Search Articles

This arts-based autoethnographic piece explores my layered experiences as a queer educator working in a rural high school, where heteronormativity and small-town familiarity often complicate notions of teacher identity, professionalism, and belonging. Using paper dolls and narrative vignettes, I explore how a queer teacher-self is negotiated and expressed within the cisheteronormative and gendered expectations of schooling. Emphasizing the disruptions possible in queer work, I emphasize that rural schooling can be a site of empowerment and joy through disruptions that students and I called “gray spaces” of possibility and affirmation—for both them and me. By highlighting moments of tension, joy, resistance, and community, I challenge notions of rural schools as solely hostile terrains for queer people, and underscore how they might alternatively be spaces of relationality, playfulness, empowerment, and transformation. Through the use of paper dolls as both metaphor and method, I accentuate that teacher identity, like pedagogy, is always layered and richly textured by context.

This article explores the creation of a digital storymap tracing the author’s journey as a white, queer, and transfemme college student from a rural background. Prompted by a graduate school narrative, the project revisits and reframes the story using the framework of queer rural liminality (QRL), which understands queerness, rurality, and liminality as co-constitutive and dynamic. Using ArcGIS StoryMaps—a digital storytelling platform—the project weaves together images, theory, personal narrative, and past writings to represent the fluidity of place, queerness, and rurality. Through restorying the author’s educational journey as a queer rural college student, the storymap resists binary assumptions of rurality and queerness as being incompatible. It demonstrates how educational environments can serve as sites of resistance and possibility for queer rural college students. In doing so, the project contributes to emerging scholarship on queer rural student experiences and illustrates how digital storytelling can be a powerful tool for identity exploration and meaning making in educational contexts.

The mixed-media artwork “Rooted and Resilient” pairs with the autoethnographic narrative to examine queer identity formation in the rural U.S. South. The artwork visualizes a life split between coercive conformity and chosen belonging: a blue, nonbinary figure braces between a frayed rope of church, family, and school expectations and a vibrant colorful braided rope of community and self-embrace. A barren field that demands “conform” and vibrant terrain that invites “embrace” encode a pull from survival to flourishing. The narrative grounds these symbols in fundamentalist religiosity, familial control, and school climate, while tracing countercurrents—rural gender “wiggle room,” clandestine literacies, and quiet peer solidarities. Together, image and text articulate how small acts, such as notes in lockers, shared books, and coded friendships, become a praxis of belonging that enables letting go of the ties that bind rigid rural traditions and stepping into chosen family and open selfhood. By rendering interior struggle and communal repair in accessible visual-narrative form, the work offers a lens for educators, counselors, rural advocates, and rural queer and trans youth and adults to recognize normative violence and to cultivate conditions where queer and trans youth can move from isolation toward collective resilience.

To explore the possibilities of and make a case for LGBTQ+ representation in the formal K–12 curriculum of small-town Rockbridge County, Virginia, the authors have imagined a history textbook called “The LGBTQ+ History of Rockbridge County.” The excerpts from this imagined textbook, created to represent what local LGBTQ+ curriculum could be, are both an exercise in creative writing and design as well as a collection of concrete stories and experiences from our home county. With the help of input from Rockbridge County High School’s flagship LGBTQ+ Alum Network (gathered via survey, email correspondence, and online focus groups), the authors designed textbook pages that provide a window into the people, places, and practices central to LGBTQ+ survival and life in Rockbridge County. Although this textbook does not exist (yet) as a complete standalone work, these pages may serve as a foundation for future projects about LGBTQ+ life in our home county and in other similar rural communities. By referencing traditional textbook aesthetics and providing a small glimpse into a rich local LGBTQ+ history, these excerpts illustrate both the costs of our erasure and the possibilities of our inclusion in formal K–12 curricula.

TransRural Lives is the first digital storytelling project that explores the lives of transgender older adults (ages 50+) from nonmetropolitan areas in the Pacific Northwest. This article explores the community-based educational events that have become crucial to disseminating TransRural Lives beyond the project’s website, specifically through rural “pop-up” storytelling events. The storytelling methods incorporated into these pop-ups serve as crucial informal learning opportunities that explore the needs of transgender individuals outside metropoles. They engage with diverse topics related to transgender aging in rural areas, intergenerational knowledge and resource sharing, the diversity of transgender older adults’ experiences, and the spaces that foster community and belonging for transgender older adults in rurality. In rural areas, where formal educational infrastructure for trans adults is lacking, these pop-ups function as a critical form of informal adult education. They also help develop intergenerational kinship networks that challenge dominant narratives about queer and trans rurality and resist the marginalization of rural lives. In doing so, they offer a model for how storytelling, when grounded in community and place, can reveal hidden histories and make visible the broad range of transgender experiences in rural areas, providing a rich area of study within broader community-facing adult education.

This creative/arts-based piece includes poetic voices from the editors of “Rural Education and Queer Identities: Rural and (Out)Rooted” alongside visual art representations from the Queer artist who provided the cover art for the volume. As contributors, Cook and Cain use reflexive poetry as a methodological exercise to engage with themes of insider/outsider perspectives in their research with LGBTQ+ participants. As editors of the volume, we found ourselves citing this practice as a rural Queer methodology to explore the tensions that arose for us as academics and educators while curating the collection. This piece explores three spaces inspired by Pennell’s chapter on being Queer across time and space in three rural settings. First, we explore rural taproots, two-steppin’ between our Queerness and temporal memories of being closeted youth. Second, we consider root systems as we two-step between our roles as educators and, as Thompson said, “agents of affirmation.” Third, we display aerial roots as we symbolically visit home as out rural scholars to unpack those early lessons. The accompanying artwork serves as further reflection into this arts-based inquiry. We conclude by providing two suggestions for future rural pedagogical practice and scholarship.