Been thinking about international "service learning trips" & how so many students are taken to countries in the Global South & are given no information about the legacy of colonialism there. Doing so allows stereotypes to flourish in what should be a space of critical engagement.
What does it mean to bring a young person to a country that they've never been to and to have them work in an orphanage or help build houses or help to deliver food, without explicitly naming the history that helped create the current landscape of inequality that currently exist?
It's essential to give students the historical tools to make sense of the world around them. It's not a matter of being "objective." Keeping this history from them is an intentional decision with real implications for how they process the things they see when they travel abroad.
