We Knew… We Should Have Known. Troubled Stories of Rural College Closure.

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Friday 9:45 am - Gold 2
  In Roundtable Session: Modern Emerging Issues in Rural Education

Abstract

This narrative communicates the experience of rural college community at closure in its confusion and wonder. Ala Hendry et al. (2018), we challenge the use of theory/method capturing the protean nature of human experience. Ours was a little college. When a board of deep-pocketed trustees closed it, we fought, cajoled, pleaded, and cursed. And lost. What unfolds is a story of disempowerment in a broader narrative of power loss spanning a culture. We wove strands our stories with stories of other rural college closures. Creating connection, becoming storied, we find and express meaning. The framework is anchored in narrative-as-research and narrative as a way of challenging the dominant methodological impulses in the epistemologies and ontologies leading to small college closure.

Authors

• Josh Montgomery, Northland College

• Dani O'Brien, Northland College