Hiding in Plain Sight: Rural Students in Sub/Urban Teacher Education Programs by Chea Parton

Hiding in Plain Sight: Rural Students in Sub/Urban Teacher Education Programs by Chea Parton

As I write this, I’m sitting outside on my folks’ farm in Indiana. The corn is way past knee-high with the fourth of July right around the corner.

There’s so much green. The breeze and temperature are both nicer than your average July day thanks to the rains that preceded my arrival.

Every morning I run with my two dogs down the road that leads to my nearest neighbor about a quarter-mile down the road.

And across the field, the white of my grandparent’s house stands out starkly against the green backdrop of the corn.

Listening to the song birds and wind through the trees, I feel at home in a way that I haven’t in a long time.

According to a report of the Rural School and Community Trust (2019), there are over 9 million rural students in the US. This is a larger school population that the biggest 85 school districts in the US combined. However, despite their substantial footprint in the educational system, the bulk of educational scholarship has and continues to ignore rural students, focusing primarily on sub/urban educational issues instead.

Watching My Cousin Vinny over the holiday, I was reminded of the prevalence and acceptability of deficit attitudes and stereotypes of rural people. The scenes of shacks along Billy and Stan’s drive in Alabama and the call between Billy and his mother in the police station where Stan passionately reminds her that the people down there are inbred idiots given to hasty justice really struck me.

The depiction of rural people in popular culture continues to paint a monolith and stereotype of mostly white conservative racists and homophobes – toothless, inbred hillbillies clinging to guns and Bibles. Television shows such as Duck Dynasty, Swamp People, Here Comes Honey Boo Boo and films like Hillbilly Elegy continue to capture the public imagination by painting a tellable narrative (Webb-Sunderhaus, 2016) and stereotype of rural people. However, rural people are intelligent and capable of attending university, and when they do, they are forced to out-migrate their rural communities because there are few to no universities located in rural areas.

After graduating with 50 people in my class, I left the around 800 people in my town to attend Purdue University, which at the time had around 40,000 students on campus. Like Ali Behrens discusses in Teaching English in Rural Communities (Petrone & Wynhoff Olsen, 2020), when I introduced myself in classes, I got tired of telling people they probably never heard of my town and just started saying I was from the nearest city. Despite Purdue’s status as a land grant university with a highly regarded agricultural program, my rural identity never seemed readily apparent to others, and it felt difficult to find people who shared my culture. Instead, I was routinely read and assumed to be suburban and to have come from affluence – neither of which are true.

This experience was even more pronounced when I moved to the Austin area to complete my PhD at The University of Texas at Austin. There was only one other rural-identifying person in my program and courses rarely explicitly discussed rurality in connection with teacher preparation. I remember rurality becoming part of the discussion in one of my classes – and I think that was largely because the two rural people in our program were vocal, were in that same class together, and chose to make it the subject of one of our class group projects.

For all intents and purposes, my rural identity had been hidden – hiding in plain sight and largely ignored by the curriculum and pedagogical theories privileged by both programs at both institutions. I soon discovered that I was not alone in these experiences. I was introduced to blog posts about the omission of rural literature from secondary ELA teaching. And through my dissertation work, each of the rural out-migrant in-service teachers in my study mentioned how place in general and their rurality in particular was not made part of their preservice teacher education.

All of these factors together have led me to ask the questions:

1. How many students in our programs are rural out-migrants?
2. How does our curriculum as teacher educators recognize or ignore the experiences and knowledges of rural out-migrants?
3. How do(n’t) we support them as they re-story and re-configure who they are in a new place?
4. What can we do?

In considering these questions, I undertook the project of creating a space online for teachers and teacher educators alike to find resources on and support for teaching critical rurality. And thus, Dr. Parton’s Literacy In Place was born. Drawing inspiration for sites like Ethical ELA, Dr. Bickmore’s YA Wednesday, and Stephanie Toliver’s Reading Black Futures, I initially envisioned Literacy In Place as a space to collect, house, and review rural young adult literature (YAL) so that teachers could find it more easily. But after reflecting on my own difficulty finding scholarly literature as I was working on my dissertation design and proposal, I realized that doing the same for teacher educators might also be helpful. The rest of this post will specifically focus on outlining the resources for teacher educators. (If you’re interested in learning more about the rural YAL aspect of Literacy In Place, look for my guest blog on Dr. Bickmore’s YA Wednesday in early August).

