Abstract
International travel has long been considered a key pedagogical strategy for global learning. Yet very little is known about whether study-abroad experiences increase students’ awareness of the impact of tourism as a global phenomenon. In this study, we assessed students’ learning through a content analysis of their journals and final essays from a short-term study-abroad course that used key concepts from the sociology of tourism to explore the impact of tourism in a developing country. Findings demonstrate how thinking sociologically about travel and tourism enabled students to look “behind the scenes,” fostered critical-thinking skills, helped in their self-assessment of ethnocentrism, and promoted a sense of global responsibility. We also discuss areas that merit further pedagogical attention, particularly when students struggle to unlearn preconceived ideas about poverty and inequality or resort to overgeneralizations when thinking comparatively.
Although the COVID-19 pandemic canceled many study-abroad plans, U.S. higher education institutions have long promoted educational travel as a vehicle for global learning. Indeed, international travel has been found to have the biggest impact in the study-abroad experience (Stone and Petrick 2013). Although some scholars have questioned whether international travel is necessary to gain insights into globalization (Baldassar and McKenzie 2016; Custer and Tuominen 2017; Soria and Troisi 2014), the majority of large-scale assessments, based on quasi-experimental self-reported surveys, link student participation in study-abroad programs with positive personal-growth gains (Bachner and Zeutschel 2009; Chieffo and Griffiths 2004), intercultural competence (Salisbury, An, and Pascarella 2013), and changes in worldview (Paige et al. 2009).
That said, studying abroad is no guarantee of a transformative learning experience. In a recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Ben Feinberg (2020) described student accounts of study-abroad experience using egocentric narratives common to global marketing of corporate brands—for example, heroic self-discovery stories that parallel those of Nike’s advertisements or celebrity TV shows such as The Amazing Race that use “exotic” destinations as a background, thereby calling into question how much about the world and themselves students learn when they go abroad. Similarly, some in-depth qualitative studies about short-term study-abroad programs have documented that being abroad could also reinforce students’ ethnocentric perspectives. For instance, Gambrell (2016, 2018) noted that American study-abroad students could easily point out the prejudices inherent in being “othered” by the host culture in Spain, but this did not translate into interrogating their racial privilege in the United States.
Up to 2020, faculty-led short-term study abroad in the United States had become the most popular format of educational travel overseas because it made international travel affordable to a broader range of students. Nonetheless, some scholars claim that the wider commercialization of study-abroad programs has reinforced students’ consumerist tourist expectations and behaviors (Barkin 2018; Bolen 2001; Kortegast and Kupo 2017). For instance, Gertner (2010) suggests that country-branding strategies promoting tourist destinations for mainstream tourists work similarly on students seeking study-abroad programs. Moreover, Gmelch’s (2010) analysis of study-abroad students’ journals in Europe documented the prevalence of consumerist behaviors such as “map-hopping,” excessive shopping, and shallow interactions with local cultures.
As social scientists and educators leading a short-term study-abroad program to Peru in 2016, we sought to explore whether developing a sociological imagination while studying tourism abroad could increase student awareness as prospective travelers and tourists. Based on the content analysis of students’ travelogues and final essays, we found that the sociology of tourism offered an effective conceptual framework for students to develop their sociological imagination. We also identified an “unlearning bucket list” that illustrates challenges that merit further pedagogical attention to support students’ critical reflection while abroad.
Tourism as Global Learning: A Sociological Tool Kit
The sociological literature on study-abroad experiences in Teaching Sociology suggests the potential of international travel to spark students’ sociological imagination (Mills 1959). Sociology instructors have noticed that students’ positioning as outsiders in an unfamiliar context enhances their understanding of sociological concepts and theories, particularly when their everyday observations abroad are used as pedagogical material (Core 2017; Fobes 2005; Halsey 1990; Kain and D’Andrea 1992; Wagenaar and Subedi 1996). Traveling abroad also creates opportunities for comparative analytical thinking (Christiansen and Fischer 2010; Nordmeyer, Teig, and Bedera 2016), allows students to consider different world perspectives (Core 2017), and fosters a sense of connection to the world (Wagenaar and Subedi 1996). These valuable experiences leverage the sociological imagination as a tool for students to understand the other abroad and, to some extent, integrate course observations once home. But beyond the subject of environmental sustainability (Christiansen and Fischer 2010), there is not much documentation of what students learn about the impact of traveling abroad.
We argue that developing this sociological imagination while exploring tourism abroad can also expand students’ understanding of its impact. It is noteworthy that even when students cite educational experience or course content as their reason for being interested in studying abroad, their expectations about a host destination might have already been influenced by the tourist-industry marketing products (Gertner 2010; Lash and Urry 1993; Urry 2001), including those third-party industries that promote educational travel (Doerr 2013). Students taking a study-abroad course in the sociology of tourism can learn about the impact of tourism on the host destination while engaging in a process of inquiry and exploration that provides a global framework for themselves and others they meet abroad. To this end—namely, helping students deconstruct the tourist destination in a way that invites them to question their own position as visitors and become aware of local impacts as well as locals’ expectations and perceptions of them—three concepts in the literature of the sociology of tourism can be pedagogically useful: the concepts of the tourist gaze, (staged) authenticity, and commodification of culture.
