CHAPTER 13
Rural Science Education
A variety of challenges are inherent in bringing together the research literature on rural science education. Perhaps the most significant challenge arises from the recognition that rural science education is not easily defined, and that it is not always easy to discern what is and what is not research on rural science education. In the same way, it has not been possible to create a useful and generalizable characterization of what is a rural school or even a rural place. Characterizations abound; finding agreement among these characterizations presents a problem. This enigmatic quality of ruralness is reflected in the way that popular writers and scholars describe not only schools, but also rural people and the places they inhabit.
Sher (1983) has written that rural schools have recognizable tendencies, such as less specialization, less equipment, and less bureaucracy than schools in non-rural sites. He has found that rural schools tend to exhibit a tendency toward teaching the basics and more reliance on the unique qualities of individual teachers, and are “more familial and relaxed in their operating style” (p. 257). These characteristics suggest that this chapter should begin with a personal story.
My earliest memories are of events on a farm in the southern Appalachian Mountains of the United States that had not seen the arrival of petroleum-powered farm equipment. That equipment had not arrived because the land was too steep, and perhaps because high-cost investment did not fit with a subsistence farming mindset. The type of farming I observed as a child has been labeled Upland Southern Mixed farming (Jordan-Bychkov, 2003) or, more simply, hill farming: “Hill farming evolved into a post-pioneer stability, becoming somewhat more market-oriented in the process. In time, it degenerated into rural poverty … allowing mining, logging, welfare, and tourism to play larger and destructive roles. Eventually the farming system disappeared from the countryside, perhaps about 1950 or 1960, but many vestiges remain” (p. 45).
The idyllic vision of this rural hill-farming culture persists, but the public school reality is the one of extensive poverty that Jordan-Bychkov suggested. In 1975, only 20% of America's rural population either lived or worked on farms (Sher, 1977). Thirty years later, the percentage is smaller still. Like a few people born in the 1950s, I witnessed the end of the era when the fields were worked with only the power from the muscles of horses and people. But I knew that I was in a rural area (though people preferred to call it “the country”) because things like milk cans, horse-drawn mowing machines, and wood-fired cook stoves were still used to accomplish the tasks of daily life, not as items to hold flower arrangements or umbrellas. For many, the distinction between rural and urban has been based in the availability and impact of science and technology.
The main character in Terry Kay's 1976 novel, The Year the Light Came On, growing up outside of Royston, Georgia, in the years just before World War II, also came to understand the distinction between rural and not. He reasoned that the world was divided between the haves and have-nots, based on access to electricity in the home. The Rural Electrification Act would be the vehicle to bring prosperity to all. Again the distinction between rural and non-rural was a correlate of the absence or presence of science and technology.
This distinction persists in some ways for rural schools today. Accounts like the one by Celis (2002), which documented a community's struggle with the conduct of a one-roomed school in Colorado, depict a variety of ways in which ruralness equates to an absence of technology. They depict rural places as pastoral, happy, and pretty, although life there is composed mostly of hard work. Celis's description of a walk from the school grounds into the mountains mirrors the myth of rural schooling from long ago where students living in isolated places walked long distances through difficult weather to arrive at school. Today that myth has many points of identification. On the negative side, it is imagined that the rural school offers the students a deficit education due to issues such as lack of science activities (Stine, 1997) and lack of a consistent curriculum (Amaral & Garrison, 2001). For the teacher, this deficit model of ruralness includes geographic isolation (Amaral & Garrison) and high teacher turnover (Barrow & Burchett, 2000).
Thus the rural school can to some degree be recognized when we are there, but the ability to provide a generalized demographic description of a rural school has grown increasingly problematic with each passing year. Many demographic definitions have been presented over the past 25 years (University of the State of New York, 1992). The U.S. Census Bureau defined rural as “a residential category of places outside urbanized areas in open country, or in communities with less than 2,500 inhabitants, or where the population density is less than 1,000 inhabitants per square mile” (Stern, 1994, cited in Horn, 1995).
