____________________________________

Innovation and Implementation in Rural Places

________

A volume in
Current Perspectives on School/University/Community Research
R. Martin Reardon and Jack Leonard, Series Editors

____________________________________

Innovation and Implementation in Rural Places

School–University–Community Collaboration in Education

________

edited by

R. Martin Reardon

East Carolina University

Jack Leonard

University of Massachusetts–Boston

INFORMATION AGE PUBLISHING, INC.
Charlotte, NC • www.infoagepub.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

   A CIP record for this book is available from the Library of Congress

       http://www.loc.gov

ISBN: 978-1-64113-213-8 (Paperback)

           978-1-64113-214-5 (Hardcover)

           978-1-64113-215-2 (ebook)

Copyright © 2018 Information Age Publishing Inc.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a
retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording or otherwise, without written permission
from the publisher.

Printed in the United States of America

Contents

Introduction

Part I

Design Features

1     Developing and Sustaining School–University–Community Collaborative Partnerships to Develop School Leaders in Rural Areas

Bonnie C. Fusarelli, Lance D. Fusarelli, and Lesley G. Wirt

2     Germinating, Growing, and Renewing a District-University Partnership to Prepare Rural School Leaders

Kimberly Kappler Hewitt, Jon Schmidt-Davis, and Ann W. Davis

3     Spanning Boundaries to Enhance School Leadership: Examining a Research–Practice Partnership Co-Design Team

Frederick C. Buskey, Hans W. Klar, Kristin Shawn Huggins, and Julie K. Desmangles

4     Toward a Conceptual Framework for Designing and Implementing the Teacher Residency for Rural Education

Emilie Mitescu Reagan, Andrew D. Coppens, Leslie J. Couse, Elyse Hambacher, Daniel Lord, Kathryn McCurdy, and Diane Silva Pimentel

5     Too Many Cooks in the Kitchen: Struggling for Voice and Sense of Place in a Rural School–University–Community Collaboration

Steve Myran

Part II

Novel Approaches

6     Third Space Partnerships for Teacher Education in Rural Communities

Michael A. Kopish

7     Design and Implementation of Needs-Based Collaborative Projects: Experiences From a Small, Rural Community in Rockbridge County, Virginia

Joshua G. Iddings and Haley W. Sigler

8     Practicing What We Teach

Tracey G. Scherr and Robin Fox

9     Implementing Multi-Tiered Systems of Supports in Rural Schools Via a School–University Partnership

Sara E. House Rich and Brit’ny Stein

Part III

Parental and Community Involvement

10    Using the Researcher–Practitioner Partnership to Build Family–School Partnerships in a Rural High School

Kara Lasater

11    Impacting Rural Communities Through School–University–Community Collaboration Partnerships: The Parent Teacher Leadership Academy

M. Blake Berryhill and Holly G. Morgan

12    Examining Community College Targeted Expansions in a Rural Environment: The Case of Butler County Community College

Lou L. Sabina, Nicholas C. Neupauer, and Kiara L. Sabina

13    Rural Incubators: Re-Visioning Rural Districts as Centers for Innovative School and Community Collaboration

Kirk Koennecke, Sharon Watkins, and Ryan Rismiller

About the Editors

About the Contributors

Introduction

In their compelling juxtaposition of rural and urban America, Lichter and Brown (2011) argued that rural and urban places have developed multiple interdependencies, and, consequently, that they have become much less clearly delineated than the popular understanding of the terms suggests. They referred to the blurring and shifting of the boundaries between rural and urban places as an “interstitial zone that is dense in social, political, and economic relationships” (p. 584).

This evocative analogy to tidal movement highlights the imperative to endow the concept of place with dynamic connotations. Indeed, based on their reading of the literature, Lichter and Brown (2011) labeled as problematic the conventional asymmetrical view that changes in rural America were largely unidirectional and resulted in rural becoming more like urban America. Lichter and Brown pointed out the more symmetrical nature of the cultural interaction especially in the ways in which individuals in urban America “play at being rural” (p. 570) by, for example, creating urban gardens, initiating sewing and quilting clubs, hosting folk festivals, sponsoring state and county fairs, horse riding, canoeing, hunting, fishing, and embracing country music. Arguably, there is a fondness among urban dwellers for a romanticized version of rural life which is sustained by their lack of first-hand experience—a sense that, in the words of Lichter and Brown, “rural people live simple and uncomplicated lives that somehow insulate them from the economic assaults and stresses of modern society” (p. 569).