The tourist gaze is a concept introduced by sociologist John Urry (1990b, 1992, 2001). Influenced by Foucault’s concept of “the gaze,” it refers to the practice of sightseeing as a ubiquitous experience of the tourist, defined as a leisure traveler. More importantly, Urry (1990a) explains that through this practice, tourists engage in the consumption of place and unravel a set of social processes by which sights are socially constructed, staged, and managed for that particular purpose. Under the tourist gaze, places, objects, people, and even the natural environment are susceptible to becoming objects for leisure consumption. In that sense, to understand what makes a place a tourist site is to understand the distinction between what the tourist considers “ordinary” and “unusual” or “unique.” Thus, tourist products are carefully landscaped and produced to engage this gaze. Since Urry coined the concept of the tourist gaze, others have revisited it to incorporate embodied and performative components of the tourist experience—for example, experiential tours that exceed the visual aspects of consumption—and the relational aspects of the gazer and the gazed at (Coleman and Crang 2002; Urry and Larsen 2011). This concept can help students critically revise images of “destinations” produced in travel guides and advertisements and reflect on the different tourist gazes these images insinuate. As students travel abroad, this concept can also help them visualize the cumulative effect of temporal visits that constitute the tourist gaze, which, independent of personal preferences and motivations, shapes spaces for tourist consumption in host destinations.
Authenticity in the context of tourism, also known as staged authenticity, is a concept introduced by sociologist Dean MacCannell (1973, 1976) to explain the rise of modern tourism as a cultural phenomenon. MacCannell (1976) argues that mass tourism, as a collective desire to travel, is propelled by the quest for a level of authenticity modern society lacks. Drawing from Erving Goffman’s distinction between “frontstage” and “backstage,” he argues that in the quest for authenticity, tourists long to enter backstage regions of the places they visit, which they perceive to be genuine. But this goal is elusive because tourist settings are variably staged to support their beliefs and expectations of what is authentic in other people’s cultures (Cohen 1988; MacCannell 1973). The search for authenticity, then, is an organizational paradigm that orders tourist settings and mediates patterned behaviors between hosts and guests. Thus, what is “authentic” in tourism refers to “the value that tourists and hosts place on the development and consumption of what are perceived to be genuine cultural events, products, and experiences” (Smith, MacLeod, and Robertson 2010:13). Whereas the concept of the tourist gaze invites students to problematize the practice of sightseeing, the concept of authenticity invites students to dig deeper into the negotiated meanings of what is considered genuine or authentic within the tourist experience and to understand the role of hosts and guests in that social construction.
The third concept—the commodification of culture—entails the transformation of a community’s products and activities within the market-exchange domain for tourist purposes (Cohen 1988:380-81). Thus, tourism comprises both the experience of consumption and the creation and remaking of landscapes, products, and even everyday life through a cultural-commodification process. As local goods or services are repurposed as tourist services (e.g., packaged tours) and products (e.g., souvenirs) to support tourist consumption, cultural commodification might extend to practices and products that were not previously considered for the purpose of market exchange (e.g., religious ceremonies). The previous two concepts also factor in cultural commodification: The social construction of authenticity creates social distance between tourists and the tourist destination, prompting a tourist gaze that unleashes the production of value. Yet not all goods and services that constitute a tourist destination are equally commodified for tourism, and management strategies of tourist destinations can entail the participation of authorities and people at the host destination. Students exploring tourist sites exposed to different levels of commodification can gain insights into the negotiated meanings of competing authenticities and cultural reinvention within local contexts (Shepherd 2002). Along with exploring these three anchor concepts, students can also contextualize related concepts, such as the culture of tourism, narratives of place, gentrification, and ethnocentrism.
Finally, one overreaching concept that can guide and connect students’ reflection through the sociological concepts is sustainability. Sustainability in tourism, or sustainable tourism, is a multidisciplinary concept from development studies that encompasses different theories and practices aimed at minimizing the environmental, economic, social, and cultural impacts of tourism while maintaining economic viability (Smith et al. 2010:169). In other words, this framework reconceptualizes tourism as a tool for supporting sustainable economic development. Although many debate whether tourism can indeed contribute to sustainable development goals (Higgins-Desbiolles 2018; Sharpley 2000), many governments have embarked on promoting tourist formats that are arguably more sustainable, such as ecotourism or community-based cultural tourism. Inviting students to interrogate what is considered sustainable in tourism encourages them to evaluate the potential and limits of these practices at the institutional level and to inquire further about the relative impact of tourists’ personal choices. The complex connection between the institutional and the personal, a key feature in developing the sociological imagination, is a strategic prompt for students grappling with issues of social responsibility in travel and tourism.
Incorporating the sociology of tourism as an object and medium for global learning can contribute to a full picture of the intrinsic inequalities shaping patterns of privilege in human mobility and its global impact. Indeed, students in the Global North are routinely exposed to course content framing international migration and immigrant integration as a social problem. Yet each year, far more people move across borders as tourists than to relocate to another country. In 2015, over one billion people visited other countries, whereas 244 million—representing 3.5 percent of the world population—resided in a foreign country (UNWTO 2016a). This mobility of privilege has important economic, environmental, social, and cultural impacts. Tourism generates 10 percent of the world’s GDP but also causes 5 percent of the world’s carbon emissions (UNWTO and UNEP 2008). Although communities with a large inflow, particularly in the developing world, may receive important economic benefits, they also bear the costs of environmental degradation, economic dependency, social displacement, and exploitative cultural relations (Smith 2001).
