Discourses of the Rural Rust Belt:

Abstract

<jats:p>This article addresses the ways in which elementary teachers in the rural rust belt both reproduce and contest dominant discourses of schooling, rurality, and poverty in their particular local context. Situated within a 4-year postcritical ethnographic study, this analysis of teacher discourse took part during an embedded, 4-month-long teacher study group. Within this context, the authors examine how the group’s discourse on poverty claimed that inequity was the fault of those experiencing it, as well as that a neoliberal discourse of education emphasized a flattened accountability and growth-only perspective within teacher’s professional interactions. However, through the addition of a spatial lens, they also situate these discourses within a particular rural and rust-belt context. This article teases apart the discursive threads within two teacher study groups, revealing the construction by teachers of their own rural, high-poverty communities as deficient, as well as exploring the complexities of the intersections of these discourses for teachers working in such settings. Their analysis contributes to a more robust understanding of the particular intersecting discourses currently circulating and producing a White-majority, high-poverty rural rust belt where children go to school and are taught by educators with their own complex orientations to schooling, rurality, and poverty.</jats:p>

Comparing early leaving across Spain and England: variation and commonality across two nations of high and low relative early leaving rates

“…Educators also observed that the lack of a university and limited economic opportunities and established low skill labour-market jobs of parents, limited young peoples' aspirations' regarding their education and training trajectories. This finding may also reflect the unconscious bias that teachers have been found to label low-income families in rural settings (Panos and Seelig's 2019).…”

Supporting Positive Post-School Outcomes for Students With Disabilities in Rural Locations

“…Courtade et al (2017) found the use of online courses, virtual coaching, and online professional learning communities allowed rural special educators to not feel professional isolation and offered more opportunities for collaboration as they accessed a 3-year professional development program. Training for in- and pre-service teachers should include opportunities for educators to reflect on their own experiences related to rurality to better understand their own locale biases (Panos & Seelig, 2019). A list of online training opportunities and resources can be found in Table 2.…”

Rural cultural wealth: dismantling deficit ideologies of rurality

“…For example, the US Census Bureau denotes that “‘rural’ encompasses all population, housing, and territory not included within an urban area” (United States Census Bureau, 2018, p. 1). Defined thusly, the term is inherently urban normative and forwards predominant sociological depictions of rural communities as regressive in contradistinction to urban progressiveness (Azano and Biddle, 2019; Panos and Seelig, 2019). Moreover, defining rural as “not urban” implicates homogeneity across culturally and geographically distinctive locales.…”