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Making a Positive Impact in Rural Places

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

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Making a Positive Impact in Rural Places

Change Agency in the Context of School–University–Community Collaboration
in Education

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edited by

R. Martin Reardon

East Carolina University

Jack Leonard

University of Massachusetts–Boston

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

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ISBN: 978-1-64113-221-3 (Paperback)

           978-1-64113-222-0 (Hardcover)

           978-1-64113-223-7 (ebook)

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Printed in the United States of America

Contents

Making a Positive Impact in Rural Places: Change Agency in the Context of School–University–Community Collaboration in Education

Part I

Targeting Instructional Leadership

1     Learning by Leading in the Classroom: A Rural Research–Practice Partnership

Matthew Militello, Karen D. Jones, Lyndsey Dunn, and Courtney Marshburn Moffitt

2     Professional Learning in a Rural School Community: The Instructional Rounds Partnership

Rebecca Woodland, Rebecca Mazur, and Michael Sullivan

Part II

Opportunities for Underserved

3     The Evolution of a Research–Practice Partnership: Examining the Recruitment and Retention of Teachers of Color in Rural and Suburban Contexts

Circe Stumbo, Deanna Hill, and Kristine Grant

4     Immigration, Race, and Rurality: Educational Experiences of Black African Immigrants in Rural America

Maraki Shimelis Kebede

5     Sustained and Sustaining Conversations: A Programmatic Approach to Narrating Resilience in Rural Ohio

Wendy Pfrenger, Erica Noll, and Austin Cope

6     Rural Education Institute: Nurturing Partnerships in Eastern North Carolina

Kristen Cuthrell

Part III

Targeting Wicked Problems

7     Addressing Rural, Wicked Problems Through Collaboration: A Critical Reflection on a School–Community–University Design Process

Catharine Biddle, Ian Mette, Lyn Mikel Brown, Mark Tappan, Brittany Ray, and Sarah Strickland

8     The Heart of Our Community: Developing University–Assisted Community Schools in Rural Places

Lisa V Blitz, Elizabeth M. Anderson, Candace A. Mulcahy, and Laura Bronstein

9     Creating a Trauma-Informed Rural Community: A University–School District Model

Brenda M. Morton and Anna Berardi

Part IV

International Perspectives

10    Mobilizing to Shape Rural Outcomes: Perspectives of School–University–Community Partnerships in Rural America and Australia

Sheri S. Williams, George G. Otero, and Viola E. Florez

11    Supporting the Under-Resourced Rural Schools Through Partnership: A Case Study of Rural-Urban School Partnership Program in China

Wenfan Yan, Yumei Han, Ling Li, Naiqing Song, and Fangfang Guo

12    Rural Areas Are Not Hopeless

Noluntu Dyubhele

13    Transforming Science Teaching and Science Teacher Education Through an Australian University–School Partnership

Monica Green and Hongming Ma

About the Editors

About the Contributors

Making a Positive Impact in Rural Places

Change Agency in the Context of School–University–Community Collaboration in Education

Educational impact is about gauging the outcome of educational practice. Impact can be a difficult thing to evaluate when one’s practice is focused on people. For example, a congratulatory phone call to the parents of a child may not impact next week’s test outcomes for that student, but may change his or her perspective on life (Vincenti, 2017) and be remembered far into the future. A phone call costs little but it can have a lifelong impact.

