Rural Literacies: Text and Context Beyond the Metropolis

Session Type: Symposium

Abstract

This session takes up contemporary work inspired by Kim Donehower, Charlotte Hogg and Eileen Schell's (2007, 2011) conception of rural literacies. The session presents four papers from the United States and Canada that view literacies from a critical and geographically-influenced perspective arguing in different ways that rurality influences textual practices and that textual practices play an important role in constructing rurality. These sessions make key links between schooled literacies, problems of educational leadership and broader questions of rural development policy. In keeping with AERA’s general theme for 2016 this session focuses on persistent problems of equitable and democratic educational programming in areas beyond the metropolis.

Sub Unit

• SIG-Writing and Literacies

Chair

• Kim Donehower, University of North Dakota

Papers

• Different Geographies, Different Futures: The Framing of 21st-Century Public Schooling - Karen Eppley, The Pennsylvania State University; Patrick Shannon, The Pennsylvania State University

• Stepping Outside the Resource Frame: Reconsidering Rural Literacy and Sustainability - Kim Donehower, University of North Dakota

• Bringing a Critical Literacy Lens to the Study of Place in a Rural Earth Science Classroom - Amy Price Azano, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

• But Will We Be Allowed? New Teachers Confront Old Conceptions of Literacy in a Rural Middle School - Michael J. Corbett, University of Tasmania

Discussant

• Barbara M. Comber, Queensland University of Technology