Policies of dispersal are increasingly favoured internationally for the resettlement of refugees and asylum seekers. With forty percent of the world's forcibly displaced people being school-aged children, the dispersal of refugee-background people into regional areas means that rural schools are central sites of community response to refugees.…

Using a collection of settler family letters to the Elementary Correspondence School (ECS) in British Columbia, the first provincial government--supported "schooling by mail" arrangement of its kind in Canada, I highlight the efforts of rural families to secure an education for their children in the period between the First and Second…

This paper reports on a naturalistic research project that was conducted in response to the educational concerns of the coastal rural communities of Labrador Straits. The research project investigated the current provision of education available to the children and the youth of these communities and found that due to declining population, changing…

In many school districts, rural life in British Columbia continues to be a geographic and economic fact. Delivering equal school services and ensuring equal educational opportunities to areas with thinly scattered populations continues to be a challenge for the provincial government and school districts. Rural schools offer many positive benefits…

Little attention has been directed towards post-secondary education in rural spaces, instead conceptualising university study primarily as an urban phenomenon. Challenging dominant conceptions of rural areas as backwards, conservative, poverty stricken and isolated, this article investigates the unique opportunities associated with rural…

A challenge for contemporary rural educators (especially teachers) is how to imagine rural education in a way that is not entirely focused on defining the rural as a problems space or as something simultaneously left behind by history and outmigration. Problems of community economic development come into the picture when we attempt to imagine…

Despite the existing research on rural education, rural teaching, and pre-service rural practicum placements, there is little research on the experiences of beginning teachers in rural schools. The purpose of this study was to explore the experiences of Saskatchewan beginning teachers who obtain employment in rural or northern schools. Eight…

The history of online learning at the K-12 level is almost as long as its history at the post-secondary level, with the first virtual school programs beginning in the early 1990s. While these opportunities were designed as a way to provide rural students with access to more specialized courses, as opportunities have become organized into virtual…

In my book "Learning to Leave: The Irony of Schooling in a Coastal Community" (Corbett, 2007) I make the claim that there is a deep and established connection between formal education and mobility out of rural areas. The book reports on a study undertaken in a coastal community in Atlantic Canada focusing on the educational and life…

The main purpose of this design-based research study is to examine the effects of an inquiry-based learning environment, with the support of videoconferencing, on both rural and urban secondary students' mathematics and science learning. An important aspect of this learning environment is the use of videoconferencing to connect classes with…

Australia and Canada are large countries with small populations relative to their size, in which a not inconsiderable number of citizens live beyond major centres of population. In both resource-based economies, the provision of quality education in rural schools is an important part of the national social and economic infrastructure. This article…

This study examined the congruence between the priorities of the Manitoba Government's "Kindergarten to Senior 4 (K-S4) Education Agenda for Student Success" and priorities of stakeholders in a rural Manitoba school division, and the division's capacity to achieve them. Capacity included three components for success: Legitimization of…

This article outlines a comparative analysis of three studies (one provincial, and two school division) that examined the congruence between the priorities of the Manitoba government's "Kindergarten to Senior 4 (K-S4) Education Agenda for Student Success" and priorities identified by stakeholders in a rural Manitoba (Canada) school…

Purpose: This paper draws on research which began in 2006 with students in a graduate course on rural education. Its purpose was to find out what graduate students saw as current issues of rural education, how that compared to the literature, and what they thought supporting agencies such as government and universities needed to be doing to…

Over the past two decades, distance education has become a reality of rural schooling in Newfoundland and Labrador. In this article, I provide historical background into the challenges facing rural schools in the province and how distance education was introduced to address that challenge. I also describe how that system of distance education…