Abstract
To get the most out of study abroad experiences, the authors argue that students must engage with what other countries are doing right in their approaches to social problems, rather than arrive ready to “help,” correct, or critique the host country.
“The white savior industrial complex is not about justice. It is about having a big emotional experience that validates privilege,” author Teju Cole said about Western do-gooding. His words can be equally applied to international learning experiences, designed to expand students’ understanding beyond classroom walls or national borders. While these study abroad experiences are well intentioned, they have met harsh critique for fostering judgment of other cultures and condoning the white savior complex.
By orienting students to some superior element of another country, model country learning allows students to truly participate as learners, rather than leaders.
On many service-learning study abroad trips, the emphasis is on student learning rather than on outcomes for the country or people visited. When these programs are outcome-focused, they often position the visiting students in a place of power over the local population. The students are treated as heroes who better solve a community’s problems than locals might, despite having only been in the country for a week or two and bringing solutions that may hardly outlast their visit.
Instead of traveling to “struggling countries,” we believe students should study abroad in “model countries.” These are countries that have been successful at addressing a social issue based on objective measures such as a global index score. Cuba and Costa Rica, for example, rank high on global environmental sustainability measures. They could easily be used as “model” countries for students studying sustainability issues. The model country approach focuses on the strengths of a destination country which, based on objective measures of criteria, can serve as a starting place for social critique of both the students’ home country and the way progress is measured.
Adopting this approach, we coordinated a model countries study abroad program through Westminster College in Salt Lake City, Utah in May 2014. We used two model countries to study gender equality, Norway and Sweden, and asked students to compare strengths and challenges in the Norwegian, Swedish, and American gendered systems. Norway and Sweden were chosen because, in comparison to the United States, Scandinavian countries have greater political representation for women, better childcare and family-friendly social policies, universal healthcare, and Norway uses a quota system to ensure women’s representation on corporate boards.
We spent one week in Oslo and another in Stockholm. During that time, students met with local residents working on gender equality issues, including policy makers, cultural producers, and community activists. We heard directly from these community stakeholders about the progress they had made, such as increasing the number of women on corporate boards, and about challenges like protecting current “daddy leave” policies and addressing the lack of resources for immigrant women. The meetings allowed students to learn about the structural aspects of gender equality in these Scandinavian countries and apply what they learned as we explored each city.
So what did students learn from visiting these model countries that they couldn’t get out of a book or a class?
For one thing, students saw the benefits of progressive family leave policies in practice. Although students had read about the characteristics of the social welfare state model, none of the students had actually talked to policy makers from Scandinavia about these policies or seen the benefits firsthand.
They also realized that, while students they had been aware that both mothers and fathers received paid time off when a child was adopted or born in these countries, they were still taken aback by the visibility of fathers in public settings. In museums and parks and out on the street, students frequently commented on the presence of Scandinavian fathers and young children. One student noted in their reflection journal: “The amount of men that were out with their children really surprised me—they also were not with their partners, typically I saw men with other men in the park or on an outing. Women were also out with their children, but the distribution was relatively even between the two genders. This is much different than in the U.S., as women are almost always out with their kids as opposed to the men.”
Public art in Oslo.
Curtis Thatcher
Coming from a country with no paid paternity leave, these American students were surprised by the more egalitarian family life in Norway and Sweden, and they were able to imagine the difficulties that might arise if similar policies were to be proposed or enacted in their own country.
The trip’s focus on a model country did not prevent the students from critical engagement with their experiences. Instead, visiting Norway and Sweden allowed the students to see some problems of policy in practice. For instance, the benefits of gender progressive policies were uneven for people with intersecting marginalized identities. In class meetings and informal discussions, students frequently commented on the ways in which minority groups were treated in public settings and how social policy excluded marginalized groups. One issue was simply defining the term diversity. As one student commented: “I was so surprised to hear about the fact diversity is not a real defined word in the Swedish language. Målfong is the Swedish word for diversity, however no one can talk about what it means.”
Another issue that came up in our meeting with the organization Add Gender was employment discrimination in hiring decisions that impacted women with non-Scandinavian ethnicities (that is, non-Whites and migrants including Roma). In the words of one student: “[T]hose with Swedish sounding names got more call backs for job interviews in comparison to those with non-Swedish sounding names. It was also interesting to hear how pictures must be attached to resumes when submitting job applications, because I think about the likelihood of companies choosing those of another ethnicity (minority) over the majority despite their qualifications.”
Despite progressive policies that should have minimized discrimination in hiring, our visit revealed how common cultural practices like including photographs with resumes maintained inequality, especially among non-White or immigrant applicants. Had we only learned about Scandinavian non-discrimination policies in the classroom, we might not have encountered the complexities that arise when gender equality is advanced before racial equality.
The students were also surprised to see that in Norway and Sweden, gender equality was almost always discussed within the confines of the gender binary and heterosexual relationships. They observed LGBTQ invisibility and a more general lack of awareness about transgender and queer identities. One wrote, “I was most surprised by how lacking both Norway and Sweden were on race and LGBTQ issues—probably most surprised by the LGBTQ issues. For me, gender studies and queer studies go so closely hand-in-hand so to see a place that was purported to be the top of the list in gender issues not really know how to talk about queer issues was really surprising and disarming.”
Observations like these enriched class discussions as students grappled individually and together with complex issues of intersectionality. They broached complicated questions like: If parental leave policies assume couples are heterosexual, do gay couples consistently receive the same benefits? Is anyone fighting for the Roma women begging at metro stops? Does gender equality even count if it only benefits privileged women? To answer their questions, students used their new knowledge of Scandinavian social policy and their previous knowledge of American social justice movements to imagine creative and complicated possibilities for the gender equality movements in all three countries.
In just two weeks, students came to understand that there are no social utopias, but that each country struggles in some areas and succeeds in others. In the process of reaching these conclusions, students questioned the meanings of gender equality and returned from the study abroad experience with a far more nuanced understanding of social policy, the social construction of gender, and the strengths and weaknesses of Norway, Sweden, and the United States.
The model country approach to studying abroad explicitly challenges the white savior dynamic so common in international scholarship by concentrating on the strengths of other countries. If the white savior complex manifests in study abroad experiences that focus on the social problems of other countries and the students’ ability to recognize and solve them, the model country approach skirts the problem by upending the relationship, intentionally emphasizing the inferiority of the visiting students’ home culture. By orienting students to some superior element of another country, model country learning allows students to truly participate as learners, rather than leaders.