Community Connectors: Jennie Germann Molz 

Jennie Germann Molz is a thought leader in the sociology of backpacking, travel, and digital nomadism. In her early twenties, she spent two years backpacking around the world. She credits this experience with sparking her academic interest in tourism culture. She went on to earn a Master’s in Popular Culture Studies, focusing on travel imagery, and a Ph.D in Sociology, focusing on tourism mobilities, from Lancaster University in England.

Today, Dr. Germann Molz is a professor of sociology at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts. Her research interests include tourism and technology, traveling families, digital nomadism and mobile lifestyles. Dr. Germann Molz’s publications include: Travel Connections: Technology, Tourism and Togetherness in a Mobile World (Routledge) and Disruptive Tourism and its Untidy Guests: Alternative Ontologies for Future Hospitalities (Palgrave Macmillan), and most recently, The World is Our Classroom: Extreme Parenting and the Rise of Worldschooling (NYU Press).

We’re so lucky to have caught up with Jennie Germann Molz while she is on sabbatical this year, in her home town of Taos, New Mexico. Like any good journey, our conversation zigged and zagged in fascinating ways. We could have spoken with her for hours. We’re delighted to share with you a synopsis of our conversation as part of our Wonder Year Community Connector series.

Tell us a bit about yourself and what sparked your interest in travel and tourism.

I wish I could remember the exact moment. As a kid, I always wanted to travel the world. I had a very mobile childhood. We moved around a lot, all within the United States. I went to 11 different schools before I graduated from high school. I think that probably embedded some existential questions in me that I could explore through thinking about travel and tourism.

When I was in high school in Dallas, Texas, I became friends with all the study abroad kids who were coming to the US. I think I felt as out of place as they did and I bonded with them over that experience. Then I applied to their study abroad program, AFS (American Field Services), and spent the year after I graduated from high school in Italy.

I did my master’s degree research on travel imagery, and then for my PhD research, I studied the blogs that around-the-world backpackers were publishing while they were traveling. I looked at the narratives on global citizenship that were coming out in those blogs. This was 2000 and 2001, and these blogs were just like personal websites, not the kind of interactive social media landscape we have today. I wanted to understand how backpackers were beginning to use mobile technologies to plan their travels, stay in touch with people, and experience the world. This academic exploration informed my first publication, Travel Connections: Technology, Tourism and Togetherness in a Mobile World. One of the travel bloggers that I interviewed for that book was a dad who was traveling with his wife and his two kids. He was a writer, and his two kids were doing school on the road. That impressed me, and I thought, “Oh, that’s my next project.” That’s kind of the trajectory that got me here.

Your experience/interest in long-term family travel is not just academic. It’s personal. Can you tell us about your family’s epic adventure?

As a sociologist, I was interested in families that were on the move, doing worldschooling, but I did not quite know how to handle the research design. I had developed some online and in-person research methodologies for studying backpackers which I applied to the study of families, but I needed time to conduct the research.

I knew I had a sabbatical coming up in a couple of years, but in the meantime, I applied for and got a Fulbright Fellowship. I took my family to Finland for six months, and we lived in Rovaniemi, which is up on the Arctic Circle. My son, Elliot, was eight at the time, and we took him out of school for the semester and enrolled him in a Waldorf school in Rovaniemi. At the end of that semester, I asked him what he would think about maybe doing a longer-term trip that would be part of my fieldwork. I wasn’t sure what he would say since there had been some ups and downs as he had to make new friends and learn Finnish. He got down from the table and walked into the other room, and I thought maybe he’s not up for it. Then, he came back with a piece of paper and a pencil and was like, “OK, where are we going to go?” He wanted to start writing down all of the places for our trip itinerary.

