Pedagogies of Cultural Change: The Rotary International Youth Exchange Program and Narratives of Travel and Transformation

Abstract

Every year, Rotary International sends thousands of American teenagers to live in foreign lands. Rotary is responsible for teaching students about travel and culture and for preparing teens for their year-long intercultural experience. Rotary International Exchange Students are 'embedded tourists', living in their host countries in order to 'acquire' a binational subjectivity. Rotary International's Program is a pedagogical site, where students are taught how to think about and consume cultural difference and are given ways of conceptualising tourism, travel, cultural adaptation, and personal transformation. Based on over three years of ethnographic research with Rotary clubs in the US Midwest and New England, this paper explores the narratives utilised by Rotary International as they socialise American teenagers for study abroad. The paper asserts that Rotary's narratives employ many of the tropes utilised in Euro-Western tourist and travel accounts. At the same time, the Rotary International Youth Exchange Program sees its students as cultural change agents and thus helps to cultivate in these students a sense of global citizenship by fostering a commitment to cultural diversity and an interest in intercultural communication. Hence, Rotary International's Youth Exchange Program is intentionally designed to bring about cultural change.