Evolving over time, Extension has expanded its programming to meet diverse needs across the nation. In Georgia, UGA Extension operates in all 159 counties, where agents and specialists collaborate to address community needs. Extension plays a unique role in building relationships, conducting needs assessments, and contributing to the development…

Often, migrants relocate because of acute disruption: war, disaster, or persecution. Slower forms of violence, however, can lead to lifestyle migration, at once a response to nostalgia and an unsatisfying present. Some young urbanites in Bulgaria seek new possibilities in heavily depopulated rural settings. While rural revitalization is generally…

This article presents the National Rural Education Association's Rural Research Agenda 2022-2027. In order to determine rural stakeholders' perspectives of research priorities, data collection included 328 surveys, six focus groups with 43 participants, and nine interviews with rural education practitioners, leaders, and policymakers. From a…

Purpose: Rural education research has historically been cast in a deficit lens, with rural places characterized by their problems or shortcomings, as if the way of understanding rural itself is to compare it to nonrural locales. These intransigent and narrow perceptions of rurality hinders recognition of the assets and possibilities of rural…

While place-based pedagogies and place-conscious education have received a great deal of attention in community literacy, these studies have often focused on classroom efforts at engaging students in their communities. This article articulates an extracurricular pedagogy of place through a historical study of a network of creative writing groups…

The close-knit, personal nature of small rural communities results in school and community operating as a single integrated social structure. Useful rural school improvement strategies must, therefore, address needs that are recognized by both the local school and the community and must operate in a style congruent with the local setting. Although…

In this paper, we suggest strength-based approaches for the creation of sustainable rural learning ecologies. We have framed the creation of rural learning ecologies with appreciative inquiry (AI) as a framework and argue that it begins from understanding rurality from positive psychology. The premise within AI has been seen to be the shift from…

School and community interaction is an important topic in education, as evidence suggests that communities that value their local schools engender more positive long-term outcomes and a strengthening of the social capital for the students from those schools. Although school and community interaction has been explored from the schools' perspective,…

There are few studies that investigate rural music educators' lived experiences in relation to "place," particularly from an Ontario, Canada context. Yet in small rural schools, the music program is often seen as the catalyst for interaction and bonding with community as music educators strive to build and foster student involvement and…

MetLife has sponsored and Harris Interactive has conducted the annual MetLife Survey of the American Teacher series since 1984 to share the voices of teachers with educators, policymakers and the public. The series examines significant changes and trends over time, highlights important current issues, and explores topics relevant to the future of…

This article describes how students in rural parts of West Virginia spend up to four hours a day riding buses to far-flung schools, built as part of the state's consolidation drive. As a result, rural communities in West Virginia have fought back by filing lawsuits, electing their allies to school boards, and defeating pro-consolidation bond…

This study examined community adults' conceptions of successful early adult outcomes for rural African American adolescents from 2 low-resource communities in the Deep South. Focus groups were conducted with parents, teachers, and community leaders. Parents also completed semistructured phone interviews. The focus groups identified 2 general types…