My son was on board. My husband was on board. And I had this sabbatical coming up. We were able to start saving and planning. Elliot decided he wanted to go to all seven continents. This was not necessary for my fieldwork. I wanted to go to some of the hubs where I knew families were hanging out so I could meet with them and interview them. But you know family travel involves compromise!  So, we planned an itinerary to go to all seven continents. Along the way, I made sure to plug into places like Chiang Mai, Thailand, and Buenos Aires, Argentina, where I knew I would meet other families. I was able to meet and interview more than a dozen families while we were traveling.

Visiting an elephant sanctuary in Chiang Mai

Your most recent book, The World is Our Classroom is subtitled “Extreme Parenting and the Rise of Worldschooling.”  Can you explain what extreme parenting is all about?

Well, I will tell you, we can thank the publisher for the book’s subtitle! The subtitle that I wanted was much longer, The World is Our Classroom: Mobile Families, Global Kids, and the Search for the Good Life in Uncertain Times. The question I was asking is how does family life happen on the move? We always think about family life as something that happens at home, so what happens when you’re doing it on the move?

That was my first question. As I started to explore, what I realized was that worldschooling families were embracing uncertainty. Whereas a lot of people see uncertainty as a threat, these worldschooling families saw it as a value add; it was something that they could embrace in order to get their kids ready for what would inevitably be an uncertain future.

What I am thinking about with extreme parenting, and I capture it in one of the chapters titled Fear and Joy, is that modern parenting falls along this continuum with helicopter parents at one extreme and free-range parents at the other extreme. The helicopter parents are extremely involved in their kids’ lives and extremely invested in monitoring, securing, and making sure that their kids are safe. Free-range parents, and I think almost all of the worldschooling parents I interviewed and many that I know about, probably situate themselves closer to the free-range parenting philosophy, are at the other extreme. Their emphasis is on giving kids freedom and fostering in them a sense of independence. We can also think about the two extremes as safety versus freedom.  When I talk about extreme parenting, I’m thinking about the way parents calculate that tradeoff.

What I realized with these extremes is that they circle back to the same place. All of these parents want the same thing for their kids, right? They want their kids to have happy, successful lives in a world that is full of uncertainty and kind of falling apart. Depending on how you think about it, climate change, political polarization, the rise of extremist politicians, volatility in the global economy – that can be really scary. So these parents are looking at this future and thinking, “How do I get my kid ready for that? Do I keep them on the straight and narrow path and make sure that they go to college, get a degree, get a good job and stay in the middle class; or, do I equip them with a sense of self-reliance and resilience and fluency in three languages and the ability to communicate with people who are different from them and the capacity to cope with change?” None of these parents have bad intentions; they all want a good future for their kids. They are just coming at it from different perspectives.

In our book Wonder Year, the blog on our website, articles, etc., we three coauthors contemplate how family dynamics change when families are in motion. You have deep expertise in mobile living. Can you help us understand a little more about the science/sociology underlying that phenomenon?  In other words, what is it about travel and being in motion that makes being a family so different on the road than it is at home?

Curiosity is a mindset. It can happen right here at the kitchen table. Travel is not the only way to cultivate curiosity and by the same token, travel won’t necessarily spark it either. I engage with a model called “transformative learning.” This is a model proposed by Jack Mezirow. The idea is that you have a learning experience that shifts you from one world view into a different world view or that shifts you from one world view into understanding that there are many, many, many worldviews.

The idea of transformative learning is primarily applied to adult learning, but I think the transformative learning model can apply with kids as they are building their world view. The very first step is some kind of disorienting dilemma; something has to happen to challenge your worldview, like you may grab the sink faucet that you think is cold, and you turn it on, and the water comes out hot. “That is not what I thought was gonna happen! What’s going on here?” There’s some kind of disorienting dilemma, and from there, you have self-reflection about what didn’t meet your assumptions. Then you challenge your own assumptions. “Why did I assume that in the first place? How did I learn that that’s how the world works in the first place?” And then you begin to recognize that there are other worldviews or that there are many ways of living in and making sense of the world. There are other steps to transformative learning, but it all starts with one big disorienting dilemma, which then catalyzes those other steps toward transformative learning. So I wonder if that’s what’s going on with mobility. When we’re traveling, there are always disorienting dilemmas, and there’s constant problem-solving, so maybe that’s one way to think about it.

