Different Geographies, Different Futures: The Framing of 21st-Century Public Schooling

• In Event: Rural Literacies: Text and Context Beyond the Metropolis

Abstract

We investigated how two federally sponsored online professional development programs position rural schools, teachers, and students, by tracing them back to their ideological roots (Friedman, 2012) and ahead to their likely curricular and pedagogical consequences (Eppley & Corbett, 2011). We ask, “How do ConnectEducator (CE) and Online Rural Community of Practice Group (ORC) represent and frame 21st century public schooling across geographic contexts?”

We take a social justice stance, adopting “a radical democratic interpretation of the principle of equal moral worth [in which] justice requires social arrangements that permit all to participate as peers in social life” (Fraser, 2009, 16). The work of this stance is to identify, contest, and remove economic, cultural and political barriers that impede or negate participatory parity among all peers. We ask: what resources are allocated, in what amounts, and does this distribution seem fair; which groups are acknowledged as having legitimate, yet distinct, identities, deserving universal respect and membership as peers; and how can all peers participate as equals within the relevant environments of the issues to be addressed?

To address these questions, we examined the official language surrounding the rationales for CE and ORC and the launch of the respective websites, noting the representations and frames assigned to each and its intended audience. To probe deeper (Ball, 1990) we explored the origins of the professional development programs locating them in ConnectEd, Connect America (2010), and the Telecommunications Act of 1996 and the annual reports on each initiative. Based on preliminary findings, we followed the ORC content stream in order to investigate its implications for curriculum and instruction in rural schools.

Through this work, we found dramatic differences in the representations and frames of schooling in the 21st century for different geographic groups. CE portrayed teachers and students as agents “in a world fueled by technology and innovation” served by schools that were “connected, personalized, and collaborative.” ORC was designed to use “technology to overcome some of the unique challenges involved in rural schools,” connecting rural teachers and schools directly with School Turnaround Learning Community (lowest performing 5 percent of American schools) despite ample NAEP data to the contrary. Through their federal policy trail, we found an underlying neoliberal understanding of the 21st century in which urban innovation ecosystems are characterized as worthy of the highest speed broadband investment with schools organized to produce a tech savvy elite who will invent the future and rural populations are identified as in need of development (Shannon & Shannon, 2013), but too low in potential to warrant the investment in distribution of high speed broadband and its affordances. Consequently, rural schools and teachers are offered Turnaround options.

We will argue that these professional development, broadband, and educational policies and actions are unjust on economic, cultural and political grounds because they serve as barriers to rural citizens’ participatory parity on local, regional and global scales. We offer hope for justice through cross regional coalitions and reading education for social justice.

Authors

• Karen Eppley, The Pennsylvania State University

• Patrick Shannon, The Pennsylvania State University