‘What is your name, where do you come from, what is your grade?’ Using art-based interviews to highlight the experience of children hosting school tours in Matabeleland North, Zimbabwe

ABSTRACT

The incursion of tourism into schools is an increasing phenomenon, whether through volunteer tourism, developmentourism or philanthropic tourism. Tourism studies have largely ignored children as stakeholders in tourism destinations. In Zimbabwe, economic turbulence has led to a broken education system that relies on external donors to finance schools. As part of this financing, some schools welcome tourists in exchange for funds, sponsorship or infrastructure. Tourists in these settings usually visit schools as part of a mass tour for between 2 and 3 h, with the expectation that children will receive financial benefits or improve their English speaking skills. This paper uses art-based methods to centre children in the research process and reporting. Using children’s drawings and extracts from the interviews and observations, the findings of this study indicate that children in the school experience the school tour in a repetitive manner. In contrast, interviews with adults suggest that school tours are positioned as enjoyable and valuable due to the exposure to English. The data generated by this study contribute to our understanding of children at host destinations and the use of art-based methods.

KEYWORDS:

• Developmentourism
• school tour
• Zimbabwe
• art-based methods
• philanthropy

Introduction

Cultural tourism often provides a vehicle for community development and philanthropic funding. In particular, tourism-orientated NGOs are becoming more prevalent in many countries in Sub-Saharan Africa (Clausen, 2019; Scarth & Novelli, 2019) and visiting schools as part of a philanthropic tourism exercise is also increasing (Chilufya et al., 2019). Tourism as a panacea for development has been previously explored in tourism research (Mutana et al., 2013; Novelli, 2016). Of these explorations, Baptista (2011) coined the term ‘developmentourism’ to reflect the ‘integration of ‘development’ discourse, knowledge and action into the tourism experience’ (p. 663). This paper explores school tours as a niche within developmentourism, encompassing elements of philanthropic tourism, volunteer tourism, corporate social responsibility and community-based tourism.

The tourism examined in this paper, that of the school tour, is a micro-niche (Novelli, 2016), within developmentourism (Smithers & Ailwood, 2022). School tours have previously been explored in the context of corporate social responsibility (Chilufya et al., 2019) and developmentourism (Baptista, 2011; Burns & Barrie, 2005), where the school tour is an optional activity provided by a local hotel. As a micro-niche within developmentourism, they exist in many configurations that are yet to be fully elucidated in the current research literature. In this paper, the school tour is a micro-niche within developmentourism and it caters almost exclusively to American tourists who are over the age of 50, who participate in tours of Southern Africa with companies aimed at providing ‘off the beaten track’ tours or educational tours. The school tour, in which a school is included in a broader tour itinerary in order to raise funds and source sponsorship, has had relatively little exploration in the research literature.

This article reports on a study conducted over thirteen weeks (one school term) in Matabeleland North, Zimbabwe. The research involved an in-depth examination of one case study school to examine how tourism influences the daily lives of students and staff. In this article, the author reports on how the conduct of the tourism was understood differently by students and staff at the school. Using art-based methods to inform these findings, the author highlights the need for tourism research to consider children’s voices in host communities. The significance of this paper is threefold: first, it examines a previously unexamined area of tourism in Zimbabwe; second, it provides much-needed insight into the experiences of children in a host community; and third, it uses art-based methods to provide insight into the experiences of these children, which is a previously under-utilised research method in tourism (see Ertaş et al., 2021; Gamradt, 1995).

Literature review

School tourism

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, tourism injected around US$1.3 billion per year into the economy of Zimbabwe with the United States accounting for the largest market share (Zimbabwe Tourism Authority, 2019). While most tourists will engage in wildlife tourism, more recently cultural tourism such as village visits, has been suggested as a replacement for the ‘big five’ tourism activities (Mutana & Zinyemba, 2013). Alongside the significant contribution to the Zimbabwean economy that tourism provides, tourism has become a solution to the under-resourcing of schools.

The problems associated with under-resourcing of schools in Zimbabwe are longstanding due to economic and political turbulence, these issues include a lack of textbooks, trained teachers, and infrastructure (Madziyire, 2015). Since the 1990s, minimal change has occurred in the Zimbabwean education system, with teachers in government schools underpaid, if paid at all (Utete-Masango, 2016). As a remedy to resourcing problems, many schools use philanthropic donations in some form as a source of funding, whether it be from one-off donations, charitable partnerships or sponsorship of children (Madziyire, 2015). For some schools, these wealthy donors are sourced through tourism ventures that provide funds in exchange for school visits (Mutana et al., 2013). In the school in this study, this tourism takes the form of a 2–3-hour school tour.

