In this conceptual article, we posit that Black life matters in the Black Belt of the American South. We connect two current trends in rural educational research--a return to questions of place and sincere attention to race as a crucial conversation in the field--and provide readers with an introduction to Black Geography as a means to inform…

In September of 2020, seven school divisions in Western Manitoba developed a remote learning program to support medically fragile families whose children could not return to classrooms. The coalition of these school divisions, known as the Westman Consortia Partnership (WCP), needed to investigate what beliefs, practices, and strategies were…

This paper presents a partial mapping of the field of rural literacies that has emerged following the publication of Edmondson's "Prairie Town" (2003) and Donehower et al.'s "Rural Literacies" (2007). These two texts presented the idea that rural places and spaces can be used to think about literacy practices in the context of…

This paper brings a rural geographical lens to the study of education and rurality. Two key interrelated notions underpinning Australian educational scholarship on rurality are explored. That is, the concepts of the rural and of community. The adoption and mobilisation of these terms in a large proportion of rural educational research as…

A critical aspect of rural research is carefully defining and describing the rural context. This is particularly important in rural special education research because different definitions of rural may influence resource allocation, grant funding eligibility, and/or research findings. In order to highlight the importance of operationalizing rural,…

Defining rural is a critical task for rural education researchers, as it has implications for all phases of a study. However, it is also a difficult task due to the many ways in which rural can be theoretically, conceptually, and empirically operationalized. This article provides researchers with specific guidance on important theoretical and…

The purpose of this article is to help education practitioners and researchers understand that research about rural education is complicated not only by issues of defining "rural," but also by the often dramatic ways that rural schools differ from each other. We briefly address issues in defining rural and describe rural classification…

In this article the focus is on the relationship between rural location and education outcomes, a field that has not received enough attention either by educational authorities or by educational researchers. Main goals are to argue for an increased focus on rural education and for the need for contextualisation of educational research in general.…

Almost two decades after the demise of apartheid, rural communities in South Africa are still plagued by seemingly insurmountable challenges, with no change in sight for those who need it most. In spite of the many interventions that have been implemented, real transformation remains elusive. This position paper is premised on the notion that this…

This paper explores some of the political and methodological challenges involved in researching rural education. It begins by outlining the situation in Australia regarding the relationship between social justice and rural education. It first describes the disadvantages experienced by many rural communities and presents an analysis of rural…

This introduction presents the case, and sets the scene, for five reviews of research on rural schools and their communities, arguing that educational research in this field is relatively rare, and decreasingly visible despite the significant population of the world's children who live in rural communities and attend rural schools. After…

An explanation is presented about what keeps young men in isolated rural areas. The purpose is to contribute a concrete analysis of habitus as used in educational research. Inadequacies in application of the term are demonstrated in research conducted on school and work by the author in a rural town. An analysis of changes from labour-intensive…

This paper reviews research on small rural primary schools in Finland and analyses it under three thematic foci: the relationship between the local rural school and the surrounding community, the small rural primary school as a learning environment, and the teachers' profession in this context. Over 30% of Finnish primary schools are small rural…

An adequate research base for mathematics learning and teaching in rural areas does not exist. According to Silver (2001), mathematics education research has virtually ignored rural context, even though approximately one third of the nation's population lives in rural areas. Mathematics education and rural education researchers seem to have little…

The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) new classification system for location of public schools and the NCES databases will provide new opportunities for rural education researchers. NCES developed a coding system called "Johnson codes" based on zip codes and Census definitions both of rural and nonrural places and of…