One key factor that is often missing from the definitions of rural is the idea of isolation (Sampson-Cordle, 2001). For the schooling and living of a place to be reflective of its ruralness, it must be isolated to some degree from those areas of the world that are not rural. In the United States this rarely occurs today. Mass media, the World Wide Web, and other inlets pour in culture to essentially all sites. The availability of technology is rarely a reflection of geography. Isolation must be largely self-imposed for it to have this impact. Crockett's (1999) study of science education in an Amish Mennonite community in South Carolina illustrated the point. This fellowship-based community lives without television, radio, or computers in the home and school in order to maintain its religious beliefs. Yet at the same time, its members use technologies, including computers, that aid their business endeavors. On the farms, there was widespread use of artificial insemination of cattle. Somehow, using technology in business is not seen as a cultural spigot.
Another factor that may characterize rural children is using education to find a new life beyond the community and home in which they were reared. This contrasts with the description by Tobin and Carumbo (2002) of an inner-city student. They discussed how the obstacles of the inner city frequently present too great a barrier for a child to “crash through”:
If Amirah were to follow this trend and crash she would add to the great divides of US schooling, urban/suburban, Black/White, and female/male. Urban, Black, female, the triple threats, must crash through the oppressive structures that characterize urban high schools to reap the promise of social transformation through science education. (p. 22)
If these are the great divides of US schooling, where does the rural school fit? Schools, whether found in the most crowded inner city or the most sparely settled rural area, have made promises of social transformation. Whereas social transformation can be enacted within short distances of the inner city neighborhood (e.g., a new home in another neighborhood), they typically lie at great distance from the isolated rural home. Thus, the oppressive structures through which the rural child must crash are largely characterized by the fact that accomplishment equates to leaving that physical site a great distance behind. The rural child may also be a member of a minority racial group or be from a family living in poverty, but since he is not seen as one of many who have to overcome the problems of the urban setting, the problems the rural child faces seem more vague, though perhaps more manageable.
In a developing country, however, this may not be true at all. Developing countries have unique issues with regard to the problem of discerning a role for science education in their populations and in their schools. The degree to which those issues mirror the U.S. rural science education is likely a function of the similarities between industrialization and transportation. To see parallels, a look back in history of U.S. schools might be instructive.
Ghose (1982) examined out-of-school science and technology education as a means of achieving rural development in Southeast Asia. His study originated from the finding that the education provided to school children was found lacking. Ghose described the situation in this way: “Formal education was found inadequate to meet the challenge of national development in general and rural development in particular” (p. 19). These inadequacies were summed up in four points: (a) the curriculum is unsuited to agriculture, though agriculture is the primary means of making a living; (b) the curriculum tends to be “bookish in nature” and thus tends to alienate young students; (c) formal schooling tends to be inefficient in areas with high drop-out rates among students; and (d) limited economic resources do not allow formal education to be spread to everyone.
Informal science education has filled the gap in some places. Science clubs and science camps served a rural development role in some areas of Malaysia, according to Ghose (1982). They were a very important complement to formal education throughout Asia but challenging to start in rural areas. In the Philippines, science clubs played an additional community service function. Through these clubs, students conducted “analysis and resolution of community problems through out-of-school science education laboratories” (p. 22). Such clubs were also active in India. Ghose also reported that science fairs played a community service role with the examination of realistic and relevant problems. Agriculture extension was also a force for science education and thus for “modernization” and rural development.
I hope that that this chapter illustrates how the rural science education issues in developing nations identified by Ghose (1982) in the 1980s mirror the story of rural education in the United States. This mirroring happens in two ways. First, there is the idea that science education in rural areas can have a much stronger connection to the community in which the schooling takes place. Nachtigal (1995) suggested that science projects based in the community context of the rural United States can make a significant impact on environmental and business issues of rural locations. Ghose found this to also be the case in the Philippines. Second, the history of rural science education in the United States has shown that, in the early part of the twentieth century, when electricity, good roads, and modern modes of transportation were not widely available in rural locations, students seemed primarily interested in science related to local vocations and phenomena, just as suggested by Ghose for Southeast Asia.