Relatively little is known about the influence of tourism on schools. Previous studies have explored volunteer tourism in schools (Henry, 2020), philanthropic tourism in schools (Lacey et al., 2016), and the influence of corporate social responsibility on the resourcing of schools (Chilufya et al., 2019). Most studies have focused on volunteer tourism, and within these studies there has been very little scrutiny of the influence of tourism on schools. For example, in their case study of philanthropic tourism in Kenya, Lacey et al. (2016) focus on the issues of management of a school funded by tourism, but not the experience of students or teachers. In an earlier study, Burns and Barrie (2005) outline the neo-colonial attitudes resulting from a school funded by foreign donors. Although some attention has been paid to the relationship between tourism and schools, much work is to be done. These studies provide a fruitful basis from which the current paper develops an understanding of how tourism in schools influences the day-to-day experiences of staff and students, with a particular focus on the experience of children in the school.

Why children?

In the last few decades, in line with Article 12 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, researchers are considering the right of children to have a ‘voice’ on issues that concern them (Hill, 2016; Holt, 2004). Historically, children were provided little voice and were considered ‘adults in training’ with research conducted on them not with them (Bradbury-Jones & Taylor, 2013). In child-centred research, children are considered ‘active participants in their own socialisation’ (Moskal, 2010, p. 17). Increasing interest in children’s voices has led to multiple fields incorporating child-centred research, such as human geography (Porter & Abane, 2008), health sciences (Campbell et al., 2010, 2015; Christensen, 2004) and education (Howell, 2017).

Children’s voices, particularly those of host communities, are often ignored in tourism settings despite children being present in many, if not all, tourist destinations (Buzinde & Manuel-Navarrete, 2013). Worryingly, Yang et al. (2019) identify there are no available or accurate estimations of the number of child labourers in tourism worldwide. Yang et al. (2019) differentiate the roles of children in tourism into two categories, workers and social actors. Social actors include those who engage in cultural performances, volunteer tourism, or souvenir businesses. The number of children engaged in these activities is unknown and the representation of children in tourism research is limited.

Alongside the lack of clarity regarding the extent of children’s involvement in tourism, they remain obscured and largely ignored within tourism research (as identified by Canosa et al., 2017; Khoo-Lattimore, 2015; Poria & Timothy, 2014; Rhoden et al., 2016; Wu & Pearce, 2016). Canosa et al. (2016a, p. 327) argue the ‘positivist legacy’ in tourism research leads to the exclusion of young voices. They performed a systematic review and identified 30 studies that included ‘young people’ or ‘children’ as residents of tourism (as opposed to young people as tourists). In the studies, Canosa et al. (2016a) identified three categories of child involvement: silent, acknowledged, and youth-focused. Although they identified three categories of child involvement, children in tourism destinations are often only acknowledged rather than provided with an opportunity to voice their opinions on issues that concern them. While children have previously been mostly ignored in tourism studies, there are a growing number of studies that take the voices of children seriously. For example, Gamradt (1995) and Buzinde and Manuel-Navarrete (2013) utilised art-based methods to investigate the experiences of children in host communities in Jamaica and Mexico; whilst Khoo-Lattimore (2015) explored the attitudes of very young children towards family holidays using a range of art-based prompts. There are also studies which use film and participatory methods to explore the voices of children (Canosa et al., 2016b).

As children are one of the main ‘social actors’ – to use Yang’s et al. (2019) term – in developmentourism and tourism in schools, they represent a significant contribution of labour to the endeavour. Given the vulnerability of children in these positions, it is important and necessary to study their experiences as hosts in tourism destinations. It is clear there is a flow of tourists through schools in certain countries. These tourists are often on volunteer tourism trips, but they can also be day trip tourists who visit briefly. A flow of tourists through schools is significant because there are dangers associated with allowing strangers to visit a school. First, if organisations do not perform background checks on all participants, there is a danger of allowing vulnerable children to be exploited (Rotabi et al., 2016; Wilson, 2015). Second, the tourists are often not required to have teaching qualifications in their home country. The children involved in school tours represent a marginalised population whose voices have previously been ignored in tourism research. Scant attention has been paid to children involved in activities such as volunteer tourism, orphanage tourism or developmentourism. In 2019, Yang et al. reported 11 studies that focused on the type of volunteer tourism that affects children, and of these studies, none used children’s perspectives to explore the issue. Although developmentourism is a distinctly separate type of tourism, there are similarities with short-term visitors whose tourism is intended to be altruistic or part of a ‘giveback’ to a local community.

Given the current lack of focus on children in tourism research, this paper argues for an urgent need to consider the voices of children in tourism settings. In particular, the use of art-based methods makes possible an examination of the voice of this marginalised community within tourism research.