You interviewed a lot of past and current travelers about their choice to pack it up and hit the road. What were some surprising findings in your research?

I was expecting to write a book that was an account of how people did family life on the move. What I ended up writing was something a little bit different, which is about how these parents were grappling with uncertainty. They were going from a more practical set of questions (How do we handle the logistics of traveling with kids?) to a more existential set of questions (How do we prepare our children to thrive in an unpredictable world?). The other thing that really surprised me is how many of the families, and this happened with my family as well, shifted to unschooling once they were on the road. You plan, plan, plan for all the lessons and learning materials and academic outcomes, and then a few weeks in you realize your kid does not want to write an essay and there’s a plane or train or bus you’ve gotta catch and you’re like “Oh well, forget about that assignment and just learn whatever you’re learning. Just look around! How do we buy tickets? Can you calculate that exchange rate? How can you figure out what time our bus leaves?” It’s definitely a philosophical shift, but I think it’s also partly a logistical shift. Unschooling just dovetails with the realities of travel so much better than carrying a bunch of textbooks and standardized lesson plans around.

I also expected that the families I interviewed, most of whom were from the middle class and the global north, would have more progressive values. What I found was unexpected. A lot of these families were leaning more toward libertarian values. They justified their decision to worldschool in terms of “This is what’s best for my family,” or “This is what’s best for my kid,” and sometimes there was not a whole lot of thought about the communities that they’ve left behind, or about investing in public education in their home towns. It felt like a lot of these people were adopting worldschooling as a personal strategy to deal with what are actually collective problems. That kind of surprised me. But I also found that these families are so incredibly smart and skillful and resilient as families. I think they have the tools to make a big impact on some of these collective problems. Maybe I was hitting them at a point in their journey where it was just about their kids. I have not followed up with any of the families, so I am not sure about how they processed their experiences or if they were finding ways to use these tools to deal with collective problems more collaboratively. I am not sure.

Is it fair to say that you think the world is not only an excellent teacher, but that it’s the best classroom? What makes you come to that decisive conclusion?

I would not say that is my conclusion, but that is the belief that I found among the parents I interviewed. The belief that the world is the best classroom motivated them to make radical decisions about their lives, to quit a salaried job or sell their home, and to take their kids out of traditional schooling. I don’t disagree with them, but I am also hesitant to celebrate travel as the best or only way to learn.

Travel alone does not expand kids’ worldviews in a positive way. There’s nothing magic about it. You have to have parents who are open and who play an active role in opening up the learning opportunities presented through travel. You know, research has shown that travel can also reinforce stereotypes. It can reinforce a sense of entitlement and superiority that narrows a worldview. So, I think that it’s really important not to romanticize travel by itself but to keep it in conjunction with some of these other conditions and to recognize that parents play a big role in the broader outcomes.

It really depends, too, on what we mean by the world, and what you’re experiencing as the world when you say something like the world is your classroom. We need to remember that every place you go is somebody else’s local place. That’s somebody’s home. When we’re talking about the world, we’re really talking about all these places that are somebody’s home, which means that our home is also the world, right? That’s why I like saying, wherever you are is just as good a place to start worldschooling as any other place because we’re all in the world.

One of the most profound types of learning during long-term family travel is when kids acquire life skills. You coined a phrase “emotional curriculum.” I think we may be talking about the same thing. Can you talk more about “emotional curriculum?”

