“They were really nice”: A post-colonial analysis of student narratives

“They were really nice”. “They were all over me, wanted to touch my hair and they really wanted to make friends with us”. “Their teaching was different, they had to learn everything by heart. It was not difficult to understand, we had it in school two years ago, but the funny way it was presented made it hard to understand. We are taught to be independent and have learned to discuss and get new ideas”. “We could not work with them in school. For example, when we should have a project on climate sustainability they suggested that someone buy a cow and a field – as if that relates to the climate”.
The citation above condenses a speech given by two Danish students, who had been visiting a high school in Global South. Other students brought back narratives on how students in Global South questioned their way of life:
“Why don’t you help at home, when you live at home?”, “We work harder than you do, we have more lessons a day and more homework and we help our parents more than you do, why is that?”
The aim of the paper is to discuss how study trips between Global South and North could be practices to invite students from both North and South to reflect on their positions in a post-colonial setting. The paper explores: Which reflections and narratives do students (high school or higher education) bring back from their trips? How could intercultural learning challenge and qualify their reflections from a postcolonial perspective?
As Saïd (1978: 3) argues, examining Orientalism as a discourse is crucial to understanding how European culture managed, produced and reproduced the Orient in a myriad of ways (e.g. politically, sociologically, ideologically) during the post-Enlightenment period.