In many ways, this chapter is an update to the volume edited by Otto (1995), Science Education in the Rural United States. That volume covered a wide range of issues facing rural science education, including “[the] status of rural education, research implications, the integration of science within the science disciplines, integration with mathematics and technology, STS, distance learning, sequence which led from the definition and philosophy of rural science education, to the political implications, Native Americans, and other cultures in rural science education” (Otto, p. ix).
This volume also posed intriguing questions about the future of rural science education. The question of greatest significance seemed to be: Does the rural school offer the student a deficit education with regard to science learning? The authors of the Otto (1995) volume seemed to be in agreement that it did not. Individual papers within the volume identified areas of need such as accessing distance learning technologies, integrating curriculum across the school subjects, recognizing the role of place and context of schooling, and attending to the needs of rural science students who are members of minority ethnic and racial groups. The research compiled by Otto began to shed light on these issues, but the need remains for more attention to be focused on rural science education.
OVERVIEW OF THE CHAPTER
This description of science education research in rural schools begins with an examination of historical studies of rural science education. As a guide to the selection of these studies, I have drawn from the digests prepared by Francis Curtis and others (Boenig, 1969; Curtis, 1926/1971a, 1931/1971b, 1939/1971c; Lawlor, 1970; Swift, 1969), as well as other historical sources.
After the historical studies, the chapter moves on to an examination of studies that were conducted around the United States in the 1980s and 1990s to determine and to describe the condition of rural science teaching. In some cases, these studies contrasted rural teachers with other teachers and in other cases they did not. I emphasize in particular one study that examined the conditions of rural classrooms in eight states.
From there, I turn to the issue of what is and what is not rural research in the present-day science education literature. There have been a great many studies that use rural as a title word or descriptor and then simply describe the physical appearance of the school's setting. Representative examples are used to distinguish these studies from those that can more validly be described as studies of rural science education.
Following this, the chapter examines the studies that to date have been documented in the examination of the National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded Rural Systemic Initiative projects around the United States. Although these reports are not by and large published in refereed journals, they do offer insight into the present-day rural school. This is true in part because of the restrictive nature of the definition used for qualifying for inclusion in the Rural Systemic Initiative program.
The next section examines current published research that contrasts the distinctions between rural and other schools with regard to the science taught. Though few in number, these studies do make a provocative statement for understanding what a rural school is and is not in terms of student characteristics.
Science teacher education for rural schools is the theme of the next section. Though limited in scope because of a lack of published examples, this section examines both preservice and inservice science teacher education.
Finally, a summary and suggestions for future research conclude this chapter. In each section described above, I have attempted to include the research from international sources on rural science education, as well as research done in the United States. The future of rural science education research is not as obvious as it might have been in the last decades of the twentieth century. I end by considering the factors that may shape this indefinite future.
HISTORICAL STUDIES
Francis Curtis, and those who continued his work (Boenig, 1969; Curtis, 1926/1971a, 1931/1971b, 1939/1971c; Lawlor, 1970; Swift, 1969), published a series of digests to examine research in science education during the first 57 years of the twentieth century. The studies they chose for inclusion were printed as abridged versions of the original research articles in order to maximize the number included. These abridged reports emphasized findings over motivations and rationale.
Curtis (1926/1971a) described the groups to whom the digests would be of value. His description of the first group, when transferred to the science education researchers of today, was an apt description for those who will read this current handbook: “All workers in educational research, particularly in the field of the teaching of science, who need to have readily available a list of important problems in educational research together with a description of the techniques used in their solution” (p. xiii).
