I'm back again and more fired up than ever. All of my time spent doing research has been eye-opening, but this last week has been especially valuable. I finally finished my annotated bibliography (for those of you who are new to reading the blog, I've spent the last 2 months searching for research literature about poverty and its relationship with academic achievement), and, though I'm relieved and proud of what I've accomplished, there's a lot still to be done. I found exactly 100 articles that make suggestions relating to disadvantaged youth in the education system, so now my job is to sort through the articles and pull out key themes and similarities. I've been doing this for about a week now, and it's been really interesting to see so much overlap in the researchers' ideas, but the more themes and agreement I find, the more annoyed I am that they hasn't been applied to rural contexts.
I know, here I go again. But, honestly, I was really mad when I wrote my last post about rural representation in research literature, so I think it's reasonable that it's still on my mind. I do wish I could just focus on the work without having the thought constantly nagging at me, but at least I'm thinking about the literature critically.
Two articles in particular have been holding my attention while I work. The first one was written by
Corbett (2005), and it talks about how students in rural areas associate formal education with out-migration, which isn't necessarily what they want:
"...additional factors such as rising
tuition costs, the centralization of educational and other services in rural
areas, the high cost of leaving, and the expansion of low-wage, low-skilled
work in the expanding rural service economy may help to explain continuing
high dropout rates and low post-secondary participation rates in rural
communities... My data supports common local perceptions about how
education functions as preparation for out-migration.... Families in coastal
communities understand that their children need education, but the source
of this need is ironically nested in the very forces that are conspiring to
destabilize the life they know...In other words, young people’s
need for formal education has been created by the same global change forces
that are seen to be jeopardizing the traditional way of life in coastal and
rural villages. Thus, education, along with other forms of state intervention,
has come to be viewed with skepticism and ambivalence (p.14-16)"
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| Image retrieved from https://therodcast.ca/2013/06/06/comparing-education-in-canada-the-usa-and-australia/ |
I realize that that's a lot of academic reading I just subjected you to, but everything Corbett says makes perfect sense. The goal of education has historically been to create workers, plain and simple, but over time it has increasingly become more about creating potential university students. Azano (2015) absolutely hit the nail on the head when they said that "teachers face the challenge of giving students meaningful (and plausible) responses to questions like, "Why are we reading Shakespeare?" (p. 268). It's a challenge because, if we're all honest with ourselves, there are some abstract literacy tools and skills that just don't matter to students who want to join the work force as soon as they leave high school. Corbett is effectively saying that there's a mismatch between rural students and modern education, because, while education as an institution likes to push conceptual thinking and academia, those things are not a priority for students who value local traditions and local work.
My goal here is not to condemn academia, if anything, I think that my exposure to abstract literature and critical thinking has made me a more well-rounded person and a more empathetic teacher. That being said, I still think it's important to remember that if students aren't given a reason to care about literature and academia, to see their value in the real world, they're not going to be motivated to engage with them. So, that's it, I guess I solved the puzzle: If students have a reason to care about Shakespeare, they'll love it and want to read it!
Well, no, it's not quite that simple.
It's not enough to tell students that something is "important" or that "they should know the material."
Sure, those are technically reasons, but if someone handed me a book, and told me that I should read it because it's "important," my first question would be "why?" Why is it important, and why should I bother? What am I going to learn from it, and will that learning matter in the grand scheme of things?
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| Image retrieved from https://darylcagle.com/2007/04/12/high-school-prepares-for-jobs/ |
Though a lot of strategies for working with disadvantaged youth are thematically similar, I think that they all depend on a school's context and culture. If there was more research available focusing on education in rural areas, I think that the entire field of study would look different. Multiple perspectives are important when approaching a subject as complicated and difficult as disadvantaged students, and as of now, there aren't enough voices from rural communities in the conversation. All in all, I think it's just important that teachers do their best to make the subjects they teach relevant to the lives of their students. It's not always easy, but it's important have a good reason - one with instrumental value - to care about and be motivated to engage with school. That, paired with more rural representation in research literature, will help our motivate our students and foster their strengths.
Have a great week!
Savannah MacDonald
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Azano, A. (2011). The possibility of place: one teacher's use of place-based instruction for English students in a rural high school. Journal of Research in Rural Education, 26.
Azano, A. (2015). Addressing the Rural Context in Literacies Research. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 59(3), 267-269.
Corbett, M. (2005). Rural education and out-migration: The case of a coastal community. Canadian Journal of Education, 52-72.
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