Rural Education for the Twenty-First Century: Identity, Place, and Community in a Globalizing World

Abstract

Rural Education for the Twenty-First Century: Identity, Place, and Community in a Globalizing World Citation: Woodrum, A. (2011). Book review "Rural education for the twenty-first century: Identity, place, and community in a globalizing world." Journal of Research in Rural Education, 26(5). Retrieved from http://jrre.psu.edu/articles/26-5.pdf. When early last year a high-ranking official from the federal Department of Education visited us in New Mexico, I was invited to act as one of his guides, to set up a tour for him at two schools. With the dramatic infusion of Race to the Top funds into education, and in particular into states like New Mexico where achievement data have consistently indicated that our students rank near the bottom nationally, his stated goal was to understand better the challenges we face. With the collaboration of an urban principal, we hosts were soon able to arrange for our guest to tour an ethnically diverse, low SES elementary school in Albuquerque. But we also wanted our guest to get a sense of rural education in the state. Arranging for that, however, required more planning, for I wanted the official to get an overview, not just of a particular rural school, but a sense of New Mexico's ethnic, linguistic, and geographic complexity. In the end, we were welcomed into a small high school located in the high desert, west of Albuquerque where the population is predominately Native and Hispanic. Our guest immediately noticed that the school's central plaza bore little resemblance to the architecture of the public schools he had visited thus far. Each of the four sides of the plaza had been built to echo the facades of the ancient churches in the four villages from which the school's students came. As we toured the facility, observing classes, speaking to students and teachers and a couple of school board members, I could see that his disorientation was growing. Finally, as we were standing in the doorway of a classroom where the lesson was being taught in the language of the local indigenous people, he whispered, "Tell me what I am looking at." Only later that day, on the drive back to his hotel, were we able to address his concerns in any kind of depth. As we discussed his seemingly simple question and what it revealed about much of officialdom's lack of understanding about rural and local education in America, I realized that an authentic response would require not just an explanation of rural schools, but also one of place and identity, and of the economics of a fast-globalizing world. Rural Education for the Twenty-First Century: Identity, Place, and Community in a Globalizing World (2010), edited by Kai A. Schafft and Alecia Youngblood Jackson, lays out an extremely helpful overview of these deeper educational and cultural issues in a volume of 13 articles. Divided into three parts, the scholars in this book address "Spaces of Identity," "Placing Education," and "Teaching Communities." Had I had this book in hand at the time of our guest's visit, its panoramic scholarship would have gone a long way toward addressing many of his questions. Rather than take as their unit of analysis the classroom or the school building (as so often has been the case in rural education research), Schafft and Jackson in their Introduction put the reader on notice that the work in this volume "foregrounds the interrelationship between school and community, and how that interrelationship is shaped by the global-local context in which it is embedded" (p. 3). Relying largely on qualitative designs "such as ethnography, case studies, phenomenology, narrative inquiry, and mixed methods" (p.3), the chapters in Rural Education for the Twenty-First Century," set out quite purposively to emphasize the views and voices of rural people, "as they are situated within their local spaces, while keeping an eye toward the global context in which rurality is constructed, experienced, and critiqued" (p. …