Rural educational justice demands reconstructing educational structures, includingteacher preparation programs. With federal funding from a Teacher QualityPartnership grant, we rebuilt a Master of Arts in Teaching pathway program fromthe ground up, using a co-teaching residency model and a core framework of ruraleducational justice practices. With goals of establishing a healthy racial climate,building the racial literacy and culturally responsive teaching capacity of theteaching resident and mentor teacher teams, and fostering rural humanizingcommunity spaces designed to cultivate genius, joy, love, intellect, and criticality(Muhammad, 2023), the first two years of the five-year grant are the subject of thistheory-to-practice analysis. Utilizing a school-university-community collaborationapproach, we identified, placed, supported, and mentored teacher residents in aplace-conscious approach to the rural, racialized communities and contexts inwhich they teach. The purpose of this article is three-fold: (a) to contextualize theeducational inequities and opportunities that exist in the rural Southeast BlackBelt, (b) to present our rural educational justice teacher education framework,curriculum, and processes to members of the field of rural education, and (c) toshare emerging themes from our experiences creating a teacher educationprogram for rural educational justice. What we offer is not yet an exemplar.However, it provides theoretical foundations, an ambitious curricular framework forrural teacher education, and an analysis of lessons learned.
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Novak et al. (2024) studied this question.