Support and Resources for Teacher Educators  

As I’ve previously mentioned, not every student who attends a sub/urban teacher preparation program (TPP) is from a sub/urban place. Likewise, not every preservice teacher prepared in a sub/urban TPP will end up teaching in sub/urban school. While many TPPs focus on critical teaching practices, few examine how teacher educators’, teachers’, and students’ place connections shape the teaching in TPPs and/or secondary classrooms. Because the development of all facets of identity, language, and culture don’t happen in a vacuum, understanding more about who and how teachers are as both people and professionals is vital to preparing truly culturally sustaining teachers. 

Because TPPs and educational scholarship are overwhelmingly metro-centric, it can be challenging to know where to go and how to start including critical rurality, rural scholarship, and rural lives in TPP classrooms and curriculum. This page of Literacy In Place supports teacher educators by offering a suggested reading list, ideas for lessons and activities, and opportunities for class visits/guest lectures.

Though I view Literacy In Place as a work in progress and hope that it continues to grow, the following sections give a brief overview of what is there currently and some possibilities for each section’s growth.

Suggested Readings

There is a growing body of research and community of scholars surrounding the experiences of rural teachers and students. However, in my own teacher preparation program and graduate work, rural teaching and preparing good teachers for rural places was seldom discussed. Because we never know where our future teachers are going to land, covering the affordances and constraints of living and teaching across rural, urban, suburban, and rurban spaces is important.

Finding work that addresses place as a critical factor in teaching and teacher preparation can be challenging, and when teacher educators are already stretched thin between the multiple facets of our work, making time to search for new readings can feel unnecessary, overwhelming, or impossible. The suggested reading page of Literacy In Place lists sources that I have found to be helpful in my own research around place, rurality, teaching, and learning.

In the future, I’m hoping to make it more of an annotated bibliography, making it that much easier for teacher educators to know if a particular reading will suit the needs of their course, students, and curriculum. I’m envisioning that it might also be a place for community contributions. For example, if teacher educators were to allow students to do a book club or reading group around rurality or place and individual students or groups completed annotations for those readings, I could publish them to this page on the website. If this idea appeals to you please, don’t hesitate to reach out.

Lessons & Activities

Along with searching for and selecting readings, finding ways to include them or include critical considerations of place and rurality in general can feel challenging because coverage is already an issue. Planning for my courses, choosing readings from the sheer number of fantastic scholarship out there to cover a broad range of important topics (especially where multifaceted identities are concerned) always seems impossibly difficult. Likewise, developing assignments and activities to use in class can also feel challenging for similar reasons. There are so many different ways of knowing and being in the world – how do you make space for and include them all?

To that end, I developed and designed some activities and assignments that connect to the work that teacher educators are likely already doing in their classrooms. Like the suggested reading list, I also see this as a start. Over time, I would love to partner and collaborate with other teacher educators who are already or are interested in doing this work to generate more ideas of how critical rural and place-responsive pedagogies can become part of the work we’re doing with preservice teachers.

Class Visits

As I’ve noted in the previous two sections, I fully recognize how incorporating critical considerations of place and rurality can feel like one more thing being asked of already over-taxed teacher educators. For folks who are interested in making critical considerations of place part of their pedagogy but just don’t have time right now to redesign their courses, I would be delighted to be invited as a guest speaker to your classes. Likewise, I’m happy to talk at departmental brown bags or as a guest lecturer. 

(Non)Rural Voices Blog

The last section of the website of interest to teacher educators is the blog. As it exists now, the blog features posts about how I am thinking about rurality, my developing (non)rural identity, and what it means and looks like to be a rural out-migrant teacher and teacher educator. Through prose and poetry with connections to readings and/or aspects of popular culture, I write to think about and process what it means to be a rural person, educator, and researcher.

In keeping with my visions of building the site as a community space for educators and learners, I hope the blog (and site writ large) will become a place where pre-service teachers and teacher educators tell their own (non)rural stories to continue efforts to disrupt and dismantle the monolith that is usually made of rural people and the stereotypes that go along with it. If you’re interested in telling your place-connected story, I would love to hear from and collaborate with you!

To conclude this post, I’m wondering again about how many rural out-migrant students are in our teacher preparation courses and whether or not we know. And why that is. And what we can do about it. I’m hoping that Literacy In Place and the resources there will continue to grow and help teacher educators make space for rural places, people, and pedagogies in their programs and courses. And, finally, one more time, I want to mention how open to opportunities for collaboration I am. If you have an idea, suggestion, or question please contact me.