Because the researcher authors are writing from their own immersed perspectives, even a cursory overview of the chapters in this volume will be enough to disabuse any idyllic perspectives regarding rural areas. The researcher authors are all writing of the optimal learning environment that emerges when the interests of schools and universities and communities in rural places coalesce to build upon the strengths and advantages inherent in such places. The chapter authors eschew glamorous half-truths and—unsurprisingly—reveal a complex panorama that defies reduction to platitudes.

While they wrote compellingly of the blurring of boundaries between urban and rural America, Lichter and Brown (2011) hastened to warn against over-generalization. Indeed, they asserted that “America today contains many rural Americas, all of which are linked in fundamental but different ways with urban America and big cities” (p. 568). Part of this dependency is the reality that big cities rely on food production in rural places. As cities have grown, this reliance has prompted fundamental changes in rural places in order to achieve greater efficiency. In the era of rural agribusiness, the small family farm is a curiosity in many rural places. The multi-faceted affordances of GPS and cell phone technology, the Internet, and cable and satellite television have generated strong demand for digital technology availability in wide swaths of rural America. Digital technology has radically altered how farmers do business, ranging from how crops are sown, to the application of fertilizer, to the regulation of water usage, and to how crops are harvested and marketed.

The dynamic interaction among the many rural Americas and what we can characterize analogously as the many urban Americas invokes the richly nuanced conception of “place” as something that is much more than a frozen scene for human activity (Pred, 1984). Pred’s (1984) dynamic conception of place prompted the inclusion of the word in the title of this volume (and its companion volume). Pred highlighted the dynamism of place by pointing out that a place “cannot emerge fully formed out of nothingness and stop, grow rigid, indelibly etched in the once-natural landscape” (p. 279). Upon reading Pred’s assertion, one is struck by how unassailable it is, and yet there is a countervailing sense of nostalgia here too: there is a sense that a place should be something to which one can return and find one’s deep-seated roots—that, for example, rural America as a place should be “a kind of safety deposit box that stores America’s fundamental values” (Lichter & Brown, 2011, p. 568).

In fact, the dynamic interaction between urban and rural places modulates values (Lichter & Ziliak, 2017). For example, in some peri-urban rural places, servicing the demand for electricity spurred by digital data storage intertwined with what started as the disruption of the retail industry is again changing the very complexion of the once-natural landscape. Renewable energy (from wind and solar farms) is transmitted many miles to an urban place, leaving inhabitants of the rural place in which the energy is generated—who have already integrated the affordances of digital technology into their everyday lives—to ponder what they value as they face the question of whether to turn yet more productive farm land over to yet another wind farm, thereby reaping an expected return far in excess exceed the potential profit from farming that same land.

The dynamism of place is paramount and sometimes problematic in schooling in rural places. Very much in keeping with Pred’s (1984) concept, Schafft and Jackson (2010) conceived of place in the context of rural schooling as “an articulation of social relations and cultural and political practices that are paradoxical, provisional, and constantly in the process of becoming” (p. 11). This somewhat Heraclitean perspective is the antithesis of “safety deposit box” thinking, and is not limited to rural schooling. It extends to other aspects of life that are pertinent to the educational prospect. For example, place is also implicated in discussions of rural poverty, as was made clear in the context of the invited conference—sponsored by the Rural Policy Research Institute (RUPRI, 2004)—oriented to creating a national rural poverty research agenda. Issues related to schooling and poverty rank high among the multiple intersections of the components of rural places, but, to hearken back to the point made by Lichter and Brown (2011), it is crucial to remember that “when you’ve seen one rural area, you’ve seen one rural area” (RUPRI, p. 3).

