Education for Somewhere: A Rural Institution Returns Home

• In Event: Portrait of a Program: Reconceptualizing and Revitalizing Rural Teacher Preparation

Abstract

For over one hundred and fifty years, the University of Wisconsin System has been preparing teachers to educate students in the communities they serve. Even with its roots firmly planted in rural places, teacher training in the state has evolved to include the needs of students in suburban and urban spaces. In an effort to serve ‘everywhere,’ have some teacher training institutions yielded programming that essentially serves ‘nowhere?’

As a part of a rural teacher preparation symposium, this paper will draw on Greenwood’s (2013) three questions to guide place-conscious learning (p.97):
(1) What happened here? (historical)
(2) What is happening here now and in what direction is this place headed?
(socio-ecological)
(3) What should happen here? (ethical)

Our paper addresses these questions by “placing” the history of one rural university in order to inform the development of a modern, rurally-responsive teacher preparation program. The paper offers as a unique perspective on the contemporary relationship between rural-placed universities and the rural schools they serve by asking how one institution has developed a teacher preparation program.

We will present a case study of the first normal school in Wisconsin; where it originated, how it prepared teachers, and how the program has transformed in response to outside stimuli – including local, state, and national influences. The institutional history of this university illuminates a process of change that is connected to and reflected in broader educational policies and socio-cultural events. This paper establishes a theoretical framework for the symposium by emphasizing the importance of place in education (Gruenewald, 2003), exploring the institutional impact when place-specific is supplanted by generalized policy, and concluding with a call to reintroduce place-consciousness into teacher preparation programs.

The study is based on archival research and relies on the use of primary documents in locally stored archives as well as connected seminal texts. We draw from research on rural schools by Horace Mann (1849) and Ellwood Cubberly (1914). Additionally, we explore Van Hise’s ‘Wisconsin Idea’ (1905), which argues that higher education should extend its benefit to every resident of the state. Our paper will share a broad history of the institution with a focus on themes in teacher preparation (curriculum, professional expectations and dispositions, and field placements) and how local and national influences have altered their transmission over time.

For years, rural identity has taken a back seat in response to new trends in education. We argue for the use of a “future-oriented historiography” (Kelley, 2018) to reconnect our rural roots to a progressive vision of rurality. This renewed connection can only lead to teacher training spaces that privilege an asset-based, rurally-responsive narrative of ‘somewhere’ as a counter argument to the present practice of preparing general practitioners for ‘nowhere.’

Authors

• Lindsay K Hollingsworth, University of Wisconsin - Platteville

• Jennifer Collins, University of Wisconsin - Platteville

• Jennifer Laura Seelig, NORC at the University of Chicago