Course Overview and Host Destination
Our study-abroad course consisted of four weeks of at-home campus classes and two weeks of international field trips and lectures abroad organized in partnership with a university at the host destination. Two faculty team-taught the equivalent of a four-credit course, totaling eight two-hour classes prior to the trip. Students were selected competitively, and selection criteria included academic performance (preferred 3.0 GPA or higher), evidence of community engagement, and clarity of purpose for traveling (as exemplified in their letters of intent). The course was supported by a partner university at the destination, which offered additional lectures and managed local trip logistics. Students were also expected to meet with home faculty twice before classes started to discuss trip logistics and agree on a common set of “rules of engagement” to facilitate group dynamics abroad.
Our study-abroad destination was Peru, a developing country known primarily for Machu Picchu, an Incan archeological site that attracts 79 percent of the flow of international tourists to the country (PROMPERU 2016a) and which was inevitably the number-one site our students aimed to visit. Prior to our study-abroad trip, tourism in Peru had been growing at 9 percent annually (PROMPERU 2016a) and registering important gains in the U.S. flow of international tourists (PROMPERU 2016b) as well as U.S. study-abroad students to the country (IIE 2016). Still, many of the local communities where tourism has been booming have not benefited. Most communities in Cusco, the region hosting Machu Picchu, have a poverty rate greater than 50 percent (INEI 2020). To address these disparities, state agencies and the nonprofit sector have been actively promoting community-based tourism to provide a more equitable and sustainable tourism format to diversify income sources for Cusco farmers, albeit with mixed results for community cohesion (Gascón 2005) and economic gains (Rendon and Bidwell 2015). These experiences offered students a way to visualize multiple environmental, economic, and sociocultural impacts of tourist development and to compare tourist-management strategies.
Learning Objectives and Teaching Strategies
Although Kelner and Sanders (2009) documented the experience of teaching the sociology of tourism in Nashville, Tennessee, by using tours as the object and medium of study, no previous issue of Teaching Sociology has documented this experience in an international setting. In this local experience, Kelner and Sanders (2009) framed tourism primarily as the consumption of place and used a set of field trips—a campus tour and a combination of field trips to known and lesser known attractions—and critical reflection strategies—travelogues and debriefings—that enabled students to use tour-guide narratives to anchor the concept of the tourist gaze and analyze the production of meaning. We adapted similar experiential activities in preparing students for traveling abroad, but because we wanted to emphasize the relational component of the production of meaning in tourist sites, we added the concepts of the commodification of culture and staged authenticity to support students in interrogating the construction of Peru as a tourist destination.
Our course learning objectives were:
Knowledge acquisition: Students would apply sociological concepts about tourism to their observations of the host destination.
Critical thinking: Student observations would identify structural factors in the production of places for tourist consumption and its local impacts.
Self-awareness: Students would interrogate their social position as visitors by recognizing how tourism shapes their cultural understanding of a place and influences locals’ interactions with them.
Social responsibility: Students would assess social and individual options for contributing to sustainable travel.
We describe some of our teaching strategies in the following.
Home-Campus Tour
Adapted from Kelner and Sanders (2009), our first class entailed a tour of the students’ home campus guided by a local historian, the goal being to experience a familiar place as a visitor. Similar to the experience these authors documented, our students felt socially dislocated by others’ reactions. As one student wrote: “One thing I observed while touring was how other students . . . would stare. I quickly felt the need to explain . . . that I wasn’t a new student.” Taking a tour of a familiar place also helped students contrast the touring practice to everyday use of a place. As one student reflected, “Being a tourist at [my university] also allowed for more time to enjoy the scenery. The curvy walls on the art building and the rain garden. I’ve wanted to visit the rain garden many times but have always been rushing to class.” The campus tour was followed by a discussion of readings about the tourist gaze and narratives of place.
Omaha Student-Led Video Tours
In the second week, after discussing tour-guide narratives, we bolstered students’ understanding of the tourist gaze by asking them to record and present to the class a video tour of their favorite place. Our intention was to allow each student ownership of the narrative about a place that might or might not be familiar to the other students. Student comments suggest that they were able to translate the experience from the first-week campus tour to their own tours and to understand the ways in which the gaze depends on who controls the narrative. As one student reflected: “This activity really demonstrated the power of the tourist gaze: depending on which lens you are looking through, or who your guide is, you can get very different perspectives about the same place.”