The Contours of the Rural Place

In order to delineate places, in 2006, the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES, n.d.) revised its definitions of school locale types to the “urban-centric” classification system (not to be confused with the earlier “metro-centric” classification system) in accord with the Office of Management and Budget’s 2000 Standards for Defining Metropolitan and Micropolitan Statistical Areas. The new system embraced four major locale categories—city, suburban, town, and rural—each of which was, in turn, divided into three subcategories. The three subcategories within rural were defined as:

Fringe: Census-defined rural territory that is less than or equal to 5 miles from an urbanized area, as well as rural territory that is less than or equal to 2.5 miles from an urban cluster

Distant: Census-defined rural territory that is more than 5 miles but less than or equal to 25 miles from an urbanized area, as well as rural territory that is more than 2.5 miles but less than or equal to 10 miles from an urban cluster

Remote: Census-defined rural territory that is more than 25 miles from an urbanized area and is also more than 10 miles from an urban cluster1

According to the 2013-2014 NCES Common Core of Data (CCD), just over 9 million students of the just under 50 million students in elementary and secondary schools in the United States (approx. 18%) resided in rural areas. Of these 9 million, just over 5 million resided in fringe territories, just under 3 million in distant territories, and just over 1 million in remote territories. These students attended 27,264 of the 98,271 U.S. public schools (approx. 28%; 10,333 in fringe territories, 10,442 in distant, and 6,489 in remote),2 which were contained within 7,156 of the 13,491 U.S. school districts (approx. 53%; 1,582 in fringe territories, 3,145 in distant, and 2429 in remote).3

The researcher authors of the chapters in this volume cite their own preferred educational statistics, but the indisputable reality is that rural America constitutes a major sector of the educational prospect of the United States as millions of children hitch their stars to an “educated hope” (Edmondson & Butler, 2010, p. 150).

Schooling in Rural Places

Schooling in rural places was acerbically referred to by Corbett (2007) as the “quintessential institution of disembedding” (p. 251). According to Corbett’s narrative, children in rural places are immersed throughout their formative years in hearing “a story about somewhere else” (p. 117), studying a curriculum designed somewhere else, and striving to meet standards of academic achievement focused on fitting them to perform on a stage set somewhere else. Little wonder, then, that some children graduate from schools in rural places and leave for somewhere else.

 The drift of youth away from rural places and away from the “vision of the common good, locally lived” (Howley & Howley, 2010, p. 47) may be inextricably enmeshed with the factors implicated in the above discussion: the quest for economic efficiency in agricultural production, the impact of evolving policies regarding resource extraction and utilization, and the spread of urbanization. However, at the same time that there is outmigration from among the youth of the long-time inhabitants of numerous rural places, in some such places there is immigration of ethnically diverse newcomers. These newcomers may be open to low-status employment opportunities, even as they anticipate that their uniqueness will be more readily embraced—or at least less hatefully construed—than it was in the places from which they came. While the enhancement of economic prospects through immigration is welcome—and not just in rural places (e.g., the influx of immigrants has staunched the decades-long decrease of the population of Utica, NY)—the respectful integration of such immigrants and the effective education of their children places a strain on the schooling resources as a new vision of the locally lived common good is born.

Nevertheless, as Petrin, Schafft, and Meece (2014) discussed compellingly, to cast education’s role as inevitably contributing to the hollowing out (Carr & Kefalas, 2009) of America’s rural places would be to over-simplify the reality. Fitzgerald, Bruns, Sonka, Furco, and Swanson (2012) advocated for higher education to embrace a “framework focused on a stronger level of societal relevance that improves both society and the overarching goals of higher education” (p. 7). They depicted such a framework as a culmination of a transition from an “an expert model of knowledge delivery” to a model in which “community and university partners co-create solutions” (p. 7). The chapters in this second volume of the Current Perspectives on School/University/Community Research series collectively exemplify just such a model: university personnel working with school and community collaborators in rural places to co-create innovative approaches to educationally and socially relevant problems of practice and then to collaborate in the implementation of those approaches.

Design Features

The first of the three sections of this volume features five chapters. In Chapter 1, Fusarelli, Fusarelli, and Wirt discuss what they describe as a “home-grown model” to recruit high-quality candidates for school leadership in rural places in northeastern North Carolina and collaboratively equip them with an understanding of the theoretical perspectives on leadership specifically as those perspectives apply in their own localities. The model they describe provides the funding to support the candidates throughout their immersion in the program and beyond their graduation. In a provocative conclusion that attests to the bi-directional dynamism of collaboration, they reflect on the disruptive impact of this model approach on the conventional leadership preparation program at their institution.

