The proceedings consist of the entire major addresses of Senator Nancy Landon Kassebaum, Steve Miller, and Walter Turner, and abbreviated versions of 29 other papers or presentations. The materials deal with a variety of rural-focused topics: women (Evelyn Hausmann); teacher career ladder plans (Paul Burden); inservice (Robert Norton, Myron…

The paper describes the Rural Special Education Preservice Project which is intended to increase the number of appropriately certified teachers in rural districts and special education cooperatives in Kansas. Problems in the state include a shortage of special education teachers, increased numbers of students qualifying for special education, high…

A free university is defined as a community learning center that connects people who want to teach or learn with resources to meet their needs. The free university for Man, located at Kansas State University in Manhattan, is described. (MLW)

Recent college graduates (N=162), teaching in schools of 600 or fewer students, rated the importance--to success in teaching--of 45 areas of college studies. Only two areas were rated below the mid-point on the scale of importance. Oral communications, discipline, classroom management, teaching major specialty, and motivating students were rated…

Rural teachers have few opportunities to learn specific strategies for developing computer literacy among boys and girls in their classrooms. This paper describes an inservice program for rural Kansas teachers that taught skills such as programming, software evaluation, word processing, building a database, and creating lesson plans that involve…

In an effort to draw together a program response to needs of those preparing to teach in rural/small schools, a review of literature is provided, which concludes with an indepth look at a 1982 research project conducted on the topic. It investigates how important some 45 areas of college studies are to success in current teaching assignments of…

A successful teacher induction program developed by Emporia State University and implemented in 20 small rural Kansas school districts uses a seminar format that promotes reflection on teaching practices and collegial interchange. Program structure and participants, seminar purposes and content, and program outcomes are discussed. (SV)

The Preservice Early Intervention Project of the Associated Colleges of Central Kansas (ACCK) was designed to recruit highly promising students into the preservice specialization in Early Childhood Special Education and to give them competencies from multiple disciplines to appropriately serve infants/toddlers with disabilities or developmental…

This videotape transcript describes Kansas State University's Alternative Teacher Preparation Program for Rural Citizens Seeking a New Career. Three related problems affect education in the Plains States--the devastated rural economy, limited career opportunities in rural areas, and the shortage of teachers of selected subjects in small rural…

Music, education, and community and the interactions among these three factors in Kansas during the 19th century offer an opportunity to study the role and function of music education in a sociocultural context. From 1824-1899, 16 Catholic missions were opened in Kansas for American Indians. These schools used music as an adjunct to academic…

This book depicts the lives of women who taught school in the late 19th and early 20th centuries on the prairies and plains of Iowa, Kansas, and Nebraska. The book is based on the narratives, letters, and diaries of 96 schoolwomen and on interviews with living pioneers, memoirs, school reports, photographs, and other documents. Part 1 includes…

This Annual Report of the Secretary of the Interior for the Fiscal Year Ending June 30, 1937 includes the annual report from the Commissioner of Education. The Commissioner's portion of this report is divided into several sections. The first section discusses: (1) In Public Schools; (2) Conservation Education; (3) Curricular and Other Interests;…

Conference papers are clustered into three major categories: background--the past and future; current issues in rural and small school education; and individual and group roles in rural and small school education. Papers in the first category provide an overview of the basic changes in rural education, project a picture of rural education in the…