ABSTRACT
Volunteer tourism has been defined as “volunteer[ing] in an organized way to undertake holidays that … involve aiding or alleviating the material poverty of some groups in society” (Wearing, 2001: 1). Although recently appropriated in domestic contexts (Villano, 2009), volunteer tourism in academic literature indexes unskilled, temporally shallow travel that moves primarily in a Global North-South flow (Callanan and Thomas, 2005). While some volunteer tourism projects may involve assisting in orphanages or building physical structures, English language teaching is a common project option (Butcher and Smith, 2010). Within English language teaching via volunteer tourism, or what I call English language voluntourism, one’s primary task is to teach English as a foreign language in settings that vary by placement site.
