This quantitative research study sought to examine the differences in retention and degree attainment for college students depending on their home locale and the location of their institution of attendance. Students were divided into four groups: rural students who attended a rural institution, rural students who attended an urban institution,…

Utilising a social constructivist lens, this study explores how students from rural areas constitute and negotiate their identities in the context of an urban South African university. Much of the research on rurality in South Africa has focused on rural areas as places, and not on the people occupying them. This qualitative study employed a…

Rurality in education research is a function of the size of the school, the distance of a school in relation to urban areas, and factors within each school that may differentiate the school community based on geography. Distance matters. This study finds variation between rural communities at different distances from an urban center and…

Since the expansion of higher education, many rural students in China managed to enter urban universities. However, migrating across layers of structural constraints, those rural students faced dramatic transitions and challenges in the urban university. Drawing upon 50 rural students' narratives about their educational trajectories, I find that…

This paper explores learning trajectories in becoming 'rural women' in Sweden, by using a biographical and socially-situated learning perspective. The data is based on in-depth biographical interviews with three young women who moved between rural and urban areas, and finally decided to return to a rural area. The findings show three learning…

I conducted this study to determine if rural scholars faced unique challenges as applicants to medical schools. I created a 34-question, novel survey, "Challenges of Medical School Applicants," and broadly distributed it to medical schools across the country. I collected and analyzed a total of 178 responses. Rural and urban cohorts were…

This paper examines how the rural identity of teachers shapes their teaching practices. It found that rural out-migrant teachers' re-storying of their (non)rural identity influenced their beliefs surrounding the inclusion of rural stories in their reading instruction. They faced challenges in recognizing rural stories as worthy of teaching, in…

This article focuses on the reform-driven efforts of three elite White women from Athens, Georgia, during the progressive era. Laura Blackshear, Mary Ann Rutherford Lipscomb, and Sarah Hunter Moss were pivotal in the creation and development of the Tallulah Falls Industrial School, which aimed to educate children in the North Georgia mountains…