After high school, I left my home in southwestern Maine under the misguided impression that I was headed for the “real” world and leaving a small farm town that had little to do with it. A few years later, at the apartment of a new friend thousands of miles away, I came across a bag of apples with a familiar label – they came from my home town, from an orchard where I had worked a couple of summers during high school. I remember feeling both pride in the coincidence – that something from my home was a part of everyday life elsewhere – and insecurity that I couldn’t answer some of the questions that I was asked (What role did apples play in the history of my town? How many people did orchards employ there? How much of the local economy did apples account for?). I realized that I’d lived in one place for 18 years, yet I still knew relatively little about it, and its connections with the rest of the world.
Within the processes of globalization, even the smallest communities are connected to the rest of the world. And with new technologies for communication, these connections between the local and global – the “glocal” as some academics are calling it – can be explored and illuminated, helping inspire students from small communities to learn more about where they come from. This can encourage a greater sense of local pride and ownership, and increase a student’s perspective about his or her relationship with the rest of the world.
Proponents of place-based education (including many island educators and Mike Felton, the Island Institute’s Education Outreach Officer) believe that broad concepts are best learned when they’re introduced to students in the more familiar context of the local community. The broad narrative of the Civil War, for example, tends to stick better in students’ heads when it’s taught together with the story of how the war affected the students’ community and ancestors.
Lobster Tales, which uses a website to track lobsters from Vinalhaven and the Cranberry Isles through the marketplace to their final destinations, is an educational project that illuminates the “glocal.” Finding out where local lobsters are bought (one from Vinalhaven was reported in Albania, for example) is just the first step in processes of inquiry and imagination from which students can discover the meaning in these connections. And there are plenty of other ways to explore glocality. Students could interview tourists, for example, and document where they came from. Or look up past local graduates and map where they went.
Why is this important? Because without a good sense of the glocality of their home, students in rural places often grow up feeling that their community is irrelevant to the “real” world elsewhere, that it’s a place apart, without much to teach the rest of the world. With a good understanding of the glocal, students will be better prepared to acclimate to new environments should they decide to leave home, and have a stronger sense of pride and ownership in their own community, should they decide to stay. If I had had a better sense of what apples meant to my hometown, I still might have left. But at least I would have known what I was leaving.
Nathan Michaud is director of the Programs Department at the Island Institute.