The Ecology, Histories, and Literature Departments have collaborated on a series ongoing personal reflective essays called Eleutheros. Each week students are asked to write a reflective essay that demonstrates their understanding of the themes from their coursework and effectively links these themes to their unique thoughts and experiences.  For each essay, students are asked to answer a new interdisciplinary prompt which inspires an integrated reflection on class learning. Our final essay asked students look at their academic semesters holistically and consider the value of their learning. In the coming weeks, look forward to some articulate examples of how our students have deeply and personally engage with these essential questions. This week’s prompt: What is your worldview, how did it come to be, and has it been changed, challenged or enforced since you arrived at The Island School? 

By Brayden Beardsley

Having grown up in a rural town in Maine, I feel that I was sheltered from the world until I grew older. The first time I ever realized that not everyone saw things how I did was when I was six years old in Rennys. A man walked into the store carrying a small bag and was asked to leave it at the front of the store. I looked up at my mom who was also carrying a small bag, and asked her why the man had to leave his bag at the front of the store and she didn’t. She responded that some people don’t trust people who are black and that she didn’t have to leave her bag at the front of the store because the man working at the store was something called prejudice, a term a didn’t understand at the time. All I knew was that the man had been treated differently for some reason and that was wrong.

For me, my world view means how I perceive what happens around me based on my outlook and values; much like the “lens” that we talked about during our first Human Ecology class. Even from a young age, I had very strong values and morals because the aspects of my life that have affected my world view are what I care about the most. Collectively, my parents, Akihisa, Biruk and Eden, and Tom and Brandon have all worked accidentally or intentionally to shape my lens in which I view the world through.

One of my most vivid memories of Akihisa (our exchange student from Japan) was when we were just sitting on his bed talking about anything that came to mind. He told me about the differences between our cultures; how no one ever hugged anyone else (even family members), how when you reached five years old, you couldn’t use the flavored toothpaste anymore or cry unless you were physically injured, how everyone was an atheist but they all believed in ghosts, how pigs were said to say “boo, boo” instead of “oink, oink”, the list went on and on. I realize now, especially after our Histories class on the Nacirema tribe that was actually describing America, that it is very easy to judge a culture at a glance and be slightly ethnocentric, but to truly understand it, you have to delve deeper, as I was able to do with Akihisa after staying with him for a year. Continue reading →