There are many variations of voluntourism, which partly depend on the sending institution or even country...
Most organizations offer you various kinds of packages. So you can book a one week tour or even decide to go to another country for more than one year. Mostly vouluntourists work as an English teacher. In Germany for example it got very popular to be a vouluntourist after finishing high school and be part of a government supported program. People get to see the world and do something good, which even looks better in their curriculum vitae. Other reasons for going are probably social reasons. Living in the Global South you feel like giving something back is the appropriate thing to do. But wouldn’t other methods be more sufficient? Or you are just sick of studying and don’t know yet what to do with all those future possibilities. But most important is to help!!! We have to help in the Global South since everything there is undeveloped and so natural that people especially children cannot reach their full potential. In the Global South children are extremely vulnerable, since most of them are orphans anyway. They really do need us since we are matured adults with so many competences especially since we are just out of school and have so many valuable skills.
No!!! Of course not! In the last paragraph I just wrote a lot of b%$§#*€t. I was once a voulunttourist myself - going to Indonesia to do something good in this unfair world and a lot of the thoughts above are more than familiar to me. But quickly I realized that I am nowhere in the position to change anything by being a vouluntourist. I asked myself, why in first place I wanted to develop people´s lives anyway ... And why, why really was I suddenly in the Global South ... Because I can be there. I can travel. I can get a visa. I am accepted to work somewhere as a teacher without being qualified - just because I from the Global North. And therefore from the "better" part of the world. While being a vouluntourist I was there exactly strengthening those same thought pathways I actually never wanted to be part of: Eurocentrism feeding a postcolonial world.
Eurocentrism means that Europe or the developed west is the standard all other countries have to climb up to. That there is one way of development only, which the Global North already went through and that would be the reason, why there is so much technology and a high living standard. Everyone else has to follow the Global North, because that is the proper and good way!!! High living standard is of course a measurement valuing western live style and is mostly considering economic aspects... And that here in the western world not everything is perfect and to be achieved, I don’t feel I have to tell you. Pretty much we all know that our lifestyle here is little by little destroying the world.
Why is voluntourism part of a seminar called 'Transnational Routes of Modern Education'? I hope it got clear by now, that certain values are spread in the world through voluntouorism, just by voluntourists being somewhere else. The Global South is presented as needing help as a motivation for voluntourist and by arriving in an “undeveloped” country the same idea is also suggested to the inhabitants. The best example is how children are portrayed on those websites offering voluntourism. They are needy, emotional and simple. They have potential and are uncorrupted. Those stereotypes fit into the world view of the Global North. Voluntourists want to experience the original, the easy way of live in a world they want to change - what an ambivalent ideal. But what do the visited think about that? What do they learn through this route of modern education? And what can we learn?
[For some theoretical and analytical perspectives conf: Zeddies, M & Millei, Z .2015. It takes a global village: Troubling discourses of global citizenship in United Planet’s voluntourism.]