Methodology

Theoretical framing

A critical approach is a turn away from positivist studies and necessitates an emphasis on the structural and systemic barriers that marginalised groups face. In fostering a critical ontology, this paper uses a theoretical lens to further understand the research data. The two theoretical framings used to interpret the data are whiteness studies and development discourses, following Bandyopadhyay’s (2019) use. The two theoretical lenses make visible the structural and often invisible framing through which interactions with host-children in the Global South are founded. In what follows, this paper will unravel these elements and explore the usage of these two theoretical understandings.

By understanding development as a discourse, we can understand it as part of the making of social reality. In the discourses of development, all countries are, usually without problematisation, measured on progress towards becoming ‘developed’. As per the idea that a country can become sufficiently ‘developed’, global aid is justified as further developing the ‘underdeveloped’ countries by providing the things they are ‘missing’ (Jackson, 2014). This binary perpetuates unequal power relations as people in the Global North feel they can intervene in the Global South in the name of development (Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2013). Further, the notion of all countries being considered on a scale of developed or undeveloped obscures the inequalities that result from years of oppression due to colonisation (Matthews, 2017). Negative representations of the African continent once propagated by travellers, missionaries, and anthropologists are now furthered by the work of NGOs and the media (Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2013).

Development and whiteness are entwined, in part due to the high number of development workers who are white, coupled with the rise of (white) celebrity humanitarianism. Whiteness, as a discursive and governing ideal, centres the experiences of white people within everyday experiences, economic structures, and narratives (Ahmed, 2007). Due to the institutional, systemic, and discursive power of whiteness, whiteness is rendered invisible to those who are white. Whiteness renders white people, in the main, unaware of the privileges afforded to them due to the colour of their skin. As part of this discursive function, whiteness enables systems of domination and supremacy, while white people are usually unaware of the daily lived experience of being always marked, positioned, and governed by skin colour. In Zimbabwe, white people are in the minority of the population and their whiteness is a physical marker of their privilege (Suzuki, 2017). However, despite being more physically visible and out of place, whiteness is still the dominant discursive construction around which both people and ‘progress’ are measured (McKaiser, 2011; Misi, 2016).

In developmentourism whiteness coalesces in the concept of the ‘white man/woman’s burden’ (Bandyopadhyay, 2019; Bandyopadhyay & Patil, 2017). The increase of celebrity efforts in development and humanitarian projects indicates how development and commodification are increasingly combined to create the image of a virtuous saviour of those marked as ‘other’. Identity through the ‘other’ and the idea of white identity building through the ‘other’ is perpetuated by discourses that suggest that individuals can, or should, save the ‘other’.

Part of the discourse of ‘saving the other’ is wrapped in conceptions of childhood. More recently, there has been a shift in perceptions of childhood and efforts to explore childhoods that might usually be marked as ‘Other’. Childhood is a cultural construction, with differing constructions of childhood occurring across time and cultures (see Aitken, 2001). Of relevance to this paper is the construction of childhood as a time of innocence and purity:

When romantic perspectives are used to talk about children, languages of nature and children are conflated as similar moral concerns: the goodness, purity and innocence of nature/children are dominant concerns and actions are predisposed towards stewardship, protection and preservation. (Aitken, 2001, p. 120)

From the perspective of the Global North, children in the Global South are defined by their ‘lack’ compared to the idealised norm (Roberts, 1998). Kesby et al. (2006) argue that for voices of children in the Global South to be taken seriously, they should be considered ‘as they are and not in terms of what they are not’ (p. 186). They also identify there are hybrid childhoods in contemporary Zimbabwe as a result of the ‘nation’s complex historical geography’ (p. 187). In taking seriously children’s voices, this paper examines childhood, as it exists for the child participants, rather than as a ‘lack’ against an idealised norm.

Study context

This research aimed to explore the impacts of developmentourism on schooling in a case study of a school. The research site was a primary school in Matabeleland North, Zimbabwe; chosen for the number of visits it receives from tourists each year. In 2019, when the data were collected, Matopo School (a pseudonym) hosted 126 visits. The school was created by a tourism company and is funded through a charitable foundation connected to the company. It also receives one-off donations from private sources, other charitable foundations, and a fee per visit from one tourism company.

The school was visited by three different tour companies, with the school tour differing slightly for each company, but the main process and ritual were the same. The tour begins with tourists arriving, being greeted at their minibus by children. A short dance/song component follows, with tourists encouraged to participate. Following this, the tourists are provided with a ‘school history’, which provides an in-depth account of the different funding that has led to the development of the school. During the school history, there is a direct appeal for tourists to donate or sponsor children in the school. The last component is a school/village tour, in which the tourists are shown each classroom and allowed time to explore the school grounds and village nearby. For each of these components, depending on the company, the tourists are either accompanied by students from the school or a teacher (the implications of this have been explored elsewhere, see Smithers & Ailwood, 2022). The tourists who visit the school are mostly white Americans aged over 50.

