Michael Corbett

Rural Education and Out-Migration: The Case of a Coastal Community.

In this article, I report on findings from a case study examining the relationship between formal education and out-migration in a Canadian coastal community from the early 1960s to the late 1990s. Although high rates of village-level out-migration were chronic, most migration trajectories were short-range. Contrary to large-scale quantitative analyses of rural depopulation, I found a geographically stable population and persistently low high-school graduation rates among those who stayed in the proximal area. In the analysis of educational attainment and migration, schools served their traditional role of sorting and selecting youth for out-migration.

Disaggregating student resistances: Analyzing what students pursue with challenging agency

In this article, we look into student agency which challenges the existing structures and find that students assume such agency for a purpose: there is something they pursue instead of just resisting something. We raise some critical questions about the concept of resistance in educational thought based upon findings from two dif-ferent qualitative research projects: one in Arctic Finland; and the other in coastal Atlantic Canada. In our research contexts, we have found that students pursue re-storation as a means of self-regulation, relevant knowledge and trust in their own terms, and also pursue dialogue in which they are considered to be relevant actors. We conclude that the concept of resistance should only be used for intentional resistance, and that when there is such resistance, it should be considered to be a sign of seriously dysfunctional school environment which we conclude can best be addressed by place-sensitive, dialogical approaches to pedagogy and curriculum.

Standardized individuality: cosmopolitanism and educational decision-making in an Atlantic Canadian rural community

With the rise of network society, consumerism, individualization, globalization and contemporary change forces, students are pressured to both perform well in standardized academic assessments while at the same time constructing a non‐standard, unique project of the self. I argue that this generates a particular set of place‐based tensions for rural students. The paper analyses data from a three‐year study of youth educational decision‐making to explore the tensions between place‐based habitus and the mobility imperative in formal schooling.

Towards a rural sociological imagination: ethnography and schooling in mobile modernity

In 1959, C. Wright Mills coined the phrase ‘the sociological imagination’ to offer a critical assessment of a discipline he saw descending into a technical or abstract empiricist practice that he feared would ultimately deepen human alienation and oppression. Mills positioned the sociologist as a careful, critical scholar working in the space between biography and history. In this paper, I offer a meta-ethnographic analysis of several recent critical ethnographies in the rural sociology of education using my own experience as a rural education ethnographer to frame the analysis. I argue that critical ethnographic work is crucial to developing educational analysis that is attuned to the nuances of place and the kind of metrocentric analysis that effectively ‘traps’ rural places in larger structural educational reform narratives.

No time to fool around with the wrong education: Socialisation frames, timing and high-stakes educational decision making in changing rural places

Abstract There have been as yet few qualitative analyses of either the lives of rural youth or their schooling in North America. While urban or suburban sociologies of education have focused heavily on the social mobility of youth, rural sociologies of education have focused on the geographic mobility of youth, typically out of rural areas. Indeed there have been a number of studies of youth migration from rural parts of North America, but these have almost exclusively focused on national or regional data sets. This study uses mixed methods in order to understand the interplay of structure and agency linking postsecondary decision making for rural youth and their families with the broader transformations at the structural level. Using semi-structured interviews and ethnographic observation, and drawing theoretically on the work of Pierre Bourdieu, this paper analyses decision-making frames employed by families in a coastal community to understand and navigate the increasing demand for formal education their children face in changing rural communities.

The Ambivalence of Community: A Critical Analysis of Rural Education's Oldest Trope

The concept of community has been central to the discourse of rural education for generations. At the same time, community has been and continues to be a deeply problematic concept. I begin this analysis with Raymond Williamss characterization of the idea of community as a uniquely positive concept, arguing that this framing is, as Williams pointed out, deeply problematic. This paper interrogates the idea of community and looks at the way it has been used historically in rural education as well as some of the ways that it is understood and used in educational, social science, policy, and governance discourses today. In this analysis I draw on the foundational communitarian analysis of American social thinkers Paul Theobald and Robert Putnam as well as on Williamss critical analysis of rurality and community. I argue that effective rural educational policy today needs to problematize the idea of community and develop it in ways that avoids playing into nostalgic and retrogressive notions of the rural. This argument is based on a conception of place that keeps in focus multiple and complex understandings of emerging postproductivist rural spaces.

