{"id":5656,"date":"2018-12-12T23:35:35","date_gmt":"2018-12-13T04:35:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/web.colby.edu\/global-elites\/?p=5656"},"modified":"2018-12-12T23:35:35","modified_gmt":"2018-12-13T04:35:35","slug":"something-old-and-something-new-glocal-understandings-of-olive-grove-academy-in-jordan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/global-elites\/2018\/12\/12\/something-old-and-something-new-glocal-understandings-of-olive-grove-academy-in-jordan\/","title":{"rendered":"Something Old and Something New: Glocal Understandings of Olive Grove Academy in Jordan"},"content":{"rendered":"

Here is an odd way to start off a blog post, I\u2019m going to ask you to read the following list of words and identify what they have in common\u2014brunch, smog, glocal. \u00a0If you identified that they\u2019re all examples of a <\/span>portmanteau <\/span><\/i>I commend you for being a force to reckoned with in English classes. \u00a0Nevertheless, I think a formal definition is in order. A <\/span>portmanteau <\/span><\/i>is two words made into one. \u00a0Breakfast and lunch equals \u201cbrunch\u201d, \u201csmoke\u201d and \u201cfog\u201d equals smog, and global and local equals glocal. \u00a0All three of these portmanteaus are neologisms, words that are slowly becoming part of our everyday parlance. \u00a0They\u2019ve all only recently taken hold in our language, as a graph of word use over time shows.<\/a> Their incorporation into language is a messy process sometimes, because, well, sometimes portmanteaus just sound funny. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

In fact, my blog today has its impetus in a moment in class where we were sharing a narrative theme of our research and just what happend. \u00a0Our group shared that we\u2019ve found that students, teachers, and administrators at Olive Grove in Jordan exhibit tensions between their want to excel in a globalized world and their want to improve their immediate local Jordanian context. \u00a0Adam\u2019s offered the word \u201cglocal\u201d as a word that encapsulated this finding, and its mention drew a laugh from the entire class, including me. I shrugged the word off. I am doing formal academic research, I thought, not forming words in the same way that we name celebrity couples (e.g. Billary, Bradgelina). \u00a0When Adam presented the the Oxford Dictionaries definition of glocal (see below) and I looked back over our narrative theme, however, I was shocked to find that the term basically condensed our long, rambling, explanation of our findings into a single, potable word; glocal<\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n

This anecdote provides two lessons. \u00a0One is to always keep an open-mind when doing research. \u00a0The other lesson, the one that is worth elaborating on, concerns the actual insight that the word glocal provides to my group\u2019s research on Olive Grove in Jordan. \u00a0\u00a0Language is a product of the social world it tries to describe. A close look at the use of the word \u201cglocal\u201d over time<\/a> reveals that the rising usage of the word coincides with the recognition of the phenomena of globalization in the last half of the 20th century. \u00a0What the portmanteau \u201cglocal\u201d does is combine globalization and the local, two seemingly contradictory ideas, in order to show that social groups have had to confront the tension between the two. Glocal is a new type of relationship to the world, a social compromise made out of the necessities of the world in the age of globalization which necessitates a new word.<\/span><\/p>\n

Which is why I feel justified in using it in our research concerning Olive Grove in Jordan. \u00a0In searching through our completed coding, \u201cGlocal\u201d is second only to the code \u201cWestern Influence\u201d \u00a0in the number of times it is found in our data. This should come as no surprise when one of the most essential and interesting facts about the school is understood, that it is an attempt to import an elite New England boarding school into a Middle Eastern context. \u00a0Olive Grove is not defined by its immediate cultural surroundings but also is seen as a site for producing the future upper-classes of those same immediate surroundings, being founded and sponsored by the political powers of Jordan. The students, teachers, and administrators all seem to question what this means for their institution’s identity. \u00a0One explicit example of this comes from a administrator, who asks <\/span>\u201cIs Olive Grove Academy an international school in a Jordanian context or a Jordanian school with an international focus?\u201d \u00a0This institutional identity question is especially pressing because of the school’s youth, only having been founded in 2007. \u00a0To what extent the school serves students locally, and what extent the school serves them as cosmopolitan global citizens is a balance that hasn\u2019t been decided yet. \u00a0Olive Grove is in a flux of glocal tensions.<\/span><\/p>\n

And how these tensions will be settled is heavily related to the outcomes of its alumni, which our research is addressing. \u00a0In his study on how elite schools founded in colonial India are adapting their schools to maintain eliteness in a postcolonial age, Fazal Rizvi (2014) identified that the outcomes of former students at an elite school are important in creating the social imaginary, the supposed shared set of practices, laws, and dispositions of a school. \u00a0Since Olive Grove is so young, a body of evidence concerning student outcomes is still relatively limited. As one Olive Grove teacher states, \u201c<\/span>So it would be interesting to see when we have a lot more data on alums about where are they, but I would like to think that we\u2019re doing well.\u201d \u00a0<\/span>The speculative ideas about what the outcomes will say about Olive Grove\u2019s institutional identity is interesting nevertheless because those part of the school seems to embrace the compromise of glocalization, rather than favoring one part of the portmanteaus components. <\/span>\u00a0The same teacher speculates:<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\u201cOne of the values that also keeps driving me personally to be at Olive Grove and give as much of my life here. But I think that as a school, we want to think that we\u2019re having students who are graduating from here, having the best experiences in the world and that they will come back because they enjoyed it.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

The ideal relationship for the elite school to the world formulated in here is one that doesn\u2019t try and solve glocal tensions but instead embraces the concept of glocal itself, promoting an institution in which students are prepared to partake in positions of leadership on a global scale which will shape their local context for the better. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Olive Grove is a new school seeking a new type of relationship to the world defined by a new word, glocal. \u00a0As a researcher in the position of evaluating this phenomenon, it seems appropriate that I would utilize the mixing of words to describe a mixture of social practices forming a new type of institutional identity. \u00a0I can\u2019t laugh at the glocal as I see its relevance and accuracy in the data I am analyzing. The portmanteau describes something new, made out of the conflict of the old. Breakfast or lunch? Brunch. Global or local? Glocal.<\/span><\/p>\n

References:<\/span><\/p>\n

Rizvi, F. (2014). Old Elite Schools, History and the Construction of a New Imaginary. <\/span><\/p>\n

Globalisation, Societies, And Education,<\/span><\/i> 12(2), 290-308.<\/span><\/p>\n\n

\n <\/div>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Here is an odd way to start off a blog post, I\u2019m going to ask you to read the following list of words and identify what they have in common\u2014brunch, smog, glocal. \u00a0If you identified that they\u2019re all examples of a portmanteau I commend you for being a force to reckoned with in English classes. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7713,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"builder_content":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/global-elites\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5656"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/global-elites\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/global-elites\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/global-elites\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7713"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/global-elites\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5656"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/global-elites\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5656\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5658,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/global-elites\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5656\/revisions\/5658"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/global-elites\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5656"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/global-elites\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5656"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/global-elites\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5656"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}