Research methods

The author spent 13 weeks living in the high tourist area and attended the school three days a week, with two days spent in a local non-government organisation office that facilitates the dispersal of donations to local schools. As part of the larger project (University of Newcastle, Human Research Ethics Committee, Approval No. H-2018-0447), a total of 12 teachers, school founders, and tourism personnel participated in semi-structured interviews that lasted 40–90 min and were held in various locations during the fieldwork. These interviews asked questions about the participants’ work, including their perspectives and experiences of the school tours. All people and businesses have been provided with pseudonyms, including the school.

The interviews with children used art-based methods. There has been previous use of art-based methods with children in Zimbabwe (Campbell et al., 2015). Although popular in other fields, tourism studies have a relatively sparse history of art-based methods. A brief description is included here to aid understanding and provide insight for those who might wish to use these methods. The aim of arts-based methods is two-fold: to disrupt the power dynamic usually present in a semi-structured interview and allow the researcher to hear participants differently. In particular, drawing can enable children to express thoughts and feelings that they have not yet been able to thematise or verbalise (Campbell et al., 2010). Further, using drawings to structure an interview can ‘act as a nonverbal stepping stone’ (Søndergaard & Reventlow, 2019, p. 3) into the lifeworld of the child.

To ensure informed assent by the children involved, the author began by asking the Grade 5 class if they knew what the word ‘research’ meant. One child raised their hand and said, ‘it is a puzzle that you write about’. Using this as a starting point, it was explained that the puzzle was their school. Following this, children could ask questions, and the school principal explained the research project in the local language, Ndebele. Children were provided consent forms for their parents and asked to explain the form to their parents. Any parents who did not understand the form were invited to ask the researcher or school principal for clarification. Only children for whom parents had provided permission were invited to be interviewed, although all children participated in the drawing process (children without parental consent kept their drawings and these drawings were not analysed). Children were reminded about their right to withdraw and asked verbally for assent before starting the interview, they were then provided with an assent form. Of 35 children in the Grade 5 class, 31 of the parents consented for their child to participate in the research, from which 29 children (aged 9–13) were interviewed. All children picked their own pseudonym, and these are used throughout this paper.

Most children were given one hour in the afternoon to draw. The afternoon was allocated in the timetable to extracurricular activities and study. First, both the author and the school principal discussed at length with the children that there was no wrong or right answer and that they should draw their own drawings without copying other children’s work. During the interview, children were asked about their drawing and how it related to the tourist visits of the school. They were also asked questions about their parent’s occupation, why they had chosen Matopo School and what they liked about school. Most interviews with children were between 5–20 min and conducted in English as this is both the official language of Zimbabwe and the language of instruction for schooling. All interviews were conducted in a public area of the school, but not the classroom. These interviews were recorded and transcribed by the researcher. Some children had low levels of spoken English, so their interviews were brief.

As the researcher was present for one school term, there were many ethical issues that arose ‘in-situ’ beyond the scope of the ethics approval. In responding to these tensions and problems, the method of collecting drawings was adapted throughout the fieldwork to accommodate the changing needs of the school (a reality for educational researchers, see Mayeza, 2017). As identified above, most children were given time in class to draw and were then withdrawn from class for an interview. Initially, the interviews were designed as elicitation interviews, in which the researcher and participant would have a conversation during the drawing process. There were three interviews conducted in this manner. However, due to the approaching examination period and the ever-present interruptions of tourism, it was less disruptive to engage students for a 5–20 min interview, rather than the much longer elicitation interview. This decision was made in conjunction with the school principal, the researcher and class teacher. There are some research studies which explore the every-day ethical tensions present in working with children, and they resonate for this study (e.g. Christensen, 2004; Porter & Abane, 2008). The ethical tensions present in the data collection for this study will be presented in a forthcoming paper, in which they are explored and unpacked in depth.

Analysis of data

The adult interview data and child interview data were considered separately in the analysis process. Data analysis used reflexive thematic analysis, as detailed by Clarke and Braun (2017). Thematic analysis involves six phases of inductive and reflexive coding: familiarising yourself with the data, generating initial codes, searching for themes, reviewing themes, defining and naming themes, and producing the report. A key tenet of reflexive thematic analysis is the role of the researcher in active theme development, themes do not emerge rather, they are ‘actively created by [the researcher] through their interpretative engagement with data’ (Braun & Clarke, 2021, p. 342). The researcher is deeply involved in the result of data analysis and will shape the way in which the results are reported.

