Many teacher educators today will find little difficulty in completing this cloze--but Bob Dylan's understanding of the outsider may not be one that we share in terms of our own experience as teacher educators. Our concern in this paper is to suggest that such an understanding may also be one that we do not often concern ourselves with on behalf…

The Appalachian Math Science Partnership (AMSP) is a project within NSF's (National Science Foundation's) Math Science Partnerships (MSP) initiative. Funded at $23 million over five years, the AMSP involved 51 school districts and nine higher education institutions in Kentucky, Tennessee and Virginia. The AMSP faced two significant challenges in…

Rural America struggles as a socioeconomic entity. While the community college has been an essential response to some of the needs of rural American higher education, the community college mission is not comprehensive enough to provide complete higher education needs. Four-year degree options are necessary for rural America to progress in economic…

As distance education becomes a more common practice in teacher preparation, it is critical that students completing these programs be held to the same standards as students completing traditional university-based programs. The author examined the achievements of students in a preparation program for teachers of children with visual impairments in…

The purpose of this study was to explore the reasons 162 rural area high school students participate in the dual enrollment program. Dual enrollment programs allow high school students to enroll in college courses for credit prior to high school graduation with local school districts covering the cost of tuition. Participants in this study were…

Young people's lives have been directly and indirectly affected by the dynamics of decline in rural Australia. In early 1999, the Casterton region experienced the suicides of two young people. These events led to the funding of a rural youth education and support program at the town's secondary college. The program adopts a multi-layered approach…

China's education system has grown increasingly complex, creating the need for an annual critical review of the education system by China's top scholars. The "Blue Book of Education," as it is known in Chinese, has gained a reputation for offering the most penetrating perspective in China on educational reform and development. In this…

This exploratory study examined the influence of residential background and gender on university student drinking patterns. A questionnaire was distributed to 255 kinesiology and physical education students. Rural students (n=104) were more likely than urban students (n=151) to drink at outdoor parties or in vehicles during their first experience…

Rural America, in direct competition with growing suburban and urban America, has struggled to maintain a high quality of life. Rural out-migration levels are high, as are poverty and illiteracy rates. Rural community colleges have worked to defend and expand opportunities in rural settings, yet face their own challenges tied to resources,…

This research study examines the major obstacles low-income rural youth face in preparing to attend college and how to overcome these obstacles through the participation in an Upward Bound program. The data for this study are from a single-site of the regular ("Classic") Upward Bound program at a public university in a rural New England…

Educators are typically people who have much to offer their profession as well as the communities in which they work. This article analyzes the strategies used to develop a university postgraduate education program that involved input from stakeholders representing different educational systems in regional and rural Australia. The results indicate…

As the first year of the Sixteenth National People's Congress of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), as well as the first year for the new government, the year 2003 witnessed new events and new expectations in Chinese society. The universalization of compulsory education and the elimination of adult illiteracy made new advancements. Secondary…

It is perhaps too easy to suggest that rurality in educational terms has been largely missing from the pages of educational research texts. A search of the past few AARE annual conference papers throws up few papers on this topic; although an issue of "Australian Journal of Education" includes a paper on long-staying rural teachers (Boylan &…

While many efforts to reform high schools target large cities, a similar minority located at the fringes of American culture has been relatively overlooked. Low-income, rural students suffer many of the same social maladies--such as severe poverty and widespread drug abuse--as urban minority children, and they are comparably disadvantaged when it…

This Occasional Paper (No. 5 from the ACCLAIM Research Initiative) offers counsel for studying rural mathematics education directed at the ACCLAIM Center's first cohort of doctoral students. It discusses the scope of rural math education dissertations, motive, design, related literature, putting rural in rural education research, and the need for…