Travel-Guide-Based Itinerary
During the third week, students elaborated the “ideal” itinerary as if they were traveling alone, based on information from popular travel guides for Peru, while we discussed readings about critical events in Peruvian history. This activity illustrated that travel guides are more than reference tools; they can shape travelers’ expectations of other cultures and their choices as consumers. For instance, most guides highlight Lima’s Spaniard colonial past and modern amenities while emphasizing Cusco’s Inca past. Based solely on the travel guides, some students wrote that they would be exposed to “newer periods in time” and to other foreign cultures in Lima. As discussions on historical events and our debriefings continued abroad, students compared expectations to historical facts and experiences. In Lima, they identified the city’s ancient heritage by learning about efforts to preserve pre-Inca ceremonial centers, known as Huacas. In Cusco, despite the travel-guide emphasis on the Inca past and rurality, students were able to recognize the city’s cosmopolitanism, largely attributed to the constant flow of international visitors. They were surprised to find in the small town of Aguas Calientes in Cusco a visibly higher density of international restaurants than in Miraflores, a modern tourist district in Lima.
This travel-guide activity also helped students distinguish their study-abroad experience from that of regular tourists, revisit their expectations about the host culture, and recognize the educational value of overlooked sites. As one student concluded: When I signed up for this trip, Machu Picchu was the first site on my mind. I am glad I got more education and visited Peru in a learning atmosphere rather than as a typical tourist. . . . I don’t think I would have made all these connections if I was going as a passive tourist.
Interview-Guide Preparation
During the last week on their home campus, students discussed local Peruvian research on the impact of tourism on local culture and economic development. After discussing the invisibility of these effects to tourists, each student was tasked with drafting five questions for people they would meet in Peru. Questions were tailored to tourist guides, tourism students, other international tourists, government authorities, and other locals. On the last day of class, the questions were discussed and compiled into a guide that one instructor translated, copied, and distributed to each student. Although students were not tasked with conducting full-length interviews abroad, they relied on their guide for asking questions on every field trip. In fact, our students came to be known as the preguntones (those who ask lots of questions) by our fellow hosts at the partner university.
Structured Field Trips and Daily Debriefing While Abroad
Of the two weeks in Peru, one was spent in Lima and one in Cusco. In each city, the course itinerary provided as many field-trip experiences as time permitted, including lectures with local tourism scholars and public officials in charge of state-led programs promoting tourism abroad and locally. The goal was to provide students as many opportunities as possible to observe and compare tour-management formats (e.g., mainstream commercial, community-based, and countercultural) and experience tours from different positionalities (e.g., tours/places with increased likelihood of encountering other foreign tourists vs. tours/places more frequented by locals).
Parallel experiences helped students observe connections between tourist-site management and community impact and differences between services catering to locals and those aimed at fulfilling international-tourist expectations. They noted how tour-guide narratives catered more to entertaining international tourists in Huaca Pucllana—located in a popular gentrified tourist area—than to educating the public about archeological findings, as emphasized in Huaca Mateo Salado—located in a mixed-income residential neighborhood rarely frequented by international tourists. Field trips beyond typical tourist places also provided opportunities for increased student self-awareness of their positionality as visitors and for recognizing that staging a place is not only a process of deceit but also a requirement in providing a level of comfort for consuming a place as a tourist. For instance, when they visited the garment district of Gamarra in Lima, a popular shopping spot for locals but seldom frequented by tourists, students realized their conspicuousness and how this place would inhibit tourist practices, such as taking photos or wandering the streets with ease.
We debriefed every day, usually after dinner. Instead of preplanned prompts, our discussions built on students’ daily observations, their follow-up questions, and their thoughts about the local impact of tourism. While in Lima, local students of sustainable tourism from our partner university guided our tours and voluntarily joined discussions, enhancing our study-abroad students’ intercultural exchanges. During debriefings, local students expanded on cultural and environmental impacts—often challenging the view that economic gains alone offset these impacts. Our students’ reflections and travelogue notes revealed that conversations with local students increased insights about college students’ experiences in Peru, tourism as a career, and the uncertainty regarding their future. These interpersonal connections cultivated empathy for the need to implement sustainable and socially responsible tourism projects that support local students’ aspirations.
Student Video-Led Projects Abroad
Students also produced a group video project intended to link the material covered in the United States, particularly the tourist-gaze concept, to their international experience and to explore elements of tourist production. Students chose one of two group projects: a promotional video for a community-based tourist experience or a behind-the-scenes video on their own student-travel experience. For the former, students had filmmaking experience and were proficient in Spanish; for the latter, filmmaking experience was not required, and the content depicted elements of the course, which started being collected on arrival in Peru.
Travelogues and Final Essay
To document their learning process, students were given a travelogue journal to record course and field-trip reflections during the one-month course and the 15 days abroad and were instructed to write one open-topic reflection a day, except for two writing prompts: the first on the use of the word “authentic” during their first week and the second, assigned the day of their return to the United States, on learning-enhancing trip activities and any changes in group dynamics while traveling. The final essay required students to compare the impact of tourism in at least two communities in Peru and reflect on ways to diminish negative effects.
Methods
Sample
The evidence for this article comes mainly from the travelogues and final essays of 10 students: 2 graduate students pursuing teaching certifications and 8 undergraduate students from different majors. None of our students were sociology majors, but almost all had taken required general education courses in sociology. The group comprised eight female and two male students from diverse ethnic backgrounds—four of European descent, four of Latino/Hispanic descent, and two of Asian descent. Six had intermediate or advanced levels of Spanish proficiency, including three heritage Spanish speakers.