Several themes were developed during the analysis of the adult interview data, one of which was the positive nature of the school tour, which included identification of the joyful nature with which the children conducted the tour and the benefits of the school tour for children’s English skills. All interview extracts presented should be considered representative of the overall theme. The children’s data were also considered using thematic analysis, with one theme about the school tour identified: the repetitive nature of the tour. The results of analysis differed between the adult data and child data and represent a rich opportunity to examine the benefit of taking children’s viewpoints seriously on issues that concern them.

Given the embedded role the researcher plays in the analysis and representation of data, it is appropriate to situate the author in the research and the analysis. The author is a white woman who was born in Zimbabwe, but she had lived in Australia most of her life. As such, her position remains as an outsider in terms of ethnicity and cultural understanding. However, throughout the fieldwork, she moved through various stages of insider/outsider positions. At times, the research participants identified the author as an insider through her qualifications as a teacher; however, she was also an outsider as she held a university qualification and was mostly experienced in Australian high school classrooms. In another example, one participant identified that, as the author was born in Zimbabwe, she was a Zimbabwean like the participant. This insider position, as declared by one teacher, is incredibly complex to navigate. In one sense, the author was born in Zimbabwe, but she was born into privilege and spent most of her life in Australia. Despite the commonality of being born in the same country, our life histories have looked remarkably different. All relationships during the fieldwork were shadowed by race and pre-existing race relations that existed in Zimbabwe, even when the author interviewed people who were also white. There are inherent risks in researching and acknowledging whiteness – particularly the risk of accidentally reinvesting in it. This paper takes a critical approach in identifying how global structures are continuing to position whiteness as a privileged location and, in doing so, aims to dismantle the discourses of development from which the school tour and developmentourism are built.

Research findings and discussion

The following two sections present the analysis of the interviews with children and the adult participants in this study. The analysis of the data is presented separately to demonstrate the insights gained from investigating the experiences of children in host communities.

Perspective of adults

To facilitate discussion of insights gained from interviews with children, this section first explores the analysis of adult interview data. It outlines the perspective of teachers, tourism personnel, and tour guides, regarding the perceived benefits of the school tour and the perception of student enjoyment during the tour. Using a critical lens, the data is situated within the broader sphere of developmentourism and constructions of childhood.

Across the interviews with adults, there was a pervading sense that the tourism in the school was beneficial as it provided children with exposure to other cultures, further practice in English speaking and that it also increased resources for the school. For example:

I think the kids get a lot of excitement out of it, I think they are quite honoured, or they are quite surprised that people come and see them and their school. ‘Why us?’ So, they get a lot of excitement out of it. I think the fact that they can, one of the big things is, they take the visitors around the school. And, the different questions, and particularly the different accents as well. It takes them a bit get used to it. (Greg, tour guide)

Greg identifies the benefits for children as exposure to different accents and different questions and that the children were surprised and honoured by the tours. The image of excited children who welcome tourists has become a well-worn trope in the past few decades, as celebrity humanitarianism has contributed to the proliferation of a discourse that positions children in the Global South as the needy ‘other’ (Mostafanezhad, 2013). As Bell (2013) argues, these acts have re-centred whiteness and cannot be removed from the colonial legacy and postcolonial reality. In the quote by Greg, the image of the white tourist greeted by enthusiastic children is a call back to these images of white celebrities arriving to an enraptured audience.

Although there is a pervasive dominant discourse that positions children in the Global South as needy ‘have nots’ who are welcoming of all interventions from the Global North, Alison, one of the school founders and co-owner of a bespoke tourism company, identified that she could understand how tourism might impact negatively on children:

In terms of the singing and dancing it is difficult, because as a tourist, and from a sort of outside perspective, I would feel quite uncomfortable thinking that kids are being made to dance for tour groups coming in. And to sing. But having said that, the kids just seem to absolutely love it! … And I’ve seen the boys practising at lunch time, and it is something that they seem to absolutely love and if I didn’t feel that, I would actually be quite anti [singing and dancing]. (Alison, school founder)

Interestingly, there was a level of performativity that occurred during Alison’s visits to the school. During the observations the author undertook as a researcher, she attended school three days a week and spent lunch and morning tea in the playground with children. She did not see children practising dancing or singing during the play times. The children’s interviews, to be discussed later, illuminate this point further. In her interview, Alison identified a change over time in the children:

The children back then were incredibly shy. As a white person meeting them it was like you were a ghost, I mean they were terrified of me when I first appeared. And they were just really awkward, really surely, you wouldn’t get a smile out of them at all. And you just would not recognise the kids now, as being the same kids then. And yes, most of them were younger but to see over just a few years these kids have absolutely blossomed. In confidence, in, in smiles and laughter.

