Etapa de planeación

Social factors and events (like the changes to the HE sector) have shaped the values and responses of generational cohorts. Volunteer tourism has also been shaped by a culmination of social factors which place it firmly as a product of ‘this’ time. In particular, the events and experiences that have shaped the attitudes and values of Gen Y, and their responses to these, have provided impetus for the development of the tourism phenomenon. This section looks further at the need for individuals to develop a competitive advantage, and advances the case that the combination of travel and volunteering is understood to provide this edge via a valuable learning experience.

An individual’s world view can be shaped by travel, either through his/her direct experiences as a tourist or by representations of destinations in marketing brochures, television documentaries, magazine articles, newspaper reviews and travel guides.406 _{Mowforth and Munt suggest that different} geographical imaginations are developed by individuals through their own unique circumstances – for example, age, sex, religion, ethnicity, experiences – and therefore, tourist experiences can be interpreted and represented in many different ways. For this reason,

405 _{Englund, ‚Higher education, democracy, and citizenship,‛ 282.}

406 _{Martin Mowforth and Ian Munt, Tourism and Sustainability: Development and new tourism in the} Third World, 2nd _{Ed. (London and New York: Routledge, 2003), 6.}

< differing geographical imaginations emphasise that representations of the world are socially and politically constructed and that there is an array of factors that contribute to our understanding of the world.407

This understanding is also advanced by Urry, who argues that ‚there is no universal experience that is true to all tourists at all times‛, but rather the tourist gaze is constructed through contrasting the experience with ‚non- tourist forms of social experience and consciousness‛.408 _{The tourist gaze} allows an individual to experience difference from his/her everyday routine, which, in turn, has the potential for sense to be made of the wider world.409 Tourism plays a part in constructing understandings of the world, thus impacting upon mental spaces as well as the physical.

The notion that travel experiences provide valuable learning opportunities which expand a person’s understanding of the world is not a new phenomenon, nor did travelling for the purpose of expanding one’s cultural and social capital originate with the secular international volunteer movements of the twentieth century, or the ‘gappers’ of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Expanding one’s mind through travel, in fact, can be traced as far back as the Roman Empire when young Romans travelled to Greece as part of their education. It is perhaps the early English travellers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, who partook in what is referred to as ‘the Grand Tour’, –that best illustrate an early example of the value placed on travel as a means of gaining ideas and knowledge.410 _{The first mention of} the Grand Tour appeared in Englishman Richard Lassels’ printed work, An Italian Voyage (1679), revealing that:

< the Grand Tour had been recognised as a means of gathering information which would be turned to the nation’s advantage, and of

407 _{Mowforth and Munt, Tourism and Sustainability, 9.}

408 _{John Urry, The Tourist Gaze 2}nd _{Ed. (London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi: SAGE}

Publications, 2002), 1. 409 _{Urry, The Tourist Gaze, 2.}

410 _{Louis Turner and John Ash, The Golden Hordes: International tourism and the pleasure periphery} (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1976), 31 – 3 and Christopher Hibbert, The Grand Tour (London: Weidenfield and Nicholson, 1969), 10.

training young gentlemen to take their places in a world in which patriotic Englishness would not be enough.411

English gentlemen used travel to facilitate the furthering of their education. Although England was increasingly expanding its power through colonisation and industrialisation, it placed value on the completion of their young noblemen’s educations in the universities of France and Italy, as well as broadening their minds through a travel experience.412 _{In these circumstances,} travel was assisting young gentlemen to ‘do good’ for themselves. There is a correlation here with a promoted benefit of volunteer tourism – that travel can expand one’s horizons.

It was not unusual for the Grand Tour to last several years whereby English gentlemen would travel to Italy, via the rivers and highways of France, for the purpose of gaining ‚a good command of foreign languages, a new self- reliance and self-possession, as well as highly developed taste and grace of manner‛.413 _{The experience of the Grand Tour, however, did not always live} up to expectations. Commentators at the time criticised the ‘Tour’ as having undesirable impacts upon the Grand Tourists, as well as being undertaken at the wrong time of life. The immaturity of the young traveller was a particular concern, as it was considered to contribute towards an inability to fully appreciate the value of the foreign experience:414

How much better, Lord Macaulay thought, to travel when the mind was mature and the brain stored with facts which would illuminate the foreign scene.415

It cannot be denied that those who undertook the Grand Tour did gain something from the experience, and that they returned to England with new ideas and philosophies that influenced English society. This is perhaps most strongly demonstrated by the neo-Classicism architectural style that