Parochialism or Pragmatic Resistance? The Role of Community-engaged Leadership, Activist Scholarship, and Vulnerable Rural Ecologies within School Reform (original) (raw)
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This dissertation, which won the Dissertation of the Year Award, examines how stakeholders in an Appalachian Kentucky high school addressed educational problems that they had targeted for reform. Set against the backdrop of the Kentucky Education Reform Act (KERA), this ethnographic study describes the challenges of effectively coupling top-down state mandates with bottom-up advocacy and engagement. Prominent in the local response to KERA was resistance to state-mandated policies. Resistance fueled state threats of punitive action to encourage compliance with standardized goals, but paradoxically, these threats engendered greater resiliency among stakeholders to make the high school reflect local priorities and ways of working together. Drawing on over a year of participant observation at "Central High School" and extensive interviews in the school and community, the research examines six interwoven themes that are critical for understanding local paradigms and paradoxes: (1) desire for local control and "taking care of our own," but also ways in which local vested interests undermined more equitable means of taking care of all students; (2) ideal of "solving things face to face," contrasted with power differentials based on family name, wealth, race, and gender; (3) respecting the contributions and opinions of stakeholders with less formal education; (4) use of statistics to legitimize stakeholders' interests and authority; (5) sharing or withholding information and the effects on the change process; and (6) symbols and metaphors reflecting connections to place and community. Includes table of contents for the complete dissertation. (Author/SV) *
education policy analysis archives, 2010
This article explores school and community leaders' beliefs about standards-based reform and the purposes of local schooling in a single rural community in the western United States. The study used interviews of 11 community and school leaders in the community. Participants engage in a balancing act between serving local interests and satisfying extralocal mandates. They care about both the students they serve and the place they inhabit, and their own assessment of the educational enterprise indicated that state and federal policy had had little constructive influence on either. The conclusion explores critical place-consciousness as a possible tool to refocus rural educators' attention on the intent of the standards-based movement and to ensure that schooling supports individual student success and the needs of rural communities.
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Educational renewal in rural schools and communities can be stymied by many challenges including teacher isolation, staff turnover, and failing resource-based economies. Education change networks within and across rural communities can nurture educator’s professional development through collaborative inquiry and connect educators interested in taking up equity-oriented, place-conscious pedagogies. This afterword draws from the chapters in Rural Teacher Education: Connecting land and People to outline how rural education transformation can benefit from and be realized within education change networks that take up multiple perspectives including the more-than-humanworld, reconciliation with Indigenous communities, and service learning.
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Recent sociological research has highlighted myriad social and economic challenges that require rural superintendents to critique internal spaces of oppression and exclusion. This body of scholarship illustrates the need for a revised conception of the rural superintendency as a position responsive to external infl uences, while simultaneously attuned to within-community spaces of marginalization and inequity. Inattention to these intra-community spaces of marginalization threatens the utility of a critical placeconscious framework for leadership (Nespor, 2008). In this conceptual article, we identify constructs for understanding the work of rural educational leaders in two iterations, or waves, of literature since the 1960s: (1) insider/ outsider and (2) place-conscious/critical place-conscious. We interrogate a focused set of publications that have driven or researched in practice these constructs. We fi nd that the second wave-place-conscious/critical place-consciousis largely prescriptive, and recent research attempting to use critical place-conscious leadership, coupled with literature on rural community change and broader superintendent scholarship, has exposed weaknesses in the model. Thus, we argue for a revised model of critical place-conscious leadership that better addresses the heterogeneity within rural communities, the rapidly changing context of rural communities, and the realities of contemporary practicalities of the professionalized rural superintendent. Methods This conceptual article was borne from conversations between us as we considered our own research and practice
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Anthropology & Education Quarterly, 1995
Rural American schools still educate almost 28 percent ofthe nation's children, but only educational historians and rural sociologists have paid much attention to issues and dynamics of such places. Here, rural educators often intentionally teach and model national norms, values, expectations, and skills. Such teachings, they allege, are particularly critical to children's successful participation in the national culture, as rural communities typically do not have the types of complementary social or economic institutions that support metropolitan schooling aims. Meanwhile, these schools themselves often continue as targets of state and federal reform efforts since their local tax base often makes them particularly dependent upon outside funding sources. In the folluwing essay I briefly develop a number of these themes. I then illustrate various rural school dynamics and issues with data from a West Virginia school system in which I have been involved in various research capacities during the past five years. RURAL SCHOOLS, APPALACHIA, ISOLATED SCHOOLS
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Rural communities in the Southern US are shaped by a legacy of racial oppression carried out through educational systems, in tandem with contemporary policies that perpetuate the marginalization of minoritized students. In this qualitative, revelatory case study, we examine the experiences of rural, southern school leaders who are tasked with ensuring educational equity. Using critical place-based leadership and bonding/bridging theory, we examine the social construction of belonging in a rural southern community, and the implications for equity-centered educational leadership. We find the community maintains tight-knit bonding capital that is rooted in land ownership and racial exclusion, which is conceptualized as southernness. Educational leaders who develop bridging capital were best positioned to shift community perceptions necessary to enact educational equity.
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In the preface to this collection of essays, the editors draw our attention to how valuable the smallest intervention can be to making a large impact on a child's life. They also discuss the impact of large investments in education and the impact of collaboration between universities, schools and communities. What makes this collection of essays different from others is the awareness throughout of the term urbanormativity, 1 when urban life and issues are seen in literature as normal, while what is rural is ignored or denigrated. In Part I, Targeting Instructional Leadership, two essays review the benefits of rural school districts collaborating on projects that build on the educational assets and work to meet their unique needs.
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