Rural Elementary Teachers and Place-Based Connections to Text During Reading Instruction

Schooling can play a role in bolstering a sense of community, but research suggests that may serve to isolate teachers and students from their rural surroundings. In this qualitative case study, we asked if literacy and instruction supported readers to make connections to their rural setting. We analyzed materials, field notes from classroom observations, and interview transcripts of teachers to describe elementary students' opportunities to make connections to their rural setting. Analysis revealed that commercial provided limited support for making connections to readers' rural backgrounds. Further, although teachers were with rural community, attempts to weave complex connections to place were rare. Findings suggest that fell short of integrating community and world. Rather, rural teacher was source for guiding students to make place-based connections.American schools often ignore students' individual realities, including context of places in which they live (Gruenewald, 2003) and instead embrace standardizing policies such as Common Core State Standards (Calkins, Ehrenworth, & Lehman, 2012) and commercial curricula that comply with state and federal policies. For example, rural and urban schools alike are incentivized to adopt same federal standards to which same commercial textbooks and high-stakes tests are aligned.A standardizing approach to education can be problematic for all schools, but especially for rural schools. Local priorities that focus on community are sidelined in favor of national policies and commercial curricula that generalize rather than particularize students' realities (Bomer & Maloch, 2012). In context of rural education, Donehower, Hogg, and Schell (2007) interpret word standardization as code for erasing differences of culture, race, ethnicity, class and linguistic usage (p. 23). This pedagogy of erasure, a term coined by Eppley (2011), occurs when the students and what they know are erased in favor of standardization and quantifiable result (p. 3). When unique qualities of community, economy, and natural are supplanted by school-centric curriculum (Gruenewald, 2003, p. 646), rural students' academic setting lacks curricular support for connection with place. In contrast, Luke (2003) stresses that in a globalized society students need experiences with text that encourage critical thinking both inwardly and outwardly.Rural schools have potential to help rural students experience literature as threads that weave together community and world. During reading instruction, for example, teachers can help students reflect on school and community by modeling and teaching readers how to make connections between text and place. With a foundational grasp of community, they can lead students in discussions on interrelatedness of home and world. Given extensive reach of curricular standardization, however, rural teachers may not be weaving fabric that unites school and community. Foundational attention to community may instead be ignored as curricular content that students need help understanding. In this article, we discuss how teachers in a rural school scaffold weaving these connections. While we focus on community and teaching readers to make connections to community, overarching goal is for literacy education to prepare students for an interconnected and complex world (Luke, 2003, p 20).Schools, Curriculum, Teachers, and PlaceIronically, schooling, with its focus decoupled from community, may end up marginalizing very community that it is intended to serve (Gruenewald, 2003). Lester (2012), when writing about instructional strategies for rural literacy, points out that students are cognizant of their education's failure to aid them in understanding and appreciating their own community, their place. …