Decolonizing International Experiential Education: Creating North-South/Allyship Through Egalitarian Partnerships

Harry Smaller and O’Sullivan will present the essential argument in their co-authored book that there is a significant potential that International Service Learning (ISL and other forms of International Experiential Education, IEE) can be transformative individually and collectively for all parties to the experience including, importantly, the local residents of the community being visited. Community members are invariably relegated to the role of providing colour to the student experience and are rarely asked “what do you want these student visitors to learn while they are on your territory and what do you want them to communicate once they return home”. For community members. What does doing well involve? to use the term associated with Grain & Lund (2018, p. 3). Essentially, in the case of receiving student visitors, doing well involves establishing relationships/partnerships of equity, in the case of receiving student visitors, by entrusting our global southern partners to play a leadership role defining what they would like our students to learn while in their communities and to communicate when they return home. Too often, global northern group leaders, be they teachers, professors, or people drawn from other sending agencies (e.g. churches, unions, various community groups) define the messaging that their group members will hear – often with those group leaders defining that according to their own priorities, and the global southern community simply providing a backdrop – an exotic location - rather than a profound learning opportunity led by the local people. In effect, our argument suggests that the means of achieving relationships of equity, trust, and mutual benefit involves the development of a profound allyship, undoubtedly over years of visits by increasingly well informed group leaders. The topic of the role of allyship in research will be taken up by one of the panelists, Luke Heidebrecht. During his time as a PhD candidate,Heidebrecht served as an RA on the SSHRC team that gathering and analyzed some of the data that forms the bases of the book. He is currently a co-investigator on a follow-up SSHRC funded initiative involving a research team composed of global northern and global southern researchers, the latter being recognized Indigenous leaders in their community. This new initiative is building on that earlier research in Mayan communities in Guatemala. Luke is a member of Pewaseskwan, an Indigenous wellness research group that works with Indigenous urban and rural people and communities in Saskatchewan with a focus on learning about and implementing Indigenous research methodologies. The panel will also include a very successful practitioner of transformational ISL and community development projects. Ashley Rerrie, currently a grant operations officer program office with Equality Fund, a feminist funding agency that funds women’s rights organizations projects globally, started her engagement with transformational global practice as a student on a CWY placement in Nicaragua. That led to her pursuing a career that, following the completion of her MA in IDS, she became the Country Director of Casa Canadiense, a Toronto based NGO with an office – a casa – in Managua and she directed numerous small scale community development projects in ongoing consultation with community leaders. Casa also ran a program which placed high school student groups in homestays in villages where the students worked with community members but always in consultation with the communities’ priorities. She practiced the principles of always respecting community leadership, she engaged in a constant process of consultation and, we can suggest, practiced allyship before it gained the prominence it currently has.