Learning through visits overseas

My earlier research (Trewby, 2007) focused particularly on the educational possibilities of overseas volunteering. This research project chose five respondents with a commitment to engagement and education in order to look in detail at their stories, in part to consider how people might come to engagement other than through experiential learning in a developing country or elsewhere. However, all five of my respondents mentioned some kind of exposure visit as being significant to their learning. These are by no means all the same; they take place at various different points in peoples’ journeys and appear to play different roles. In some instances they lay the foundations for future engagement, while in others they encourage immediate commitment to action or are themselves a response to previous learning and engagement. They can be seen to encourage individuals who are already committed to global justice issues but also raise questions and complicate engagement.

As discussed above, Rebecca credits her early experience of living in Kuwait with influencing her “love of tolerance between different groups of people.” Her

182 visit to India as part of her university degree challenged her belief that she could really ‘make a difference’ (see p. 116): “in those moments I felt helpless… and I… I felt like quite disempowered actually.” Rebecca then goes on to question her particular forms of engagement: “Why was I doing this, shouldn’t I be doing something better, something that’s going to make more of a difference?” This visit therefore served to challenge her, destabilising, and perhaps eventually deepening, her commitment to global justice. Learning here is shown to be much more complex than the relatively simple model proposed by Trewby (2007); it is not simply experience-reflection-action, but instead experience leading to challenging and messy questions forcing reflection on both global justice issues and her responses to them. Malcolm’s reflections on his visit to East Africa similarly challenge a simplistic understanding of experiential development education. While he states that he valued the opportunity to interact with local people, the learning he emphasised was the re-enforcing of his opinion that NGOs are “problematic”. It therefore appears not to have affected his ongoing commitment (positively or negatively) other than in terms of form, strengthening his commitment to educative initiatives and engagement based in solidarity, social movements and Black groups.

Leena had childhood instances of experiential learning, visiting India with her family. She said that the trips helped her to understand something of the similarities and differences between life there and her life in the UK. She noted that learning differed according to age, with her relative maturity during later visits helping her to make a more nuanced comparison: “The older you get, the more you realise that the life you lead in London is nowhere near in comparison to your cousin in India who, I’ve got one cousin who got married at the age of 17. When I went to see her, my third visit, she had her second child, at the time I was I think 16. And then you just realise you’re so similar, but you lead such different lives.” Leena described her return to India as a volunteer as “the best four months I’ve had in my life”, emphasising various things she learnt from the experience. These included learning about development and life in India. In particular, she notes being inspired by individuals she met there.

Jules tells of a number of overseas visits which can be understood as experiential learning. The first, when he was 16, was also an instance of group

183 learning, as he travelled with other young people to visit concentration camps in Poland before spending a week in Israel. He saw this as a particularly significant learning experience in terms of developing Jewish identity and “a vigilance of discrimination”, perhaps having some influence over his decision to ‘speak out’ against homophobia (discussed above). The second came after university, when he returned to Israel to spend a year in a fellowship programme. He feels his most significant learning in this time came through volunteering with an NGO taking international groups on tours of the separation barrier. Here, as in other points in all respondents’ stories, he himself learnt through the process of educating others. Some years later he spent two “eye- opening” days in Gaza that had “a real impact” on his continuing involvement with global justice issues. He said of this visit that “there's no substitute for seeing things with one's own eyes, and having, getting beyond the, especially when something becomes so taboo, like a stereotype of it builds up quite quickly.” Experience can serve to break through preconceptions, with “everyday” life experiences in particular “shattering” simplistic understandings. Each of these three instances of experiential learning plays a different role in Jules’s journey. The first built a “particular form” of Jewish identity and encouraged him to challenge discrimination. The second played a significant part in challenging this first Jewish identity, particularly when seen alongside other learning taking place in his journey around that time. Through these experiences Jules’s began to question the identity of an ‘Israel advocate’ and build a new identity open to multiple perspectives on Israel-Palestine. By the time of Jules’s visit to Gaza he has fully embraced this more critical perspective and is educating others to/in it. The visit therefore serves not to challenge him or change his practice, but to reaffirm his engagement.

Experiential learning via visits overseas also plays a significant role in Ayo’s story, but with a significant difference from the stories above. Ayo was born in Nigeria into a relatively wealthy family, coming to the UK when she was ten and moving between the two countries many times. A particularly significant moment of experiential learning in her story occurs after she leaves her boarding school to attend university in London. Here she discovered poverty and experienced racism, exposing her to injustice: “I’d never seen people who had nothing, who basically were living, like on benefits, in a room somehow with

184 the rest of, I’d never seen that, I didn’t know people lived like that.” This had a significant impact on her, “opening up her world view” and providing her with a sense that “this isn't right and you should do something about it.” It also led her to see Nigeria with “new eyes”, becoming angry about other peoples’ lack of access to power: “I kind of realised actually you can’t forget about these people, they’re like everywhere, they’re poor, they’re struggling, they’re angry, I guess, because I realised I was quite angry about not having access to things and maybe for me it was the first time in my life that I wasn’t part of the powerful group.” Although she had seen ‘the poor’ of Nigeria many times previously, and in fact been active in a number of charitable initiatives with her family, her experiences in London provided her with a new perspective and empathetic understanding of injustice leading to new learning. At a later stage this learning was widened further to include people in other contexts who suffer from a lack of power: “Look at that group of traveller kids, it’s the same story, look at a group of white working class kids in some crappy estate in East London, it’s really the same issue.”

Ayo’s experiential learning described above can be seen to mirror some of the learning experiences of people from the UK visiting ‘developing’ countries, and experiential development education models explored by Trewby (2007), Simpson (2004) and others. It raises important questions about the power of ‘distanciation’ and the ‘exotic’ in learning, and emphasises the potential impact of education practices which act to develop feelings of empathy.