Rural Education and Curriculum Theory: Identities of Place

• In Event: The Curriculum of Forgotten Rural Places: Identity, Indigeneity, Education, Urbanism, and Cartographies

Abstract

This presentation is a curriculum study of rural place in the U.S. that extends existing conversations on rural education, specifically the effects school closures have on communities. The narrative takes up the span of years where the author’s story and the local school’s story intersect, 1969-1977, and speaks to intersections of identity, intergenerationality, schooling, and rural community—all contextualized in place. That, ultimately, is the goal of this presentation, to center autobiographically on rural culture in one engaged life—while disrupting nostalgic longing for an idealized memory. The author also captures how the self is complicit in institutions, communities, and places; thus, conversations about them must uphold the same complexity with which we consider the self-in-relation.
Recent research on rural education explores relationships between the schools and community, and important to this presentation, the relationship between effects on the community when its local school closes. This research yields important insights into what it means to be and feel—to believe oneself to be—rural. For example, Theobald and Wood (2010, p. 18) contend that rural dwellers learn to be rural, and in spite of diversity of identities or intellects and navigating the social and cultural, etc. They further state: “Though some may possess the ability to dismiss the messages, the very act of dismissing them becomes a part of the identity an individual builds” (p. 18). The author of this presentation contends that Littleville School shaped her identity by aiding her in negotiate and navigate the identifications she took on. She asks, then, where does that process intersect with the process of dismissing negative stereotypical messages of what it means for me to be rural?
The author teases out rural meanings from her own partial, contingent, contextualized, incomplete narrative. Mindful of the autobiographical methodology of currere, she examine regressive, progressive, analytic, and synthetic moments to complicate conversations on rurality and schooling, while bringing rural education conversations into curriculum theory. “It promises,” promises Pinar, “no quick fixes” (2004, p. 4). This meandering narrative of identity, school, and community engages in the slow remembering and re-entering the past, where the author hopes to “meditatively imagine the future…in order to understand more fully, with more complexity and subtlety,” her submergence in the present (Pinar, 2004, p. 4). The author thus intentionally become “temporal” (p. 4). This presentation takes the form of a series of re-memories, scenes that the author uses to illustrate how the past, present, and future live in one another. These scenes are illustrations of her “past existential experience as ‘data source’” (p. 36). The snapshots are framed by current literature on rural education, which, in turn, guides the theorizing.

Author

• Reta Ugena Whitlock, Kennesaw State University