Attesting to the coherence of the collaborative approach to preparing rural school leaders, in Chapter 2, Hewitt, Schmidt-Davis, and Davis discuss their distinct “grow your own” program for the central region of North Carolina. Their collaboration involves a supply-side partnership between a university and an organization that constitutes a 16-state compact offering core services to its member states. This innovative approach involves a collaboration among 11 high-needs, rural school districts oriented to “germinating/initiating, growing/developing, and sustaining/renewing” the preparation of leaders for those districts.

In Chapter 3, Buskey, Klar, Huggins, & Desmangles describe a research-practitioner partnership that encompasses a 12-district consortium of rural, high-needs schools in South Carolina, again oriented to developing educational leaders. One of the characteristics of a research-practitioner partnership is its long-term focus, and, in this regard, they focus on the positive impact of the diversity of perspectives brought to the table by the wide range of representatives who remain intentionally engaged in leading this endeavor.

Reagan, Coppens, Couse, Hambacher, Lord, McCurdy, and Pimentel shift the focus of this section to teacher education in Chapter 4. The collaboration they describe is oriented to alleviating the teacher recruitment, preparation, support, and retention issues that beset rural places in New Hampshire. Their innovative approach sets out to purposefully engage the schools and communities within the very same rural places that confront the difficulties that the Teacher Residency for Rural Education is designed to address.

To bring this initial section to a fitting close, in Chapter 5, Myran evokes cooks and kitchens in reflecting on his decade-long involvement with the building of authentic partnerships in the kitchen (at the grass-roots level) in Virginia against the ever-evolving policy milieu continually reconstituted by a hierarchy of multiple cooks. He cautions that the intensity of policy and personnel churn at the hierarchical level has the potential to obscure the place-based needs of the community.

Novel Approaches

Kopish opens the second section of this volume (in which authors highlight novel approaches to collaboration) with Chapter 6 by offering his inquiry as stance perspective on a “third space” collaboration in a rural Appalachian Ohio context. As Kopish explains, the third space concept is operationalized in this rural place by promoting “civic engagement among teacher candidates through service-learning projects with community partners” that build on both community members’ knowledge and lived experience.

Continuing the service-learning theme while broadening the horizon beyond teacher education, in Chapter 7, Iddings and Sigler discuss their personal collaboration in developing several service-learning projects for the undergraduate students in their neighboring but very different respective institutions that collectively serve a rural community. They highlight the imperative for careful planning to enable the full involvement of their students while avoiding over-taxing the limited place-based resources.

In Chapter 8, Scherr and Fox discuss their novel collaboration that casts their own university in Wisconsin in the role of a place-based resource. By involving university faculty and both undergraduate and graduate students with the opportunity to actively engage with children in a local rural school district on a regular basis, this collaboration provides time for teachers to engage in productive professional development. The university, for its part, benefits from the demystification of the university as a place.

Rich and Stein bring this section to a close with Chapter 9, in which they discuss how, in the context of an innovative federal grant, their 12-district collaboration in Oklahoma has facilitated the introduction of a multi-tiered system of support approach across 17 schools. The effectiveness of this collaborative endeavor is evidenced by student behavioral and academic indicators. The dynamic impact of place is elegantly highlighted by the contrast between how their grant proposal envisaged the collaboration would play out and its eventual configuration.

Parental and Community Involvement

The final section of four chapters opens with Chapter 10. Lasater discusses a research-practitioner partnership in a Midwestern rural high school the focus of which is to do nothing less than transform family-school relationships. Continuing the theme of reciprocal benefits highlighted by Scherr and Fox, Lasater’s personal investment in this partnership stems from her commitment to the place in which she lives and raises her own children.

In Chapter 11, Berryhill and Morgan build on the theme of family-school relationships by recounting how a collaboration with which they are involved in Alabama works to counter the isolation induced by the physical separation between parents and their children’s school that is sometimes a characteristic of rural places. This isolation is only increased by well-meaning rural school district consolidation. The Parent-Teacher Leadership Academy represents an innovative ecological systems approach to this issue at the elementary school level.

Sabina, Neupauer, and Sabina move the discussion to the other end of the formal education continuum in Chapter 12 with a discussion of community college expansion in Pennsylvania. They make the point that expanding the opportunity for higher education is, in itself, an exercise in long-term collaboration that, to be effective, must take into account the perspectives and agendas of a wide range of stakeholders. When done well, such expansion expands opportunities for students while lessening the potential for them to “fall through the cracks.”

