The Purpose of The Local Life
The Local Life series gives the students an opportunity to engage each other, their surroundings, and the local community. Participating in this program leads students to greater cultural understanding on local, global, and personal levels.
Objectives of The Local Life
The main objectives of The Local Life are to increase students’ experience of culture, including cultural differences, and to provide an opportunity for students to process their thoughts. We want to challenge students to understand more of what they are seeing, feeling, and perceiving, while helping them understand more about the issues that confront the local community by increasing cultural awareness, sensitivity, and understanding.
The Local Life for Faculty-led Programs
The Local Life program is designed with the ability to be modified to fit an increasing number of faculty-led programs. CIS Abroad recognizes that programs in which student do not take courses with locals require greater cultural introduction to the host community. The Local Life can be implemented to complement the content of any course abroad. Each CIS Abroad faculty-led program is staffed with a CIS Abroad On-Site Program Coordinator to support the faculty and university by running the program logistics on the ground. On-site program coordinators confer with faculty to determine if they wish to implement any of the program elements as an additional aspect of the course abroad. Whether one week long or a full semester program, these activities are extremely useful to help students integrate an understanding of the host cultures into their experience.
This activity exposes students to the host country’s food and market culture by taking students to a local market and then participating in a cooking class. This class helps aid students in shopping for and preparing local specialties, trying new dishes, and introducing them to the host culture’s perspectives on food and meals.
Site directors and host families engage students in a discussion about something unique or special to where they come from that will not be available in the host country, the importance of this “gift,” and what it represents about their home. Our goal is for students to think about their own cultural identity and how it relates to their new environment, as well as to create a context for sharing and engaging students in conversation about the host cultures.
With guidance from the site director, students are divided into teams and given a set of destinations to visit, as well as certain information to gather by interacting with locals. Teams are prompted with a set of questions at each location, which help them to identify and observe cultural norms, historical significance, and activities unique to the local cultures. Students reconvene for an opportunity to have group discussion and reflect about what they observed and experienced.
