Rowman & Littlefield Publishers Teaching English in Rural Communities: Toward a Critical Rural English Pedagogy

Showcasing the voices, perspectives, and experiences of rural English teachers and students, Teaching English in Rural Communities promotes equity, diversity, and inclusivity within rural education. Specifically, this book develops a Critical Rural English Pedagogy (CREP), which draws attention to issues of power, representation, and justice related to rurality. Based on the assumption that "rurality" is a social construct, CREP critiques deficit-laden stereotypes and renderings of rural places and people that circulate in media, popular discourse, and even education at times. In doing so, CREP opens up possibilities for educators and students to use the English classroom as a space to better understand the complex issues they face as rural people and ways to promote more nuanced and comprehensive representations of rurality. In particular, this book highlights English rural classrooms whereby students examine representations of rurality in literary and media texts; decenter dominant settler-colonist narratives of rural spaces, places, and people; develop understandings of Indigenous perspectives and cultural practices, particularly related to land stewardship; and engage in local outreach to promote inclusivity within rural communities. This book also gives special attention to ways race and racism may factor into literacy education in rural contexts and possibilities for rural educators to attend to these issues. Review As an African American educator who grew up in a rural setting and whose family history is tied to the rural Midwest, I welcome a study like Teaching English in Rural Communities. Petrone and Wynhoff Olsen don't write about rural folks; they write with them and for them in this enlightening work. Offering an approach to teaching English to rural students that helps them to "critically engage" and confront constructions of rurality that demean and devalue their own experiences and identity, this book shows us the ways that rural English teachers are already empowering their students to see themselves as vital and important thinkers, acters, and citizens. In a cultural moment when the rural/urban divide seems as profound as ever and rural spaces are dismissed as nowheres whose only value lies in what they can provide for cities, Petrone and Wynhoff Olsen emphasize a place-based pedagogy that encourages rural students to develop a critical awareness of their own identities, the places where they live, and how both are perceived culturally. Most importantly to me, Petrone and Wynhoff Olsen embrace the diversity of rural experience, highlighting decolonizing pedagogies that recognize the sovereignty of indigenous people and their land and acknowledging the existence of BIPOC folks in rural spaces. Resisting the conflation of whiteness and rurality, this study demonstrates the ways that Critical Rural English Pedagogy can provide a powerful challenge to popular conceptions of rurality through the deployment of a critically-engaged, decolonizing English curricula.--David Todd Lawrence, Associate Professor of English and American Culture and Difference, University of St. Thomas, and author of When They Blew the Levee: Race, Politics, and Community in Pinhook, Missouri Teaching English in Rural Communities comprises first and foremost some great narratives of pedagogies in place. Bringing together theories of critical literacy, race and place conscious pedagogies the authors provide a series of wonderful nuanced accounts of pedagogical practices which attend to who and where people are - teachers, students and the communities. This is a book to share with English teacher educators, teachers and literacy researchers who are deliberately working towards racial and spatial justice and with care for the planet.--Barbara Comber, Interim Dean of Research, Education Futures, University of South Australia and Author of Literacy, Place, and Pedagogies of Possibility Teaching English in Rural Communi