In this paper, we suggest strength-based approaches for the creation of sustainable rural learning ecologies. We have framed the creation of rural learning ecologies with appreciative inquiry (AI) as a framework and argue that it begins from understanding rurality from positive psychology. The premise within AI has been seen to be the shift from…

Rural poverty rises to higher levels than poverty in urban and suburban areas, and rural communities and their schools face greater isolation, which means that families must travel farther than their urban and suburban counterparts to access available services and learning opportunities. Elaine Weiss describes two rural communities, one in…

Rural America is experiencing an era of unprecedented demographic change, as rural communities of color are growing--an expansion that is necessary for keeping rural America thriving. But racial and class inequality divides many rural places, threatening rural students' education and rural communities' well-being, and the current pandemic is…

School and community interaction is an important topic in education, as evidence suggests that communities that value their local schools engender more positive long-term outcomes and a strengthening of the social capital for the students from those schools. Although school and community interaction has been explored from the schools' perspective,…

Small places are not devoid of opportunities nor of successful programs to equip them for the future, despite perception to the contrary (West, 2013). This paper considers career education in the context of rural places in the modern globalised world. The paper introduces the "Pathways to Success" project, involving more than eighty…

Career Technical Education (CTE) can provide an on-ramp for rural learners to access meaningful, high-wage careers while simultaneously strengthening the talent pipeline to meet regional labor demand. Yet rural learners all too often face an uphill battle when it comes to accessing high-quality CTE. Scarce resources, limited regional employers and…

This research examines national data and investigates the nature of provincial education in Australia, with a particular focus on students attending schools in isolated areas. Numerous government reports and research findings have acknowledged a range of issues regarding the academic performance of students from "rural" to describe the…

Rural students are often overlooked when it comes to education policy reform. However, the majority of rural students in nearly half the states are from low-income families, generally earn lower scores on standardized high school assessments, lack access to rigorous coursework, and attend college at lower rates than do students from non-rural…

This study documents the experience of an Asian woman faculty in the rural Mountain West as it relates to difficulties teaching predominantly White preservice teachers about the importance of diversity and social justice to prepare them adequately with skills and materials for their P-12 classrooms in a rapidly changing world. The current…

The quality of rural teachers is a key factor affecting the quality of rural education. A better understanding of rural teachers is the basis for strengthening their development. It is possible to obtain a more holistic understanding of rural teachers' work and life through their identity. Based on a wealth of case-based information, rural teacher…

The urgency of the issue stated in the article is stipulated by the contemporary requirements to rural schoolchildren education, i.e. rise in its availability, quality and degree of specialization. The Federal State Education Standards have set an urgent, but at the same time challenging task to reach not only subject but also meta-subject and…

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…

We argue here that critical educational scholarship is crucial to developing educational analysis attuned to the nuances of place, mobility, and change in rural locations. Critical sociological analysis, we argue, can also nuance and complicate simplistic portrayals of rural communities and their social, economic, and cultural character. Two…

This paper provides initial evidence of the effectiveness of an educational program in a Tasmanian regional community that has experienced ongoing industrial restructuring. In response to these changes, community and civic leaders adopted a multifaceted strategic plan to address employment needs and opportunities. Part of this plan involved…

This research utilizes a natural experiment design to explore geographical differences in Early Learning Development Standards (ELDS) completion amongst registrants, both before and after an online delivery option is made available. Registrants were geocoded by workplace, and the employment zip code serves as a clustering variable. Spatial…