This short paper is designed to serve as a kind of primer for professors interested in thinking through ways to build a rural dimension into mathematics education courses in the interest of squarely addressing the vision and mission of ACCLAIM. Few words, therefore, will be deployed in the interest of establishing an intellectual warrant for the…

The great challenge for rural education scholars is explaining what relevance the rural circumstance might have to schooling, a task especially difficult in the case of mathematics education. This paper argues that the rural lifeworld makes math education rural and suggests implications for research based on that statement. The lifeworld is the…

Rural and urban family literacy programs share similar challenges in helping families work through obstacles to participation, such as transportation and childcare. However, the scope and nature of these challenges and the program management strategies to deal with them differ in rural and urban settings. Some of the most creative solutions to…

This statement abstracts the theoretical framework for the Appalachian Collaborative Center for Learning, Assessment, and Instruction in Mathematics (ACCLAIM). ACCLAIM's mission is the cultivation of indigenous leadership capacity for the improvement of school mathematics in rural places. The mission addresses local organizational ability to (1)…

This paper describes the use of webcasting technology in a personnel preparation program for rural special education practitioners. Emerging technologies offer promising solutions to the challenges of providing accessible and appropriate training to rural special educators. Web-based instruction is especially appropriate for on-the-job training of…

A project was conducted in Pennsylvania to develop a standard set of forms to be used by nonmetropolitan literacy providers. During the project, the project team surveyed nonmetropolitan literacy providers through a first mailing to 90 agencies identified, as well as several intermediate units, with less than one-third of the agencies responding.…

The differences between computer use and gender were investigated at a rural island junior/senior high school with a majority of Pacific Island students. The school is located on the island of Tinian in the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands. During a 9-week period, students recorded the amount of time and what they were using the…

A student in a distance education course, as part of a midterm project, set out to build a Web site that had written communication as its main focus. The Web site, "The Global Campfire," was modeled on the old Appalachian tradition of the "Story Tree," where a storyteller begins a story and allows group members to add to it.…

In most debates about teaching, learning, and research, the spatial context of education is either taken for granted or ignored. But places can be viewed as more than empty frames for social action; they can be seen as both historically constituted by social processes and, in turn, constituting those social processes. This paper aims to restore a…

The essence of the politics of language is the choice of audience. This paper analyzes politics of language and choice of audience in the work of two liberatory educators, Myles Horton and Paulo Freire. Horton and Freire had much in common, each working to create educational processes to benefit the poor and each focusing on liberation for the…

Thirty-eight rural kindergarten students participated in this quasi-experimental study designed to assess the effect of employing daily, sequential phonemic awareness exercises on kindergartners' developmental spelling skills. In September all students were assessed for letter recognition, symbol-sound correspondence, phoneme segmentation and…

Gifted and talented children have cognitive and affective characteristics that set them apart from their more typical classmates. These characteristics may be particularly problematic in rural areas where stability, traditional values, small schools, and self-sufficiency can be at once a barrier and a support. This paper discusses the…

In the popular view, somehow, rural schools often just do not measure up. The world over, rural schools generally get short shrift in the allocation of resources and prestige, their lack of urbanness often a self-fulfilling indicator of deficiency. As a result perhaps, rural students may perform, on average, less well than others in terms of…

General Agent for Alaskan Education Sheldon Jackson's 11th annual report to the Interior secretary on the introduction of reindeer into Alaska from Siberia notes that a number of reindeer were secured from the Ola, Siberia, region for crossing with existent herds. Jackson reports on the herds at Eaton Reindeer Station, at mission stations, and…

In the eighth annual report on introduction of domestic reindeer into Alaska, General Agent for Alaskan Education Sheldon Jackson notes that 1898 saw a government relief expedition to whalers stuck in ice near Point Barrow as well as a government commission sent to Lapland to procure a Lapp colony and purchase a herd of reindeer to transport…