Alison’s comments exemplify the governing ideal of the dominant idea of childhood. In the Global North, childhood is conceptualised as a time of innocence for play and exploration (Kesby et al., 2006). In this extract, Alison invokes the discursive ideal of a normative childhood and identifies that the children took some time to meet her idea of a ‘child’. The translation of ideas and normative constructions about childhood are reflective of the neo-colonial structures which position Global North childhoods as normal and appropriate for all children. These images also reflect how the school children should perform the role of the ‘ideal child’ on the school tour – a child who sings and dances, filled with joy.

The conception of children feeling joy and honour when asked to be a tour guide was consistent throughout the interviews with teachers, tourism stakeholders and tour guides. Aside from the joy the tour was perceived to bring, there were numerous benefits associated with the school tour. Zibusiso, a classroom teacher, identified that being ‘chosen’ to be a guide on the tour was important in encouraging children to develop their English skills:

And if you look at those who cannot speak English. They also want to walk around with the guests. So it, in other words, it is a motivation to them, to say if you are able to speak in English. Then you will be able to take turns, take shifts to walk around with the guests. (Zibusiso, classroom teacher)

In the above extract, Zibusiso identifies that it was a popular activity to be the ‘guide’ for the guests. According to Zibusiso, children enjoyed the task and it was a motivator for children to speak English. That both teachers and tour guides who visited the school engaged in the idea of English language skills being an important outcome of the tourism is unsurprising. The concept of exposure to English and differing accents is endemic to the insidious discourse of English as the global language (Jakubiak, 2012; Kushner, 2003). Further, the emphasis on English as the language of choice reflects Zimbabwe’s colonial history and the identification that for success in tourism, English skills are important (Makoni et al., 2006; Sylod & Chivhanga, 2013).

There was a persistent idea that the tours were beneficial to the school, even if no money was exchanged at the time of the tour. A deeper purpose of the school tour was to create the opportunity for connections and networks that might lead to further funding. For example, one teacher said:

I thought it was also for networking and the exposure. Because like, you know our children sometimes they get connected to children who are overseas whom they don’t even know. They get to exchange ideas and the likes because they have pen pals. They get connected to their pen pals through the coming of the visitors and the likes, so they benefit and the fact that some other children, those who are needy they get sponsors, so they also benefit from that. (Ingrid, classroom teacher)

The teachers and school founders positioned the school tour as valuable for children to make perceived connections with others and as providing the basis for further opportunities for sponsorship. The benefit of connections reflects the type of tourism, in which development and tourism are an intermingled aim and design of the product (Baptista, 2011). Further, the connection of tourists to children, resulting in sponsorship, is an appropriation of the ‘discourse of development’, which positions the tourists as agents of change. The discourse of development, in this case, has been taken up by the teachers at Matopo School and creates a relationship of power in which the tourists may feel compelled to undertake their end of the ‘bargain’, that is, to provide sponsorship and funds to the student pen pal. Positioned through discourses of development, the perception that poverty can be eradicated through individual action largely ignores neo-colonial structures, which are pervasive globally and work to continuously recreate inequalities for those in the Global South (Escobar, 1995/2012; Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2013).

Although often imbued with dominant discourses that privilege the Global North, the interviews with adults in the school community suggest a positive and beneficial school tour. The teachers and tourism personnel outlined the perceived happiness of the children during the tour and the competitive need to be involved in the school tour, which allowed for an increase in English language skills. Further, the teachers outlined the benefit of the children forming connections with tourists, as it created a potential avenue for future funding. While these interview extracts above exemplify the perceived benefit of English skills and that the children ‘absolutely love’ the performance they give, the child interviews tell a different story. In what follows, the paper will explore the perspective provided by the art-based interviews with children at the school.

Child perspective

The analysis of the art-based interviews with the children is presented now. In what follows, the children’s art is considered a ‘visual means of strategically communicating feelings and experiences’ (Hickey-Moody et al., 2021, p. 58). The children were taken seriously, in this study, as valued sources and producers of knowledge about their own life and experiences.

Within the drawings, the tourists were depicted in relatively narrow ways, as demonstrated by the drawings from Precious (age 10) and Shama (age 9):

In most pictures that depicted tourists, they were shown in the courtyard of the school, holding a child’s hand.¹ Depictions of the outside of the classrooms and the bus that tourists arrived in were also frequent. In fact, there were no drawings of children interacting with tourists in their classrooms, except one that depicted the school ‘shop’. Given the nature of the school tour, which follows a set formula, it is unsurprising that the children depicted the tour in formulaic ways. Despite the teachers identifying the children as having wonderful ‘friends’ and relationships with the tourists, for most of Grade 5, the interaction was depicted as artificial. The repetition in the children’s drawings shows the continuation of the routine and how once children had mastered the process, the questions, and the answers, there was nothing left for them to learn.

