Empowering Rural Voices Through Deliberative Mini-Publics

This conceptual paper explores the tension between valuing and listening to community voices, while also providing a space wherein rural advocates and community members can come together to address difficult issues prevalent within rural schooling, through deliberative mini-publics. A multiplicity of reasons supports deliberative mini-publics, but I explore three in particular, the first being that they provide a space wherein an intentionally diverse set of community voices and perspectives can be shared, listened to, and explored. Second, the goal of any democratically deliberative space is to explore multiple perspectives as part of the process to seek solutions that contribute to a common good. Third, mini-publics would allow educational decisions to be contextualized within rural communities. Deliberative mini-publics offer a promising route by which solutions to rural schooling difficulties can be generated through a careful, democratic, and systematic exploration of multiple perspectives within an affected community.