I had a whole curriculum for Elliot before we left on our travels. I had promised the superintendent of his school district that he would come back knowing this, this, and this. I had downloaded so many books on the Kindle! And then we got started, and it was hard to stay on track. For his social studies curriculum, he was studying the history of Mashpee Wampanoag Indigenous culture in Massachusetts. But he was working on that unit while we were in Australia. It didn’t make sense. I wondered why he was not reading about Australian Indigenous culture. Eventually, the curriculum we had crafted just disintegrated, and we moved into unschooling mode to take advantage of the cues and experiences around us. I realized that a lot of the parents I was interviewing and talking to were doing this as well.

They would tell me things like: “Ok, so my kid can’t name all of the US presidents in chronological order, but they can order seven different flavors of gelato in Italian.” Or “They’re struggling with long division, but they just played with a kid for two hours, and they don’t even speak the same language.” Or “My son isn’t that interested in chemistry, but he is learning how to cope with change.” It was like the fact that kids were learning all of these life lessons and emotional skills was a justification for what kids weren’t mastering in the standard academic curriculum.

What I also realized was that, in parents’ minds, some emotions count as life lessons and some don’t. There was a lot of emphasis on positive emotions: resilience, independence, empathy, compassion, gratitude, these kinds of things. But parents were not as forthcoming when talking about disgust, embarrassment, or when their kids get grossed out by things. They didn’t talk a whole lot about homesickness. I started to dig a little bit deeper into what was included in the emotional curriculum and what was being left off. What I theorized, in the end, is that these emotional skills really add up to an emotional curriculum of global citizenship. A lot of the parents explicitly say, “We’re going on this trip because I want my kids to become global citizens.” It is a noble goal, but what does that mean?  Citizenship is technically a codification of rights and responsibilities – voting, paying taxes, being part of the social contract – but that’s not how we think about global citizenship. With global citizenship, we mostly talk about it in terms of feelings, not in terms of paying taxes.

What I found was that these parents were really using the emotional curriculum to teach their kids how to feel global. And that’s why feelings like compassion, empathy, tolerance for difference, ability to cope with change, and resilience became far more important than maybe admitting that your child was disgusted or grossed out when they saw something upsetting, like someone living in abject poverty or when they were intolerant of something. That’s what I’m getting at with the emotional curriculum of life lessons and emotional skills and competencies that stand in for some of the academic outcomes. It’s a way of feeling global, and it’s also a way of equipping kids with the emotional skills they’re probably going to need in the future, like being able to work with people who are different from you. Or being able to use technology to stay in touch with friends could translate into using technology to collaborate on a group project or something. It was really about the here and now and also about the future.

Visiting a chinstrap penguin colony in Antarctica as part of our family’s seven-continent itinerary

Finally, do you have any thoughts to share with folks who might be on the fence or afraid of taking the leap? What do you tell people when they come up to you and ask Should I go? Should I do this? Is it good for my kids?

My worry is that people are motivated by FOMO (fear of missing out). Social media is full of these images of kids and parents frolicking on the beach or strolling through quaint villages, and the kids are learning how to count to ten in another language or how to make chocolate from cocoa pods. And when you see this, you might think to yourself, “Oh no, what if my kid isn’t learning how to do that?” I think the social media landscape has ratcheted up the expectations for parenting, and I think that it’s very easy to get caught up in it.

So maybe this will be an unpopular opinion, but I would tell them, “If you want to do it, do it, and if you don’t want to do it, don’t do it.” There are a lot of reasons not to do it. There are a lot of reasons to do it. Many worldschooling parents talk about cultivating roots and wings, and they’re both incredibly valuable. I’m not urging anybody to go, and I’m not judging anyone for doing it or for not doing it. If you have the resources to worldschool your kid, if you can do it, and if your kid wants to do it, that’s fantastic. If not, don’t feel bad about it. Invest the resources that you do have into making your child’s community and home and their school a nurturing, wonderful place to be. Where I am right now in my life, my philosophy is the grass is greener where you water it.

Jennie’s book, The World Is Our Classroom, is available anywhere books are sold. We highly recommend it!