Kari Giordano – Fulbright Distinguished Award in Teaching 2020

Students as Empowered Creatives
Many struggling rural communities face the fact that they
are educating children who may not be able to nor want to
stay in the towns of which they were raised. In some cases,
the price of home-ownership does not meet the average
wage expectations or the market may not support a wide
variety of industrial jobs. For others, their small town
might not offer enough in terms of recreation and cultural
offerings. For whatever reason, rural areas are experiencing
a decline in the population of young citizens which
has many negative effects. Family-owned businesses aren’t
able to continue on, schools close, cultural institutions
aren’t sustainable, and the aging population creates an
imbalance of cultural offerings.
Schools in these areas have an added challenge: to empower
students to be as community-minded as they
would expect their parents and grandparents to be. Placebased
education provides the platform for students to
create the progress they wish to see. Many rural students
complain about limited recreational offerings or of their
feeling that cultural institutions aren’t inviting to youth
or don’t provide offerings which speak to their age and
interests. These place-based ideas encourage students to
take on the role of community creative and to ensure that
the recreational opportunities speaks to them.
David Sobel and Gregory Smith discuss place and community
based education in their writing and state, “No
school should be an island, but rather a peninsula – off to
itself a bit, but connected to the wider worlds of first the
community, then the region, the state, and finally the big
wide world.” They suggest that in an era where screens
have taken up the focus of communication, place and
community-based education teaches students how to
reconnect with their communities in meaningful ways.
This connection is the driving force of why place-based
education can be the method used to employ change in
struggling rural communities. Students who are better
connected with their communities become engaged in
their futures.
With the right tools and leadership, an engaged student
can feel empowered to create change and become a force
within a community of any size.
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