Reading Lefebvre from the Periphery: Thinking Globally About the Rural

The term “rural” has a great deal of baggage about which a great deal has been written. One key component of this baggage is the sense in which rurality is somehow a local, placed, and concrete natural phenomenon which is set off against abstract, fluid, mobile, and significantly, cultural ideas which are central to most conceptions of globalization. The idea of receding ruralities and ascendant cities is a central trope of this discourse. This paper draws on narrative analysis of my own standpoint as a person who lives rurally, who conducts primarily qualitative research in rural places, and yet who teaches and does research that attempts to understand rurality at a conceptual level within the ambit of spatially diverse and distributed change forces which are trans-local in nature. I argue, using Lefebvre’s complex, multilayered conception of the production of space and Lacan’s three psychoanalytic orders that constructions of rurality need to be understood and rethought in complex ways that engage with both contemporary developments in social theory and with the massive and consequential movement of people, goods and services around the globe. I argue that my own practice as a teacher and educational researcher at a small rural/regional university attempts to problematize established and emerging power relations, suggesting the need for more engaged, relational and sensitive rural education scholarship and more spatially sophisticated teacher education practice.

Rural youth out-migration and education: challenges to aspirations discourse in mobile modernity

ABSTRACT We argue here that critical educational scholarship is crucial to developing educational analysis attuned to the nuances of place, mobility, and change in rural locations. Critical sociological analysis, we argue, can also nuance and complicate simplistic portrayals of rural communities and their social, economic, and cultural character. Two central narratives in rural education today relate first, to the economic and social problems faced by challenged ‘left behind’ communities faced by depopulation and restructuring, and second, ‘boomtown’ communities that experience rapid infusions of wealth and population. We offer two linked case studies from Australia and Canada that draw on what we call a rural sociological imagination to interrogate how education is framed in contemporary convergences of history and biography in rural locations. These framings complicate and even confound meritocratic and human capital assumptions that underpin contemporary educational policy discourse, particularly as it relates to rural education.

Rural education and literacies: An introduction

This volume explores the relationship between literacy studies and rural education, expressly from a transnational perspective. It is worth clarifying, at the outset, what we are dealing with, in bringing together not only two quite distinct fields of scholarship but also researchers from a range of countries, with contributors from Australia, Canada, the United States, and Finland. First, we see the need to take into account the possibility that there may be quite different ruralities in play, but also, conceivably, quite different literacies. Indeed, it seems highly likely that there are, across and within national contexts, differing constructions of the rural, as well as different manifestations of rurality, depending in part on geography but also on culture (Donehower, Hogg, and Schell 2011, p. 10). Second, what counts as literacy, and also literacy studies, needs to be (re)articulated, and made explicit. This is because there may be distinct affordances in different scholarly cultures and different educational systems, from primary schooling right up to graduate work and beyond. Different things are imaginable or intelligible, according to standpoint, and acknowledgment of the now thoroughly globalized nature of academic inquiry, including that associated with both literacy studies and rural education. Hence, there are different rural imaginaries evident across this book, and divergent experiences and histories, despite important commonalities and connections.

Rural Futures: Development, Aspirations, Mobilities, Place, and Education

This piece responds to the content of each of the articles in this issue and raises questions in response to some explicit and implicit themes including particularly the way that differently positioned rural youth are “oriented” in the course of their educational experience. These articles are read as accounts of people in place that confound and confront simplistic deficit assessments of educational paths, aspirations, relationships, and purposes in rural space. I suggest that this issue illustrates how rural education scholarship inevitably returns to the particular and to the material, challenging the hegemony of the placeless and abstracted neoliberal vision of educations aims in late modernity. The broad argument is that educational struggles and orientations in rural schools should be understood in relation to the crucial global challenges of sustainability and survival.