin & Griffiths, 2013; Martin & Raja, 2013). Pre-service teachers from an English university took part in study visits to Southern India in which there was a service learning element where they lived and worked in an orphanage with an on-site primary school for ten days. Many of the study visit participants described their experience as ‘life changing’ and transformational. Critical questions about whom and what is transformed, and whether this is at the expense of the ‘Other’, raise concerns about the nature of such transformations. Revisiting the data to undertake a Critical Discourse Analysis has revealed fundamental ontological and epistemological differences between the interacting groups, as a result of which we propose that ISL programmes could usefully be reframed as sites for critical, intercultural learning based on pedagogies of relation informed by postcolonial theory We argue that without an explicit focus on relational forms of knowledge about culture and identity, self and other, and the power differentials which are inscribed by ‘North-South’, the potential for transformations in how we relate to, and learn from, each other in postcolonial contexts is severely diminished.

Bamber, P. (2011) The transformative potential of International Service-Learning at a University with a Christian Foundation in the UK. Journal of Beliefs and Values 32(3), 355–369. Martin, F. & Griffiths, H. (2014). Relating to the ‘Other’: transformative, intercultural learning in post-colonial contexts, Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education 44(6), 938-959. Martin, F. & Raja, L. (2013). Transformative Learning: Indian Perspectives on a Global Partnership. Indian Journal of Adult Education 71(4), 59-80.