Rural Spaces of Longing and Protest

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

Abstract

Objectives or purposes
Over the few decades, corporate formations have come to structure social relationship in rural spaces and K-12 schools across the U.S. Some educators and community members in rural settings are critically aware of the larger constitutive forces that responsible for the growth of social inequalities inside and outside of educational settings. For example, social networks are forged in towns to resist political disenfranchisement. Rural spaces serve as a strategic backdrop/location to reclaim political power. The purpose of presentation is to highlight the interviews and exchanges with rural actors the quest for social change in Wisconsin and the U.S.
Perspective(s)
Unfolding in rural areas in the U.S. are neoliberal education reforms and the dismantling of public education. In particular, there are budget cuts, attacks on teachers, and taxpayer subsidy of private, religious schools (Author, 2013). This last problem was until very recently confined to urban school district(s) (Author, 2014). In 2015 that changed, and “vouchers” are sweeping through an entire state like Wisconsin, 2/3 of whose school districts serve rural areas. Rural interviews effuse a type of nostalgia through a longing for small towns with a pristine and uncluttered culture, the sense of belonging, community building, and small ‘d’ democracy. However, the rationale of nostalgia is insufficient for working in opposition to the commoditization of curriculum and commodification of schools that education reform demands. Through video, rethinking education in a new light, with a different tone, and toward an undetermined yet hopeful, rather than pre-determined, utilitarian end is possible.
Modes of inquiry and data analysis
Indeed, I/we were texts on which video and social struggle were inscribed. Ellsworth and Whatley (1990) provide strong evidence that video is no less a curriculum then “static” texts. Video can build a living, sentient discourse in social protest, place, and identity formation (Author, 2009). Transcriptions from semi-structured interviews with rural, social justice activists are deconstructed using critical geography (Helfenbein, 2011), place-based curriculum (Chair, 2013), and critical hermeneutics (Habermas, 1989; Regan, 2012).
Largely ignored in the current educational reform movement, rural school districts are now ascendant in conversations. Paradoxically, the same features that impact urban public schools now arrive at the doorstep of rural communities as political agendas abound to re-invent education along market-based ideological lines. This essay affirms that rural citizens will not be idle in fighting against these regressive efforts.

Author

• Todd Alan Price, National-Louis University