The concluding Chapter 13 of this section and volume brings us back to a comment that Lichter and Brown (2011) made to the effect that “cities (and their elites) have always been viewed as the incubators of new ideas, technology, and mass opinion that spread outward to people living in small places and the countryside” (p. 567). By contrast, Koennecke, Watkins, and Rismiller re-brand rural school districts as rural incubators and implement a novel format for their chapter by adopting a social media-like approach to discussing school and community collaboration in a small, rural school district in Ohio.

“Get it done”

Although not directed specifically to rural places, Harkavy’s (1984) clarion call to work “intensively, systematically, and effectively to ‘get it done’” (p. 33) is fitting way to raise the curtain on this volume. The “it” is the formation of school-university-community collaborations. The following chapters chronicle the innovative work of those who know first-hand that, when it comes to school-university-community collaborations, “the hard thing is to figure out how to do it. The hardest thing of all, or course, is to actually get it done” (Harkavy, 1984, p. 33).

Notes

1. Office of Management and Budget (2000). Standards for Defining Metropolitan and Micropolitan Statistical Areas; Notice. Federal Register (65) No. 249.

2. U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, Common Core of Data (CCD), “Public Elementary/Secondary School Universe Survey,” 2013–14, (version 1a).

3. U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, Common Core of Data (CCD), “Local Education Agency Universe Survey,” 2013–14 (version 1a).

References

Carr, P. J. & Kefalas, M. J. (2009). Hollowing out the middle: The rural brain drain and what it means for America. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.

Corbett, M. (2007). Learning to leave: The irony of schooling in a coastal community. Halifax, Canada: Fernwood.

Edmondson, J., & Butler, T. (2010). Teaching school in rural America: Toward an educated hope. In K. A. Schafft & A. Y. Jackson (Eds.), Rural education for the twenty-first century: Identity, place, and community in a globalizing world (pp. 150–172). University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press.

Fitzgerald, H. E., Bruns, K., Sonka, S. T., Furco, A., & Swanson, L. (2012). The centrality of engagement in higher education. Journal of Higher Education Outreach and Engagement, 16(3), 7–27.

Harkavy, I. (1998, January).School–community–university partnerships: Effectively integrating community building and education reform. Paper presented at the Conference on Connecting Community Building and Education Reform: Effective School, Community, University Partnerships, Washington, DC. Retrieved from https://community-wealth.org/sites/clone.community-wealth.org/files/
downloads/paper-harkavy.pdf

Howley, C. B., & Howley, A. (2010). Poverty and school achievement in rural communities: A social-class interpretation. In K. A. Schafft & A. Y. Jackson (Eds.), Rural education for the twenty-first century: Identity, place, and community in a globalizing world (pp. 34–50). University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press.

Lichter, D. T., & Brown, D. L. (2011). Rural America in an urban society: Changing spatial and social boundaries. Annual Review of Sociology, 37, 565–592. doi:10.1146/annurev-soc-081309-150208

Lichter, D. T., & Ziliak, J. P. (2017). The rural–urban interface: New patterns of spatial interdependence and inequality in America. The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 672(1), 6–25. doi:10.1177/0002716217714180

National Center for Education Statistics. (n.d.) Rural education in America: Definitions. Retrieved from https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/ruraled/definitions.asp

Rural Policy Research Institute. (2004). Place matters: Addressing rural poverty. A summary of the RUPRI Rural Poverty Research Center Conference: The importance of place in poverty research and policy. Columbia, MO: Author. Retrieved from http://www.rupri.org/Forms/synthesis.pdf

Petrin, R. A., Schafft, K. A., & Meece, J. L. (2014). Educational sorting and residential aspirations among rural high school students: What are the contributions of schools and educators to the rural brain drain? American Educational Research Journal, 51(2), 294–326. doi:10.31o2/0002831214527493

Pred, A. (1984). Place as historically contingent process: Structuration and the time-geography of becoming places. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 74(2), 279–297.

Schafft, K. A., & Jackson, A. Y. (Eds.). (2010). Rural education for the twenty-first century: Identity, place, and community in a globalizing world. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press.