Exploring Rural Teachers’ Sociocultural Influence, Curriculum Choices, and Students Glocal Worldview in North America and Eastern Europe: A Mid-Pandemic Context

• In Event: What did we learn from the national/global crisis? What should we do differently?

Proposal

In this mid-pandemic, qualitative study, I sought to understand how rural teachers in Appalachian Ohio, West Virginia, and North Karelia, Finland navigate the sociocultural influences of their upbringing, demonstrate those influences in their lessons, and shape their students’ senses of glocal (i.e., local to global) worldview. Teachers in all three areas sought to increase equity and workforce-oriented social skills in their local communities through their classrooms. Simultaneously, they had to battle their own engagement in colonial and post-colonial era mindsets, making the process a slowly-growing change throughout the educator’s careers. In the middle of a global pandemic, over 25 teachers with teaching experience that ranged from 5 to over 20 years, contributed their voices to continue the work of filling the literature gap of understanding the perspectives of rural educators in our ever-connecting world.

The central question of this study was: How do experienced, public education teachers in rural Finland and the United States of America (USA) perceive the ways they use their sociocultural background to influence their teaching curriculum and their students’ glocal (i.e., local to global) worldview? The conceptual framework I used in this study fuses Vygotsky’s Sociocultural Theory, Cooperrider’s Appreciative Inquiry approach, and the Hodges’ Health Career Model—a glocal framework designed to provide professional development in the medical field. As a comparative case study, I compared North Karelia Finland with Southeastern Ohio, USA and North Central West Virginia, USA. I collected data through initial, individual interviews, curriculum document analysis, and follow-up focus group interviews. Due to the COVID-related safety guidelines at the time and in each country, all interviews were conducted virtually. I used invivo and lean coding methods to form coding categories and themes, bridling my own experiences and thoughts as separate from those of my participants in my researcher’s journal. Finally, I employed a transactional approach to ensure the authenticity of the data via member checking, triangulation, and peer debriefing. Based on the findings and implications of the data, in this presentation, I list specific recommendations for educators, educational leaders, policymakers, and teacher preparation programs with glocal connection in mind.

Author

• Claire K.G. Ramsey, Building Bridges to Careers