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Volume 38 Issue 2 Wordle

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The enduring misperception that rural places are homogeneously White may contribute to the underrepresentation of Black students in rural gifted education programs. In this study, we sought to understand this relationship by examining the underrepresentation of Black students in rural gifted education programs through a theoretical framework of critical Whiteness studies, critical pedagogies of place, and spatial injustice. Using logistic regression, we analyzed data related to identification processes used in 11 high poverty rural school districts. These identification processes included local district-led identification strategies and study-led methods which were designed to increase equitable access to gifted education by administering a universal screening assessment, collecting teacher ratings for every student, and using local norms to interpret scores. Data analysis confirmed that Black students were identified for gifted services in greater numbers with the study-led methods and that district-led identification strategies often overlooked Black students for gifted identification. Results also indicated that teachers rated Black students lower on traits associated with giftedness even when the students had comparable scores on the universal screener. These findings point to promise in using more inclusive identification strategies and centering place in the interpretation of data as a step toward equity, but they also point to a significant need to disrupt Whiteness in rural gifted spaces. We discuss these implications and offer suggestions for further research to improve the rate of inclusion of Black students in gifted education programs as an issue of equity in rural schooling.

Issue 38.03 Word Cloud

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This study is about a seventh-grade classroom in a predominantly White region in the rural northwestern United States where a White teacher led an interdisciplinary unit on African American narratives of enslavement and freedom fighting. Through the lenses of racial literacy, critical Whiteness studies, and discourse studies, authors use data from a co-ethnographic classroom research project to examine how students grappled in talk and written assignments with tensions around how to understand race and racism in the past and present. Findings present three race talk dilemmas—race is not really a thing (but it is), just tell us the right words (but the right words aren’t enough), and we can stop racism before it starts (but can we?)—and offer windows into the tensions present in building racial literacy in predominantly White spaces as a contradictory process, not linear or one-size-fits-all. Discussion suggests that engagement with race talk dilemmas must make space for racial literacy to be seen as a relational process grounded in place and the inclusion of local experiences and histories with race.

Volume 38 Issue 4 Word Cloud

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This article reports on the first three years of a teacher-led professional development program on the Navajo Nation. We draw on both quantitative and qualitative data from our end-of-year surveys to highlight some of the early lessons we have gathered from the Diné Institute for Navajo Nation Educators (DINÉ). We highlight two guiding principles that have developed through this work, cultural responsiveness and teacher leadership, and we suggest that these guiding principles could be useful for other professional development efforts in Indigenous-serving contexts, many of which would be characterized as “rural.” We connect these guiding principles to the broad concept of Native nation building, which situates teachers as frontline workers in Indigenous communities’ efforts to engage self-determination through self-education. A key lesson from the DINÉ is that professional development for teachers in “rural” schools serving Indigenous students must aim to build capacity among teachers so they determine the ways in which local knowledge is integrated into curriculum and everyday practice.

Volume 39 Issue 1 Word Cloud

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Rural schools and communities across the United States are increasingly diverse—linguistically, racially, and culturally. As rural schools experience this diversity, the need for well-prepared educators (teachers, leaders, counselors, and coaches) has continued to grow. This three-year study consisted of a place-conscious educator professional development program aimed to support rural English learners (Els) and their families. Participants engaged in six hybrid graduate level courses with onsite meetings, coaching, and classroom support. Data for this study derived from participating educators’ coursework, focus groups, material archives, observations, and fieldnotes. Data were analyzed following open and axial coding techniques, collapsed into categories, and merged into themes. Data indicated that the collaboration that emerged from the professional development was relational, equal, and synergistic in nature. This collaboration appeared to be pivotal in creating and implementing new supports for ELs and more equitable education for EL students and families.

Volume 39 Issue 2 Word Cloud

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Data on postsecondary degree attainment show persistent equity gaps between rural and nonrural student demographics. Accordingly, colleges and universities throughout the United States are now recognizing the need for more explicit support of rural stakeholders. These efforts are spurred by political shifts that have foregrounded the concerns of rural peoples in the United States and drawn rural spaces into the center of policy discourse. Policymakers seeking to further support rural demographics often face challenges, particularly in operationalizing rurality as a policy construct. This case study analyzes the development of a rural equity initiative—the Engage Program—at pseudonymous Southern State University, a public land-grant university in the Southeastern United States. By applying Schneider and Ingram’s policy design lens, the author explores the ways in which campus administrators wrestle with and help to produce—or reproduce—social constructions of rurality. The results suggest that rural equity initiatives may serve to introduce rurality into mainstream conversations about campus diversity, helping to further crystallize rural identities on college campuses and, by extension, within society at large.

Volume 39 Issue 3 Word Cloud

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This study examines the outcomes of non-school internships hosted by two Appalachian Ohio organizations: Rural Action and Building Bridges to Careers (BB2C). As intermediary organizations, these entities work outside the boundaries of formal schooling to address issues of youth outmigration and sustainable community development through high school internships. This qualitative study, guided by the conceptual framework of community and career connected learning (CCCL), seeks to fill a gap in the literature where existing studies favor a distinctly urban-centric vantage point or focus on optimizing social mobility and developing skills needed to maintain a globalized, unrooted workforce. Previous program participants (2016–2020) between one to three years post-high school graduation (n = 25) were interviewed and data were analyzed using generalized issue focused analysis. Findings reveal impacts on participants’ (a) perceived role within their rural communities, (b) career pathways, and (c) social capital acquisition. Participants indicated the internship positioned them to establish an initial career trajectory, while also leading them to reconsider their role within the community.