Within the drawings and interviews, it became apparent that the relationship between the tourist and the children is superficial. When asked to describe a ‘memorable’ tourist, most of the children could not think of one. Some children chose to name their sponsor, but most could not recall the names of specific tourists or any particular event. In interviews, when asked how they interact with the visitors, the children said they were asked similar questions on each visit:

They will ask, what is your name, where do you come from, what is your grade? (Ashant, age 10)

They ask me, what grade are you? And they ask, if I have my young sister or if I have my brothers, or my sisters. And they ask me, umm … if I’m living nearby the school. How many kilometre away? And they ask me [about] my teachers. And they ask, how many teachers in your school. (Aysha, age 10)

These questions were also shown in several pictures, including the two preceding. One example is the picture drawn by Peace (age 9):

The picture depicts a school bus on the left with two children and two tourists on the right. The dialogue between one child and a tourist depicts the tourist asking, ‘What is your name?’ and the child replying, ‘My name is … ’ (name removed to protect child identity). The nature of the relationship is unsurprising, given the short stay the visitors undertake; however, it becomes problematic when a perceived aim of the tourism is to encourage networking and further English skills. Previous research has suggested that short-term visitors do more harm than good (Carpenter, 2015; Guiney & Mostafanezhad, 2015). The perception that a brief time with an adult from the Global North is more beneficial than time with a qualified teacher is linked to legacies of colonisation. In these legacies, global structures position Global North knowledge as superior to Global South knowledge. The child interviews and drawings suggest that although the time with an adult from the Global North is prioritised there is little interaction beyond a repetitive question-answer structure. The repetition suggests that very little learning happens once children learn the basic questions and responses.

Most drawings showed a similar picture of tourists and children interacting on the school tour. For example, Gareth depicted an interaction in the school ‘shop’. The school ‘shop’ was a stop on the school tour and it was the Grade 5 classroom. Prior to each groups’ arrival, beaded jewellery and chitenge² aprons made by students were laid out across the classroom tables. During the tour, those in Grade 5 who were not guiding a tourist would make jewellery or cut pieces of cloth for aprons. Inevitably, this transformation into a shop caused disruption to schooling, although that is not the focus of the paper and has been explored elsewhere (Smithers & Ailwood, 2022).

In this drawing, two tourists are depicted in the school ‘shop’ and are commenting on the jewellery made by the children. They say, ‘oh! Good’ and ‘oh! nice beads’. In the interviews, children used similar words to describe interactions with tourists. For example, when asked what conversations they have on the school tour, children said the following:

They buy [the beads]. And they say ‘Oh, nice’. (Aysha, age 10)

They say, ‘This is nice classroom’ or they say, ‘This is nice children’. (Brenden, age 10)

About the school? They will say, ‘The school is nice’. (Gracious, age 11)

These interview extracts highlight the repetitive nature of the interactions, with children identifying that the tourists describe the school, the beads and the children as ‘nice’. These findings are particularly troubling considering the adult interview data presented earlier. If the purpose of the tour is to improve the English skills of the children, repetitive interactions do not meet this aim. Further, the nature of the conversations may reflect the experience of the tourists themselves, in that they may have very little experience interacting with children. This raises questions about whether people with little experience with children should be responsible for English language instruction and whether they should be visiting a school at all. The idea that people from the Global North can visit schools, hospitals or other locations in the Global South without qualifications or experience is pervasive (Bauer, 2017). A critique of this practice, and its representation in the media, is well established in studies that examine orphanage tourism or volunteer tourism (Bandyopadhyay, 2019; Carpenter, 2015; Guiney & Mostafanezhad, 2015). However, the school tour remains a place where people who may have very little qualifications or experience can interact with and educate children.

As demonstrated in the preceding section, the tourism is reported by the adults as enjoyable for children. While children in their interviews identified that they ‘liked’ the tourists visiting, often the reasoning was that the tourists brought gifts for the children:

I would prefer to come to school which has visitors because they will be helping us. When there are no books, they will be paying, they will, be giving us some money, and we buy some books. (Tawanda, age 10)

With visitors is coming here to school. With the visitors you take your photo. Visitors give all books, pencils, pen. (Lovely, age 10)

These extracts are contradictory to the perception of Alison, who suggested the children enjoy singing and dancing. These extracts suggest that the children show joy and happiness about the tourists due to the potential payoff: gifts. The children did enjoy the visits, but it may not necessarily be due to an inherent love of dancing and singing for the tourists. The dominant image of childhood in the Global North is one of play; however, research in Zimbabwe has identified a need to recognise the multitude of childhoods that children experience (Kesby et al., 2006). In understanding their childhood in this way, this data could suggest that the children are positioned in such a way that they know gifts and future tourist visits are contingent on their performance. If this is the case, the children will show happiness towards tourist visits and the school tour, as it is a prerequisite for funding or material donations. Therefore the childhood of the children in this study should be considered beyond just play, with a more complex construction that includes a pragmatic awareness of their own disadvantage and the tools that might rectify this.

