Conflicting Rural Discourses: Policy Frames and Educational Equity

• In Event: 58.035 - Reconceiving Rural Education: An Examination of Meaning and Equal Educational Opportunity

Abstract

There are multiple rural discourses that either illuminate or obscure characteristics of rural communities, which in turn offer different frames of understanding of their educational needs.
As Corbett (2007) notes, “the ‘rural problem’ in contemporary educational theorizing effectively constructs the rural community itself as a problem” (p.34). I situate my paper in ethnographic data collected during a twelve month study of a rural school-community relationship in northern Wisconsin. An emergent theme I explore in this paper reflects on the feeling of being removed or distant from policy decisions. As one school official remarked, “I think we’ve come to grips with is we know that a lot of those challenges for the school district aren’t going to be solved in Washington, aren’t going to be settled in Madison, they’re going to be settled here.” This sentiment suggests that policymakers and educational professionals in urban centers may be less effective in generating meaningful and effective rural educational policy; therefore, this paper reflects on similarities and differences between externally-produced state rural discourses and the discourse of educational needs in one rural community. Through my analysis I question how educational equity can exist within a centrally-located and urban-centric educational policy framework.

Author

• Jennifer Seelig, University of Wisconsin - Madison