For reference, we conducted an entry survey about students’ prior travel experiences and practices. We learned that six had traveled abroad, and five had traveled somewhere else in Latin America. Among these five, three traveled in the context of a study-abroad program or international service-related experience organized by the university or other organizations. Other travel experiences were connected to vacations or family visits.
Procedures
This study received exempt determination under 45 CFR 46:101b, category 4, from the University’s Institutional Review Board (IRB No. 363-17-EX). We conducted a content analysis of our students’ travelogues and final essays to analyze how they used their sociological imagination to gain insights about their travel abroad. We started by coding fragments of journals and final essays by the activity type, place, concepts used, and descriptive themes. Descriptive themes reflected students’ actions, for example, “described how tourist guides used narrative tricks to appeal to tourists,” “integrated the concept of staged authenticity into their lived experience,” and so on. Both researchers then independently classified themes into subcategories of the four stated course learning objectives (knowledge, critical thinking, self-awareness, and social responsibility) and into two groupings—effective examples, which described accurate and/or appropriate learning-outcome illustrations, and ineffective examples, which described inaccurate, inappropriate, or otherwise incorrect illustrations.
Among the effective examples, we used the concept of pivot points to distinguish fragments that illustrated the habits of the sociological imagination. As explained by Wickersham et al. (2015) in their analysis of community-based experiential learning outcomes, this coding strategy identifies reflections that showcase a substantial shift in student learning and understanding beyond listing facts or examples of theories learned. In these reflections, students are able to connect the particular/individual to social/theoretical constructs, problematize their role as learners, and articulate nuanced insights about the topics learned (Wickersham et al. 2015:20–25). The percentage agreement for this round was r = 91 percent. Most disagreements were the result of one fragment exemplifying more than two learning objectives. We then compared and discussed our classifications to reach full agreement and to assign one learning objective per fragment analyzed.
A total of 618 fragments were analyzed, of which 64 percent were written during the trip, 25 percent corresponded to final essays written back on campus, and the rest were written before the trip. Whereas the travelogue content provided insight into how students processed their experience during the trip, we expected that the final essays would reflect more complete conclusions.
Findings and Discussion
Unpacking the Sociological Imagination Abroad
As shown in Table 1, our content analysis of students’ travelogues and final essays revealed that all students recorded at least one pivot and that the number of collectively achieved pivots increased significantly during the trip and consolidated in post-trip essays. Similarly, during the trip, almost all students recorded effective reflections, which did not necessarily demonstrate a transformative impact at the level of the pivot points but did represent building blocks for a better understanding of the course content. These effective reflections increased during the trip as well. At least six students continued to show complementary effective reflections in their final essays.
Coded Reflection Counts and Percentages by Type and Time Period.
The three momentums of the learning process also triggered different dimensions of our learning objectives. As Figure 1 shows, before the trip, students were more prone to writing pivots that focused first on self-awareness (54 percent) and second on knowledge acquisition (33 percent). During the trip, the number of pivots in these two dimensions were more equitable, 39 percent and 32 percent, respectively. In the post-trip final essay, students’ pivots gravitated toward critical thinking (37 percent), knowledge acquisition (29 percent), and social responsibility (22 percent), with the least attention paid to self-awareness (10 percent). We describe qualitatively what these pivots and effective reflections entail for each learning objective.
Distribution of Pivot Points by Learning Objective and Time Period.
Gains in knowledge acquisition
Students consistently applied sociology of tourism concepts to frame their observations and deepen understanding of their relational dimension while abroad. Before the trip, students related new concepts to previous experiences, most often about tour-guide narratives. During the trip, they drew comparisons from different narrative tricks the guides used and related them to the general audience attending the sites. Students also connected observations in their effective reflections with the concepts of the tourist gaze and staged authenticity. Because of exposure to tourist-production “scenes,” pivot points demonstrated a deeper understanding of the relational dimension of these concepts. For instance, when interviewing public officials involved in managing tourist marketing and community-based support programs, students were able to identify how “authenticity” is socially constructed and the extent to which places or experiences were staged in relation to the tourist gaze. As one student noted: When he [public official] was asked what his definition of authenticity was, he said it was a unique experience. To say that something unique is authentic is to say that an ordinary life or experience is inauthentic! So, reality is not authentic. Authenticity would most likely be fake in order to be unique then. The term is totally turned around in order to fit tourists’ perceptions of authenticity.
Gains in critical thinking
Students demonstrated a more nuanced understanding of the role of tourism in local communities and a greater awareness of the unseen aspects of cultural commodification. For example, in their visits to local authorities, many students noted local governments’ need to develop tourist infrastructure to improve outcomes for community-based experiences. Yet some also started to interrogate whether alternatives outside tourism were in place in areas that could be affected by large tourist investments. Asking repeatedly about these issues, some students noticed the drawbacks to an overreliance on tourism. As one student pondered: If a local person or community becomes dependent on tourism, it can really hurt them when a disaster occurs that prevents tourists from visiting. . . . On the same note, if tourism suddenly changes directions, it can be devastating to the community. . . . As tourism subsides from their area they will be forced to switch to a different form of work. The government has programs in place to help develop tourism in local communities. However, they do not have any programs in place to help communities return to other methods of work, such as agriculture, once tourism leaves an area.
