Renè M. Du Terroil is co-founder of Badgir, an NGO that organises educational tours and language immersion trips around Iran. With more than six years’ experience working in and travelling to the country, he’s eager to share its culture and history. As international relations with the country thaw, he’s optimistic more students and faculty will get that opportunity.
The PIE: Tell me how you got involved with bringing study tours to Iran.
RDT: For the last 16 or 17 years I’ve worked in international education in the Mediterranean, mainly based in Italy.
I’ve always had an interest and a desire to work further in the Middle East but many of the places where I wanted to work, for example Egypt, or in Lebanon were already kind of saturated with big established names and programmes. I’ve always had a lifelong interest in Iran through family, friends, through people I knew, through my interest in the region.
So in 2009, I had a sabbatical year and I went to Iran and I started doing the basic research for taking faculty to Iran on kind of like fam trips, in the hope that one day I could do a student tour. Over the last six years of going to back to Iran, I’ve now worked with and for a couple of major tour operators. I do student recruiting as well, Iranian students going abroad. And in creating all of this network, I’ve created the basis by which we can start bringing faculty administrators and students to Iran on study tours.
The PIE: What does Iran have to offer for students or faculty going there?
“You have this very distinct identity of what Iran means and what it means to be Iranian”
RDT: First and foremost, going to Iran makes both a political and cultural statement, in the sense that the isolation that Iran has found itself in in the last 36 years reflects the isolation that other countries have had from Iran for 36 years as well. It’s very much starting a new chapter, starting a dialogue, people breaking down stereotypes, prejudices and boundaries which have been imposed by the media, by governments and by propaganda on both sides. So I think that’s the first part.
The second part is that it is a country as rich, if not richer than Italy, where you have this crossroads of civilisations and the idea of a very old nation. So you have this very distinct identity of what Iran means and what it means to be Iranian.
I think these are very interesting things for people to see in a region especially where identities are so fragmented and so fragile. In terms of being Iranian, or even within Iran, let’s say ethnic groups and religions also have very strong identities, but at the same time they are Iranian. So the Jewish community of Iran, are Iranian and Jewish. The same with Armenian, Azeri and Kurdish communities. It’s not one before the other or one against the other. This also leads to being able to look at lots of different topics in Iran, urban development, problems in climate change and agriculture, women’s studies, even the history of the Islamic republic, and then of course the obvious things, architecture and archaeology.
The PIE: How has the government reacted to you doing this?
RDT: It comes under the authority of the cultural heritage organisation. They’re purely tourism but we are looking at very specific things in these tours.
The PIE: Do you have any partnerships with universities there?
RDT: At the moment we have lecturers, but no there are no relationships with the universities.
The PIE: Tell me about the students you recruit out of Iran, what are they looking for?
RDT: They’re looking for a job, they’re looking for a career, they’re looking to establish themselves abroad, and they’re very interested in the opportunity cost of the education that they’re seeking. For example, right now Italy has become an interesting destination for Iranian students because there are a large number of English language MA programmes and PhD programmes and Italy, interestingly enough, is a very good cultural fit coming from Iran.
“Students get opportunities to use the language, hear the language, to see the language in use in parts of the country where travellers don’t usually go”
So it’s a very easy adjustment at the same time, they’re in the EU and so should things work out afterwards and they start to work and get residency, it’s very nice because then it allows them to flow back and forth. They don’t talk about the concept of being a transnational citizen anymore, but I think this is much more the trend of the future. Before you had students from “developing nations”, when going to school was like abandoning their country. Rather today, it’s much more career-oriented but still having that continuous connection through the gift of tech and the ease of transportation.
The PIE: Are you familiar with Iranian students coming to the US?
RDT: Yes, a lot of students will go to certain countries often times because they are pathways that have already been established. There’s like a family pathway, or someone from their town has gone there. Like our family or people from our town, we went to school at the University of X at California. It’s kind of like that tradition.
In the US, it’s kind of changing a little bit, and difficult to say what decision because of how the immigration laws and visa status has changed, so very often if they do have family in the US, it might be harder for them to study there. That’s one of the reasons why Canada is a very popular choice for Iranian students because they offer all of these pathways to work permits and permanent status because they’re actually looking to their international students to become the engineers and the researchers and the doctors of the Canada of tomorrow.
The PIE: Is language ever an issue?
RDT: We can have a faculty member who is one of the tour leaders so there is a tour leader who obviously speaks English and the programmes are all customised to the requirements of either the institution or the group of people who decided to come to visit Iran.
“Canada is a very popular choice for Iranian students because they offer all of these pathways to work permits and permanent status”
The PIE: How long are the tours usually?
RDT: On average about two weeks. Nine days is the minimum we can do and we have a three week programme which is what I call a Persian version tour. It’s basically a tour where students of Persian Farsi only speak Farsi during the full trip.
I based it on what they already do in Iran, since it’s so hard for Iranian students to go abroad and almost impossible for them to go abroad to study English. They go on vacation in their own country and it’s like an English only bus trip for like a week, and so it’s taking that same principle. Students get opportunities to use the language, hear the language, to see the language in use in parts of the country where travellers don’t usually go.
The PIE: Are some of the programmes you do credit-bearing for universities?
RDT: It depends on the organisation that has asked to organise the programme, like with all these types of things, that credit is all something that happens with the organising institution and whatever work the students might do is usually completed afterwards, so they might do like a prep somewhere, for like a week like in Istanbul, come to Iran for two weeks and then go back to Istanbul to decompress. Or start in Dubai, come to Iran, and then go back to Dubai. We are looking for those to start in January or in the summer of 2016.
“It’s so hard for Iranian students to go abroad and almost impossible for them to go abroad to study English”
The PIE: Are you optimistic following the regime change in Iran, that it will open up?
RDT: In 2013, there was a presidential election and President Rouhani is the new president. And one of the big things that the new government is promoting is increasing tourism. So for most nationalities, they can actually get the visa at the airport and they’re actually updating the policy right now so that you can renew the visa and stay longer. Tourism for the Iranian market right now is driven primarily from Europe, Italy being one of the main countries for tourists to Iran, as well as a large number of Chinese tourists
I really think that going to Iran makes a statement of rejecting propaganda and stereotypes and then afterwards when people come back they become an advocate for reality. I think tourism is the first step in change, I think universities and studying and all this type of thing, this is something that will happen, but small steps at a time. There are already lots of European students and Asian students who study in Iran. There are several universities that have Persian language and culture programmes, and they go on those programmes. Small numbers but they exist.
The PIE: Do you think the US/Iran nuclear agreement will have an impact on mobility into and out of Iran?
RDT: At the moment I would say it is too soon to tell, there are lots of events that still have to transpire and the effect of the end of sanctions on the economy are hard to predict in terms of the exchange rate, inflation and consumer confidence.