On the other hand, the impact of even large investments in education can be ephemeral—at least in the short term—to the point that proponents of large-scale philanthropic endeavors grow disenchanted. The scale of such investments can be substantial. For example, in the same edition of Education Week, Vara-Orta (2017) wrote about the 17 years of massive investment by the Gates Foundation on initiatives based on teacher evaluations (more than $700 million up to late 2013) and the $1.7 billion projected to be spent in the next 10–15 years; and Vara-Orta and Prothero (2017), in writing about the retirement of Eli Broad from the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation, highlighted the $590 million that foundation has invested in education-related endeavors since 1999. Undoubtedly, both foundations have been change agents, yet, despite the scale of their investments, the impact of their endeavors has been arguably disproportionate to the amount of money they invested and has prompted their re-thinking along the way. For example, the Broad Foundation suspended its $1 million Broad Prize for Urban Education in 2015 after 13 years of operation “when it didn’t rapidly prove itself, when it wasn’t clear that the winners of the Broad Prize continued on an upward arc, when it wasn’t clear that other districts adopted those strategies with equal success” (Vara-Orta & Prothero, 2017, p. 15; citing Henig), and the Gates Foundation is reportedly changing from a focus on new initiatives related to teacher evaluations to a dominant emphasis on “locally driven solutions” devised by networks of public schools that utilize a “continuous improvement” approach (Vara-Orta & Porthero, 2017, p. 14; citing Gates).

The chapters in this volume attest to the wisdom of the emerging dominant emphasis of the Gates Foundation in that the authors chronicle the impact of truly collaborative projects among universities, schools, and communities—but in rural places. The common starting point for the chapter authors has been the desire of the rural schools and communities for assistance in addressing a need they have identified. The role of the university, in each instance, is to provide insight and bring the additional resources in order to instigate their rural colleagues’ desired change in course.

Urbanormativity

The needs of rural places in general are not high on the national agenda. In the introduction to their edited volume, Fulkerson and Thomas (2013) highlighted the numerous “Don’t Frack New York” signs that appeared during the 2011 “Occupy Wall Street” protests in Zucotti Park in lower Manhattan. Ostensibly, these signs evidenced the convergence between the concerns of those living in the rural Catskills areas and those living in New York City, all of whom potentially could be harmed by the chemical contamination of their water supply as an unintended outcome of hydraulic fracturing. However, far from signifying the making of common cause between urban and rural concerns, Fulkerson and Thomas pointed out that the concern voiced by the urban protesters was exclusively on the impact that such potential unintended contamination would have on the drinking water of “the city,” and not the drinking water of those who lived in Binghamton or, presumably, more rural areas. It could be argued that this emphasis was a natural “not in my backyard” reaction by the urban protestors—understandably primarily concerned about the potential impact on them—but Fulkerson and Thomas interpreted it as something more substantial—as “an excellent example of urbanormativity” (p. 2).

Fulkerson and Thomas (2013) began their explanation of urbanormativity—Brown’s (2015) confession that he had “never encountered [this term] during 40 years of research” (p. 295) indicates the necessity of an explanation—by pointing out that 2008 marked a watershed event: globally, more people lived in urban places than in rural places for the first time ever. The rural “shrinking half of the planet” (p. 5), Fulkerson and Thomas conjectured reasonably, would now be depended upon ever more heavily to provide food and other resources for those living in the burgeoning half of the planet who live in urban places, even as urban places continue to expand and radically alter the places that previously sustained rural communities (Garner, 2017).

Despite the undeniable reality of the dependency of urban places on rural places for food and resources, even the flow of such assets towards urban places indicates urban places as higher status destinations. Urbanormativity, Fulkerson and Thomas (2013) proposed, stems from the underlying assumption among urban dwellers that “urban life, urban values, and urban concerns are of primary importance” (p. 2). Urbanormativity “promotes urban as normal and ignores or denigrates rural” (Brown, 2015, p. 295). In its most confrontational form, Fulkerson and Thomas (2013) assert, urbanormativity is

the ideology that informs us about the inevitability and desirability of urban life [which] is infused in our culture to the point that cultural capital itself can only be gained through the demonstration of being urban, or at least not being rural. (p. 22)

Taking for granted the contribution of education to the accumulation of cultural capital, Corbett’s (2007) acerbic reference to schooling in rural places as being the “quintessential institution of disembedding” (p. 251) takes on deeper meaning in the context of urbanormativity. The proximity of Corbett’s characterization to the 2008 rural/urban tipping point highlighted by Fulkerson and Thomas (2013) renders it even more poignant.