In their daily reflections, students also gathered observations on the degree of community participation in managing tourist sites and the extent to which proceedings supported locals. These observations facilitated comparisons of tourism formats, which deepened students’ understanding of the impact of tourism, namely, that the economic benefits of tourism also brought economic dependency, inequality, and cultural change. Across many of the communities visited, students concluded that cultural change could result in the preservation of otherwise deteriorated patrimony but also loss of cultural meaning when these sites were commodified to fit tourist expectations. Regarding the local impact of tourism, a common comparison was the experience of the town of Aguas Calientes on the route to Machu Picchu and the farming community around Caral—the oldest ancient city in the Americas that as an archeological site recently opened for visitors. As one student wrote in the final essay: A negative consequence is the commodification of Inca Culture. The name of the town of Aguas Calientes has changed to the town of Machu Picchu and the train that leads to the Inca Rail has the slogan “A Mystic Experience.” Today, this is a touristic town with hotels, restaurants, coffee shops, and handicraft markets everywhere, with little evidence of life outside tourism. It looked like Disney World, with high prices, souvenirs, tourist buses, and fake replicas, and tons of tourists. Most plazas and public statues were built to copy the ancient cultures and respond to tourist expectations.
This same student later observed about Caral: Our guide is proud of Caral and optimistic about the benefits of tourism. Tourism has offered a complementary economic activity to agriculture. There is lots of local participation, 90 percent of employees on the site are from the area. Farmers receive training to learn about history, culture, and how to become guides. Different from Machu Picchu, Caral is advertised to locals and educational tours made [up] the majority of their visitors.
Comparing tourist management styles from more mainstream/commercial (Aguas Calientes) to community-based (Caral) styles helped this student connect the effects of the commodification of culture, incorporating in both quotes many of the elements observed on the trip and connecting them to those who consume those sites. These observations also bolstered the concept of sustainability because the community-based experience contrasted with the overdependence on tourism of the mainstream/commercial experience.
Gains in self-awareness
While abroad, students interrogated their social position as visitors by recognizing their tourist gaze and questioning their prior expectations about the host destination. Many students’ pivot points demonstrated instances in which they were able to reflect on how tourism influenced their perceptions.
A beautiful mountain peak, buying a cute llama craft, feeling sorrow for the wild dogs, etc. All the things that were out of the ordinary for us are ordinary for those that live there. They’re just trying to make ends meet and have their own everyday stresses much like we do in Omaha. Once I noticed this commonality, it was the people I took notice of, and not the mountain peak or lost dogs.
As this student describes, awareness of their own gaze prompted them to redirect their focus from the visual consumption of the touristic images to the local people. This also guided them to question their assumptions about the host destination. For instance, the implications of the word “authentic” were a recurrent issue in many student reflections. As time passed, fewer students continued to describe authenticity as an issue about how Peruvians staged their culture and noted that describing something as authentic was more a function of tourists’ expectations than an intrinsic quality of the host culture. Some students took these reflections even further and started to look inward, existentially: If you have certain expectations about a culture, when those expectations are met, that person may assume it is “authentic” but really it is just their perception based on their own preconceived ideas . . . so I guess if I had to describe what it means to me, it would be setting aside expectations as much as possible and experienc[ing] what is in front of me at each moment. . . . I can authentically examine my own feelings/expectations but until you live somewhere and become absorbed into the local culture you will never know what their “authentic” life is like.
As shown in this pivot point, this student came to redefine authenticity as a condition of being fully engaged in the experience, understanding that as visitors, they have limited knowledge of the host culture. Likewise, they identified that the gaze worked both ways. Standing out and being perceived as a tourist also had its discomforts, for example, the expectation that students could pay more. In many effective reflections, they identified elements that distinguished Americans from other foreign tourists or that prompted questions about why indigenous culture seemed so fascinating abroad but not in their local communities. These realizations enabled students to look inward, beyond touristic egocentric comforts, and to envision their own impact. In the titles of their final essays or inclusion of concepts such as “the student gaze” or “student tourist,” students revealed their ability for self-awareness during the trip by challenging their tourist expectations.
Gains in social responsibility
Through gains in self-awareness, the study-abroad experience helped our students develop a greater sense of social responsibility while traveling. In our pre-trip discussions, students appeared not to have thought much about ethical tourist practices when planning a trip. During the debriefing after the home-campus travel-itinerary activity, when asked what type of information the guides had missed, no student mentioned fair labor or environmental practices. They based their decisions about lodging and eateries predominantly on convenient locations and price ranges. Yet in the entry survey, students with travel experience reported frequently observing environmentally friendly practices and occasionally inquiring about fair-labor standards. 1
The exposure gained by asking questions abroad also increased student awareness of their ethnocentric worldviews, helping them recognize new paths for social action. For instance, after interviewing an artisan about her embroidery and textile business and learning how many days each piece took to make, one student reevaluated their approach to bargaining, realizing that the market price did not reflect the time and dedication invested in their craft.
All I kept thinking was about ethnocentrism because I felt that I was doing it, unintentionally of course. I felt bad and guilty almost because when I was buying souvenirs I kept bargaining with them for the lower price on their hand-made textiles. The rest of the time, I purchased things I bought for the actual [asked/noted] price.