Although most interactions were reported to be repetitive, one child identified an interaction that went beyond the usual question-answer routine:

I met him at the bus, and then we walked around. And he told me that, ‘I come from the United States’. Then said, ‘In United States, some of them speak in Spanish, some of them there are some Indians, and some of the Zimbabwean peoples, the black people’, and he showed me his wife and their sons, granddaughters and we moved around. When we were moving around, he told me that ‘Your English is good, better than mine’. And I said, ‘Thank you’. Then when we were going [around the school], then he said goodbye, and that was over. (Tawanda, age 10)

In Zimbabwe, English is the language of instruction for schooling past Grade 3. Despite the expectation that children can speak, learn and interact in English at school, the tourists were often surprised by the English skills of the children – something that was noted in the fieldnotes kept during the study. Although that tourist was not interviewed, the interaction with Tawanda highlights the expectation of some tourists who arrive at the school: that they will provide the child with knowledge and skills they may not have previously had. Well established is the white saviour discourse, which positions those from the Global North in a position to educate those in the Global South (Henry, 2020). In this unexplored frontier, the white saviour is constituted as having a role to play in educating the local people in ways of knowing and doing (Wale & Foster, 2007). In this case, the dominant discourse of development – that countries in the Global South cannot speak English – governs the expectations the tourists have when they arrive at the school.

This section has explored the experiences of children on the school tour. Largely, the children experienced the tour in a repetitive manner. They were asked the same questions on most tours and were provided with the same niceties about their school on each tour. Further, although the children expressed enjoyment from the tours, it appeared this enjoyment also arose from the gifts and donations the tourists provided to the school. These findings are important as they are somewhat contradictory to the reasonings and attitudes expressed by the teachers.

Conclusions and implications for future research

This paper has identified the need for diverse methodologies and research involving children. In host communities, children are often not provided with a voice or the ability to speak on issues that concern them. Analysis of the adult interview data suggested that the school children experienced ‘joy’, ‘honour’, and ‘happiness’ in relation to their participation in school tours. Across the interview dataset, the teachers, tour guides, and tourism personnel agreed that the tours were beneficial for children’s English language skills and potential funding opportunities. The interviews with children, and their drawings, identified a different picture altogether. The analysis of the children’s data suggests that they experience the tour in a repetitive manner and that the communication that occurs during the tour is repetitive and thus might limit their ability to learn English language skills. On a pragmatic level, this paper suggests that there are some concerns to be further explored when including children as tour guides in schools that are funded by tourism. The range of this practice is not yet known from the literature. In the school in the present study, the extent to which children receive positive benefits from the tour, such as skills in English or experience in a range of cultures, is also not clear.

The above findings indicate that the field of tourism studies needs to urgently consider the role of children in hosting school tours. The school tour exists in varied forms across southern Africa and other regions of the world (Chilufya et al., 2019). Not only should tourism studies begin examining the role that children play in school tours, but there is also an urgent need to consider the role that children play more broadly in host communities. Taking the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child seriously means that tourism scholars must design studies that allow for authentic and purposeful representation of children in host communities. Art-based interviews are one such method for children’s voices to be heard in tourism studies.

This paper has unravelled some practical applications of art-based methods with children in the case study of a school in Zimbabwe. Taking children’s voices seriously as a starting point has demonstrated the alternative viewpoints and opinions that research with children provides. Further, it has offers a critical lens for examining the nature of school tours in Zimbabwe. Although the generalisability of the study’s findings is limited due to the small-scale nature of the study, it offers fertile ground for those considering art-based methods or methods that give voice to children in host communities. Tourism scholars should seriously consider the provocation that children in host communities offer real insight into the issues that concern them.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Australian Government Research Training Program Scholarship and Fee Offset.

Notes on contributors

Kathleen Smithers

Kathleen Smithers is a Lecturer in the School of Education at Charles Sturt University, Australia. Kathleen has worked across a number of projects, including Virtual Reality in Schools, school improvement, and precarity in Higher Education. With a focus on equity in all her projects, her doctoral thesis investigates developmentourism in schools in Zimbabwe.

Notes

1 The ethics of handholding and photography is not discussed by the author in this paper, but is considered to be a problematic addition to this type of tourism with serious ethical implications.

2 A type of brightly coloured and patterned material commonly sold and used in Zimbabwe.