The Contours of the Rural Place

As discussed in the preceding volume in this series (Innovation and Implementation in Rural Places: School–University–Community Collaboration in Education), 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 cluster.1

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 United States educational prospect as millions of children hitch their stars to an “educated hope” (Edmondson & Butler, 2010, p. 150).

Making a Positive Impact in Rural Places

Against the somber tones of the urbanormative backdrop, the chapter contributors to this volume foreground the vibrant colors of school–university–community collaborations in rural places that are notable by the fact that they have made or are in the process of making impact—not by hollowing out America’s rural places (Carr & Kefalas, 2009), but by taking an asset-based, appreciative approach that views challenges as thinly disguised opportunities.

Targeting Instructional Leadership

Militello, Jones, Dunn, and Moffitt raise the curtain on this volume by discussing the first year of an ongoing collaboration among four rural school districts in North Carolina and a nearby university that is funded by the Panasonic Foundation. Their project is a model instance of effective foundational funding in that it is finely tuned to the needs of the school districts and carefully designed to build on the existing educational assets in the participating schools.

Woodland, Mazur, and Sullivan are in harmony with the themes developed in the preceding chapter as they describe the noteworthy impact of their collaborative project in Chapter 2. Their project emerges from the context of their collaborative partner, and was developed to address specifically the needs that the superintendent identified and that the school leaders owned. The mutual benefits to the school district and the university continue to accrue.

Opportunities for Underserved

In Chapter 3, the project described by Hill, Grant, and Stumbo illustrates the ideal supportive role of the university highlighted above in that it begins with a collaboration among a community organization and three school districts. The university was invited into the project because it could bring the required research resources to the table. All the collaborative partners are learning as they collaborate to tackle one of the pervasive issues in education: the inability of children of color to see “people like me” among their teachers.

In a discursive vein, in Chapter 4, Kebede brings her personal international perspective to her theoretical insights into one aspect of the issue raised in the preceding chapter by discussing the intersection among race, immigration, and rurality. As rural places become more diverse, it is imperative that the histories and social contexts of the immigrants to those rural places be taken into account adequately.

In Chapter 5, Pfrenger, Noll, and Cope describe a project in rural Ohio that elaborates on the central theme of sustenance in describing a strongly collaborative Rural Scholars Program. The mission of the Rural Scholars Program is to provide first-generation students whose ambition is to attend college with the academic wherewithal to realize that ambition.

Cuthrell provides the background of the Rural Education Institute (REI) in Chapter 6, and discusses something of its impact over the more than 30 years of its existence. Under her leadership, REI is undergoing a renaissance as a collaborative research hub in addition to its historic role as an initial point of contact for 43 school districts in the area and a broker for student teacher placements.

Targeting Wicked Problems

In Chapter 7, Biddle, Mette, Brown, Tappan, Ray, & Strickland set the stage for the three interrelated chapters in this section by identifying a wicked problem as a social issue that is hard to define. Such indeed is the well-being of rural youth who are encountering toxic stress in rural places. Rural communities’ pressing needs have been misinterpreted by federal initiatives; relational approaches that build on community strengths and youth wisdom are better positioned to make a positive impact.

In Chapter 8, Blitz, Anderson, Mulcahy, and Bronstein reference the accumulating research on the benefits of trauma-informed approaches to dealing with the impact of trauma and toxic stress on students in schools—especially in the context of culturally responsive approaches. They discuss their model of a culturally responsive, trauma-informed approach that focuses on the domains of family, resiliency, education, and empowerment.

To conclude this section, in Chapter 9, Morton and Berardi discuss their collaborative endeavor to assist a rural school district to implement trauma-informed school programming. They point out that the trauma-informed approach is beneficial even in the absence of highly stressed students as it promotes broad access to services and is particularly salient to the context of rural communities.