Students’ final essays demonstrated their increased awareness of the impact of tourism, focusing on issues related to fair pay, either for tourist-industry workers or among handicraft entrepreneurs. They also recognized that tourists, including themselves, need more education not only on the history or background of a destination but also on making informed decisions regarding the impact of their consumption on the places they visit and knowing enough about the tourist industry to look beyond the commonly advertised sites. This comment summarizes a common reflection: As tourists in any country, we need to become aware of the people behind the curtain and where the money is being directed. . . . We, as tourists, should stop treating foreign countries as an exotic traveling vacation but rather . . . educate ourselves in the country’s history, to be informed on the country’s current economy and lifestyle. Gaining knowledge about each country’s main subject [sic] [referring to social issues] will enhance our experience in the country itself and to correctly support organizations that strive to preserve not only the country’s popular landmarks and attractions but to also support the community and the locals that contribute greatly to the community.
The Unlearning Bucket List
Our content analysis of ineffective travelogue reflections revealed some of the roadblocks students faced when developing a sociological imagination abroad. They struggled to unlearn preconceived notions about developing countries, ways of seeing poverty, and expectations from their own tourist gaze. As a portion of all fragments coded, ineffective comments—which refer to incomplete, underdeveloped, or misleading reflections—rarely appeared in students’ travelogues before traveling (n = 2, from only one student), increased during the trip (n = 37, from all 10 students), and decreased in final essays (n = 25, from eight students; see Table 1). Certainly, the exposure to different contexts increased the challenge for our students and raised further questions once home. We identified at least three sets of ineffective-comment themes.
The first set consisted of students battling their own tourist gaze. Some early content about navigating culture shock related to their tourist needs and expectations. For instance, on just the second day after arrival, a student wrote about how little time the itinerary left for shopping, and others complained about not being able to take pictures of protected sites. Furthermore, even though on-campus discussions had used the relational conceptualization of authenticity, many students reverted initially to the word “authentic” to denote purity or originality in their expectations of Peruvian culture. Similarly, some students fell back on the essentializing praise of ancient cultures, awed by the monuments they visited and enticed in part by tourist-guide rhetoric that emphasized “mystery” in response to the alleged need for modern scientific knowledge to achieve such levels of architectural sophistication.
The second set of ineffective comments corresponded to students’ inadequate use of some sociological concepts to frame observations. For instance, some used concepts applicable to a frontstage region of the tourist experience to describe backstage experiences. As an example, one student described as “happenstance” (Wynn 2005)—a serendipitous event capitalized on by tourist guides as a trick of the trade—the kindness of the owner of the family-run hostel we stayed in to have some students join her at a Sunday-morning Catholic mass. Prior to the trip, students studied happenstance to analyze narratives of places produced by tour guides, but in this experience, the event was not part of a deliberate narrative of the hotel owner to enhance a tourist experience, just a moment in her everyday life. These students’ observations, among others of the same kind, opens up the question of whether everything is a frontstage region from the student’s perspective and if the overuse of these concepts may inhibit them from engaging meaningfully with locals if they perceive that anything can be a performance.
The third set of ineffective comments resulted from students grappling with observations of the inequality of living standards in Peru and the United States. Some students dealt with the discomfort of these encounters by affirming their personal gratitude and good fortune for better housing or labor conditions. These reactions were understandable and expected. Nevertheless, as instructors, these incomplete observations task us with encouraging students to further interrogate why these differences exist or whether the home-country standards students enjoy are accessible to all. In other instances, the difference in living standards hindered students’ capacity to learn from those that they perceived to be poor. For instance, when visiting the Cuyuni Community, the Chief invited us to tour his house, whose ecological sustainability had been arranged with the help of a local nongovernmental organization. The two-story adobe house was collecting the solid waste from the family guinea-pig farm to produce gas for heating water, and the kitchen was rearranged to capitalize on the naturally occurring cold and hot spots for food storage. Instead of reflecting on this visit as a lesson on ecological sustainability—after all, an individual with a negligible footprint was making ecofriendly arrangements—many students misread this experience as witnessing poverty. 2 Through this lens, students merely reassured themselves that people have a better life in the United States without further questioning this assumption.
There was a greenhouse and methane-collection system. They had a ceiling to keep their house warm. Their stove was clay. They had a cuy [guinea pig] farm. . . . The house made me sad. This is because the guy was so proud of it. He was so proud of this advanced technology. [In the United States], our poorest people live better than that. It really gives you an appreciation for what you have.
This student reflection seemed to suggest that unlike this farmer, extremely poor people in the United States can meet their basic needs, which is an overgeneralization. As instructors, we expected complex emotional responses to these encounters, to which facts alone might not fully prevent misleading interpretations. In the case of the aforementioned reflection, the student’s sadness seemed to create an emotional distance that contributed not only to obscuring the experience of poverty in the United States but also to this student’s overlooking the contributions of traditional forms of living and low-tech solutions to environmental sustainability.
