Your lesson, should you choose to accept it, is to explore the perspective of an educator who researched and taught in rural schools.  The special agent assigned to help you with this task is Casey Jakubowski, of Watervliet, New York.

As someone who grew up in a suburb 20 minutes from Vancouver, the third largest city in Canada, and now lives in a suburb 20 minutes from Seattle, which comes in at a respectable 18th place for largest US cities, my ideas about how 1 in 5 Americans and Canadians live and learn have been informed primarily by media and stereotypes.  Thankfully, Casey Jakubowski was kind enough to talk to me in May about the reality of teaching in a rural district.  His main point, that rural and urban education is more similar than different, came up and again and again as we discussed standardized testing, the value of relevance for students to be engaged, and how parents just want the best for their children, regardless where they live.  

In this episode we discuss:

• What media narratives and stereotypes get wrong about rural education

• The importance of community, and how to harness this for meaningful and relevant units

• Understanding parental expectations, navigating ideological clashes, and looking beyond standardized tests

Links:

• Buy Casey’s book

• Explore his website

• Follow him on LinkedIn

• Follow him on Twitter

Scholars mentioned:

• Robert Wuthnow author of The Left Behind: Decline and Rage in Rural America

• Paul Theobald of the Rural Schools Collaborative

• Cat Biddle of the Rural Vitality Lab

• Amy Anzano who tweets as @ruralprof