International Perspectives

The closing section of this volume consists of four chapters that feature international university–school–community collaborations. It commences with Chapter 10, in which Williams, Otero, and Florez discuss an innovative international collaboration between researchers in the American southwest and the state of South Australia who themselves collaboratively engage with schools in their geographically disparate but contextually analogous places. The impact of this collaboration is partly evidenced in modulating the roles of the partners as they study and reflect on their shared practice.

In Chapter 11, Yan, Han, Li, Song, and Guo showcase an extensive one-to-one, rural–urban school partnership that involved 100 urban and 100 rural schools in an endeavor to lessen educational inequities that are commonly observed between the educational attainment of students in urban and rural schools in China. In this partnership, the university’s role was to bring resources to the table in terms of facilitation and training, and research evaluation capacity. Survey data and individual interviews attest to the impact of the project.

The title of Dyubhele’s Chapter 12 offers a direct challenge to deficit thinking regarding rural places. Dyubhele describes the impact over time of her collaborative work as a university faculty member with the women in an impoverished rural area in South Africa to which the Black population living in the “wrong areas” during apartheid had been forcibly relocated. Dyubhele used two questionnaires and interviews in IsiXhosa (the local language) to gather data—initially about the needs of the women and subsequently about the impact of her work.

Green and Ma bring this volume to a close with Chapter 13, in which they discuss their work as science educators in collaborating with schools to prepare student teachers who come from and return to rural areas and regional townships in the central Gippsland region in the state of Victoria, Australia. They typify their approach as orienting the student teachers to “place-oriented science pedagogies in rural settings.”

Not “Seeing Like a State”

Schafft (2016) described as ironic the contemporary lessening of the accountability of schools to the communities in which they operate in the process of increasing their accountability to other entities. This can have particular impact in rural places in which, as Schafft pointed out, the rural school plays critical roles: “not simply educational, but cultural, civic, economic, and symbolic” (p. 139). These roles may be less prominent in urban areas, in which case the comparative rural education policy vacuum that Schafft decries might be another instance of urbanormativity (Fulkerton & Thomas, 2013). Schafft, however, sees the shift in accountability as an example of Scott’s (1998) concept of “seeing like a state,” which Schafft (2016) defines as “the institutional practice of imposing an overarching rational order to reduce the heterogeneity and complexity of the lived world to discrete and comparable statistical indices for the purposes of bureaucratic management and control” (p. 149).

In opening the door to the chapters in this volume, I contend that collaboration among universities, schools, and communities is a clear antidote to “seeing like a state.” In its most easily discernable form, the school–university–community collaborative context emanates from a school and community that collectively knows what is needed to enhance the well-being of the children in the community and recruits a university to bring to the table (a compelling analogy) the resources to which the school–community collective does not have access. The following chapters bear witness to the impact of not “seeing like a state.”

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

Brown, D. L. (2015, July). [Review of the book Studies in urbanormativity: Rural communities in urban societies, by G. M. Fulkerson & A. R. Thomas]. American Journal of Sociology, 121(1), 295–297. doi:10.1086/681215

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.

Fulkerson, G. M., & Thomas, A. R. (Eds.). (2013). Studies in urbanormativity: Rural communities in urban societies. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.

Garner, B. (2017). “Perfectly positioned”: The blurring of urban, suburban, and rural boundaries in a Southern community. The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 672(1), 46–63. doi:10.1177/0002716217710490

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

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

Schafft, K. A. (2016). Rural education as rural development: Understanding the rural school–community well-being linkage in a 21st-century policy context. Peabody Journal of Education, 91(2), 137–154. doi:10.1080/0161956X.2016.1151734

Scott, J. C. (1998). Seeing like a state: How certain schemes to improve the human condition have failed. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Vara-Orta, F. (2017). Bill Gates announces $1.7 billion in new K–12 investments. Education Week, 37(10), 14.

Vara-Orta, F., & Prothero, A. (2017). A major K–12 benefactor is stepping down. Will his impact last? Education Week, 37(10), 1, 15.

Vincenti, M. (2017). Smaller classes serve a larger purpose. Education Week, 37(10), 28.