Overall, ineffective comments correlated to the tourist gaze, and the inadequate use of tourist-related concepts tended to decrease over time, as students debriefed and discussed their observations every day while abroad. Although we also regularly debriefed with students about their impressions and discomfort regarding standard-of-living differences, we cannot clearly assess the influence of those conversations on students’ final takeaways. None of their final essays specifically addressed global inequality or poverty. However, in general terms, many final essays acknowledged the challenge of grappling with misinformed views on developing countries and with the discomfort of confronting these thoughts, for example: We had to finally realize that we don’t understand what we don’t understand. . . . It was extremely challenging to not be ethnocentric because in the United States the media tends to make developing countries seem extremely underdeveloped. . . . As a novice traveler with no background in traveling whatsoever, it became a positively overwhelming experience for me, basically an internal conflict. I thought keeping an open mind wouldn’t be so difficult, but it turns out it is a lot harder than it sounds.
Discussion: Students not Tourists?
In this article, we argue that sociology-of-tourism concepts enabled study-abroad students to interrogate their role as “visitors” in unfamiliar territory and develop their sociological imagination. Through the content analysis of students’ travelogues, we identified that international travel was conducive to frequent, extensive, and deep reflections. Pivot points—that is, reflections that demonstrated significant moments of transformative learning—were more plentiful during the trip than during pre-trip experiential learning activities and solidified insights that translated into final essays. Even though pivot points typically occurred at different “bursts” in each student’s trajectory (Wickersham et al. 2015), we observed a collective learning pattern. Early reflections demonstrated students’ incorporation of knowledge through their application of concepts to lived experiences and gradually evolved from gains in self-awareness during the trip to enhanced critical-thinking skills and commitment to social responsibility in the post-trip period. During the trip, gains came from students placing the concepts of the tourist gaze and staged authenticity into a relational framework. By means of the uncomfortable disruption of intercultural engagements, their realizations regarding social responsibility became less “normative” and more personal after witnessing the impact of tourist choices and recognizing that some of these behaviors were indeed theirs. This pedagogical strategy proved successful to counteract the “vacation mindset” or “consumerism” identified in many study-abroad experiences.
Traveling abroad not only provided students opportunities to interrogate misconceptions but also revealed some hindrances to critical reflection that merit further pedagogical attention. Given the context of traveling abroad to a developing country, students struggled to make sense of the unequal living standards they observed. In many cases, these encounters with the poor or those whom they perceived as poor only reinforced preconceived ideas about poverty in the United States or prevented them from interrogating these inequalities further. This finding, from our unlearning bucket list, adds to the evidence suggesting that even a short-term study-abroad course calls for long-term on-campus preparation and extended post-trip debriefing sessions (Root and Ngampornchai 2012). Consequentially, higher education institutions would serve students well by supporting efforts to internationalize and decolonize the core curriculum and by promoting at-home experiential learning opportunities surrounding these issues. Within this framework, study-at-home experiential learning courses need not be perceived as competing with study-abroad because they can complement each other in facilitating global learning.
Furthermore, instead of thinking of tourism and educational travel as separate forms of international travel, we could be more deliberate in acknowledging the influence of tourism on students’ travel expectations in study-abroad formats. To better prepare students for cross-cultural learning, it is essential to help them in interrogating their relative privilege of mobility in their social position as visitors. For many of our students, this was their first experience traveling abroad, and for those with travel experience, it was the first time they interrogated tourism as a social problem.
In short, higher education institutions worldwide could be more deliberate in shaping generations of young travelers. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, youth travel was the fastest growing segment in the worldwide tourist market—a discrete segment because of their preference for travel formats with a “purpose” (e.g., study abroad, language learning, and volunteering; UNWTO 2016a). Several studies suggest that traveling to a foreign destination is the strongest motivation for students to enroll in study-abroad programs (Nyaupane, Paris, and Teye 2010). Although it remains uncertain how international travel will resume after the pandemic, the slowdown can offer the opportunity for institutions of higher education to evaluate the marketing of study-abroad experiences, build more equitable partnerships at host destinations, and commit to study-abroad sustainability by investigating its environmental, economic, and sociocultural impacts. It might also be timely to reflect not only on improving students’ learning outcomes abroad but also on the future impact of their graduating travelers. And as part of that commitment, the sociological imagination as it pertains to travel and tourism might be one important item for instructors abroad to pack and unpack.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
We gratefully acknowledge the Office of Latino/Latin American Studies (OLLAS) at the University of Nebraska Omaha and our partner university, Universidad Antonio Ruiz de Montoya (UARM) in Peru for facilitating the development of this course. We are grateful for the insightful lectures of UARM Professors Alberto Martorell, Javier Gordillo, Oscar Gamarra, and Martin Schmidt and the guided talks of sustainable-tourism students Natalie Quino, Adrian Molina, José Fuentes, and Luis Valle. Our deepest appreciation to Father Carlos Miguel Silva from the Society of Jesus; Carmen Sirvas, administrator of the San Pedro Apostol de Andahuaylillas Parish; and Meritxell Oms from SEMPA for sharing with us their community-based experience in managing the Route of the Andean Baroque. We also thank Dr. Julie Pelton for her input and comments on the first draft of this article and the feedback received by the panelists and participants in the 2020 ASA Annual Meeting session titled “Teaching Strategies That Transform: Addressing Human Rights and Inequalities Despite Ideological Resistance.”
Editor’s Note
The reviewers for this manuscript were, in alphabetical order, Rachel Core, Jeffrey Gardner, and Stephen Scanlan.
