This book brings together authors from United States, South Africa, United Kingdom, China, Canada and Australia to provide insights and case studies from across a range of contexts to explore the interplay between the notions of rurality, innovation and education. The book reveals a hopeful and resilient approach to innovative rural education and scholarship collectively and provides important evidence to speak against an often deficit view of rural education. Three patterns are revealed, namely: the importance of place-attentive strategies, the importance of joined up alliances to maximise resources and networks and finally, the need to utilize alternative methodologies and frameworks that have a starting point of difference rather than deficit for any rural initiative or approach. By drawing from international examples and responding in innovative ways to rural education challenges, this book provides an opportunity to share international insights into innovations, interventions and partnerships that promote and support rural education in its broadest sense.

"A collection of essays examining the various social, cultural, and economic intersections of rural place and global space, as viewed through the lens of education. Explores practices that offer both problems and possibilities for the future of rural schools and communities, in the United States and abroad"--Provided by publisher.

This book provides authentic accounts of the effects of the revolutionary political reform experienced in the past half century on education in Europe’s considerable rural hinterland. These reforms include the liberation of the Baltic and Eastern European states from Soviet communist domination, the ‘eurozone’ economic crises, and the current and future migration of people fleeing war and poverty from the Middle East and Africa. Overshadowing these events are so-called global forces which champion economies of scale and pressurize academic performance as keys to economic success. Trapped in this distal whirlwind of change are 1000s of small and/or rural elementary schools and the life chances of more 1000s of young children. The research presented here unveils the unseen and under-reported consequences of top-down, urban-oriented educational policies on children’s and communities’ experience of place and space. Exposure of these conditions in rural Europe is long overdue, but obscured for decades by political extremes of left and right. Yet, the lived reality of peremptory and swathing school closure programmes, and poverty inflicted on rural populations in parts of Eastern Europe is relatively unreported in the western educational literature – a situation exacerbated by the virtual invisibility of rural educational research generally. The chapters in this book reveal the insights of social science scholars from 11 European countries including those from low GDP, formerly soviet bloc countries, recently enabled to present their research at western European conferences such as the European Educational Research Association. Their research will inform and alert education academics, researchers and professionals to these rural European educational contexts. The research methodologies reported are diverse and innovative. The national context chapters are complemented by overview chapters which survey and synthesise (i) definitions and conceptualisations of rural, (ii) pan-European appraisal of educational, structural and geospatial statistics on small and rural schools, and (iii) identify key messages for better understanding of the rural situation in European research, policy and practice. Crucially, despite the gloom, the authors report positive strategies for rural school survival at governmental and/or school and community levels, that include community involvement, rural educational tourism, and deliberative inter-community school network planning.

The impetus behind this volume stems from reflections on commemorations of the historic Brown v. Board of Education decision. Brown turned 60 in May of 2014, and many special issues of peer?reviewed journals were dedicated to that anniversary. Unlike most special issues and volumes, we sought to highlight a smaller part of Brown, though no less significant. More specifically, we thought to develop a volume that focused on rural education in the aftermath of the decision. Most of the education policy and education reform literature caters to urban and suburban contexts, and very few academic books and journal articles—with the exception of research conducted by Craig, Amy, and Caitlin Howley and the Journal for Research on Rural Education—focus on rural education in the US. Thus, we wanted this volume to focus on the politics of educational opportunity in rural contexts. There is a paucity of rigorous research that examines how education policy affects the conditions of rural education. More specifically, research is scarce in examining the ways in which students in rural schools and districts have access to educational opportunities, although approximately one?third of all public schools are located in rural areas (Ayers, 2011). Educational opportunity in rural districts has been plagued by geographic isolation, loss of economic bases, and lack of capital (both financial and political) to voice the need for resources. To be clear, this volume does not present chapters that detail educational opportunity in rural districts and schools from a deficit perspective. Instead, chapters in this volume offer insight into both micro? and macro?level policies and practices that shape educational opportunities for students in rural schools and districts. As such, chapters in this volume investigate the “now” of educational opportunity for rural students and makes recommendations and suggestions for “later”. Given that, we are reminded of James Coleman’s (1975) thesis, “Education is a means to an end, and equal opportunity refers to later in life rather than the educational process itself” (p.28). This book will be organized into two distinct sections. The first section, comprised of chapters that examine educational opportunity in rural districts from a micro?level perspective, is devoted to chapters that broadly examine the implications of state and federal policy on educational opportunity in rural schools and districts. The second section, which includes case studies of rural districts in the American South, Appalachia, and the Northeast, takes a macro?level approach to examining educational opportunity in rural districts. Combined, chapters throughout the book provide readers with both an overview and a specific snapshot of educational opportunity in rural schools. Given the breadth and scope of chapters included in this volume, we believe the book adds tremendously to the education policy literature, as this vantage point has rarely been included in larger education policy discussions.

This teacher education textbook invites preservice and beginning teachers to think critically about the impact of rurality on their work and provides an overview of what it means to live, teach, learn, and thrive in rural communities. This book underscores the importance of teaching in rural schools as an act of social justice—work that dismantles spatial barriers to economic, social, and political justice. Teaching in Rural Places begins with a foundational section that addresses the importance of thinking about rural education in the U.S. as an educational environment with particular challenges and opportunities. The subsequent chapters address rural teaching within concentric circles of focus—from communities to schools to classrooms. Chapters provide concrete strategies for understanding rural communities, valuing rural ways of being, and teaching in diverse rural schools by addressing topics such as working with families, building professional networks, addressing trauma, teaching in multi-grade classrooms, and planning place-conscious instruction. The first of its kind, this comprehensive textbook for rural teacher education is targeted toward preservice and beginning teachers in traditional and alternative teacher education programs as well as new rural teachers participating in induction and mentoring programs. Teaching in Rural Places will help ensure that rural students have the well-prepared teachers they deserve.

Half the world’s population lives in rural places, but education scholars and policy makers worldwide give little attention to rural of education. Indeed, most national systems, including in the developed world, treat their educational systems as institutions to “modernize” the global economy. The authors in this volume have different concerns. They are rural education scholars from Australia, Canada, the United States, and Kyrgyzstan, and here their focus is the dynamics of social class: in particular rural schools but also in rural schooling as a local manifestation of a national (and the global) system. For the most part, the volume comprises relevant empirical reports, but none neglects theory, and some privilege theory and interpretation. First and last chapters introduce the texts and synthesize their joint and separate meanings. What are the implications of place for social class? How do class dynamics manifest differently in more and less racially homogeneous rural communities? How does place affect class and how might class affect place? How does schooling in rural communities reproduce or interrupt social-class mobility across generations? The chapters engage such questions more completely than other volumes in rural education, not as a final word or interm summary, but as an opening to an important line of inquiry thus far largely neglected in rural education scholarship.

Rural poverty encompasses a distinctive deprivation in quality of life related to a lack of educational support and resources as well as unique issues related to geographical, cultural, community, and social isolation. While there have been many studies and accommodations made for the impoverished in urban environments, those impoverished in rural settings have been largely overlooked and passed over by current policy. The Handbook of Research on Leadership and Advocacy for Children and Families in Rural Poverty is an essential scholarly publication that creates awareness and promotes action for the advocacy of children and families in rural poverty and recommends interdisciplinary approaches to support the cognitive, social, and emotional needs of children and families in poverty. Featuring a wide range of topics such as mental health, foster care, and public policy, this book is ideal for academicians, counselors, social workers, mental health professionals, early childhood specialists, school psychologists, administrators, policymakers, researchers, and students.