The relative infrequency of manuscripts in the Curtis Digests that dealt with rural science education was a result of a variety of factors. First, Curtis (1926/1971a) asked the National Association for Research in Science Teaching (NARST) membership to supply recommendations of articles for inclusion in the digests. He then asked that same membership to evaluate each article's value for inclusion in those volumes. Research design was an important factor in the evaluation by the NARST membership. My own experience as editor of a historical column in the journal, School Science and Mathematics, suggests that rigorously designed research on rural science education was quite rare. Second, there was probably not a great deal of research of any kind done on rural schools in the pre–World War II era simply because of problems with access, sample size, and efficiency.
An examination of the first digest compiled by Curtis (1926/1971a) revealed essentially no mention of rural schools. The word rural was contained in the title of only one article, and that article dealt with students’ knowledge of agriculture. Many of the researchers stated that their data was purposely collected from high schools in cities. Curtis himself did not elaborate further.
Although not specifically identified as a study of rural schools, one study (Davis, 1923/1926) that was included by Curtis (1926/1971a) dealt with the effect of class size and its relationship to “teaching efficiency.” Teaching efficiency was defined in terms of the proportion of the different grades (A, B, C, etc.) given in courses across classes of different size. This study (Davis) was conducted in schools from “very small to very large” during the 1921–22 academic year. The results were somewhat ambiguous, because although more students in small classes scored A's and B's, the author concluded that, “considering only the percentages of low marks, the best size class for science is large” (Davis, p. 94). About all we can conclude from this study is that class size and school size were on the minds of some researchers. The representation of rural science studies in the first digest indicated it was not on the minds of many.
In the second digest of science education research assembled by Curtis in 1931/ 1971b, an abridged version of an extensive study by Palmer (1926/1931) was included. In this work, Palmer asked teachers, beginning in 1921, to “send in the nature-study questions which had been asked by their pupils” (p. 36). In the five years that followed, the rural New York teachers who participated in the Cornell Nature Study program sent in over 7,000 questions. The most numerous categories of questions, representing over 30% of the total, related to the “habits of plants and animals.” When broken down over grade level, this category of question was always the most prevalent. It seemed clear that the rural school students of that day were interested in things they encountered in their daily life.
It was often the case that research from earlier times served as a mirror for later works. For instance, the needs assessments of the 1980s and 1990s are very much in keeping with an early study reported in the Journal of Chemical Education, and included in the second digest, that dealt with the teaching of chemistry and other sciences in South Dakota. Written by Jensen and Glenn (1929/1931), the study reported the results of research that had used both quantitative and qualitative research methods. In the words of the authors, these were called, respectively, “statistical studies” and “visitational studies.” They (1929/1931) reported:
… some of the outstanding needs of small high schools are (a) a reasonable science program with a definite science sequence adapted to the needs of a given community, [and] (b) an alternation of the science subjects offered in the first and second years of high school and those offered in the third and fourth years in order to reduce the teaching load of the instructors and thus provide more time to prepare daily lessons adequately for the subjects taught. (pp. 330–331)
Also high on this list of needs was “a state law making it impossible for a Board of Education to employ a teacher to give instruction in a subject in which he is not adequately prepared” (p. 331). As with many issues in the history of science education, this has again come full circle with the creation of the U.S. presidential mandate encapsulated in the No Child Left Behind Act (U.S. Department of Education, 2002).
Curtis (1927/1931) conducted a survey of the “scientific interests of pupils enrolled in the ninth grade in small high schools and of adults living in small towns and in the country” (p. 341). Returns were received from 32 Michigan high schools in towns with a median population of 309. A sample of the responses contained an interesting expression of rural and small-town science interests. Physical science, rather than biological science, was found to “predominate,” even though all of the students in the study were studying biology. Small-town and rural girls were found to have “somewhat greater” scientific interests than boys, just as “the range of the scientific interests of these country women is slightly greater than that of these country men” (p. 344). Perhaps the greatest distinction between rural and not was summed up in the finding that the issues of greatest interest to the rural dwellers were those of a “technical” nature. For instance, Curtis found that “a comparison of questions submitted in both studies, shows, moreover, that the rural dwellers ask many technical questions bearing upon horticulture or agriculture—i.e. related to their vocational life—while the city dwellers ask technical questions relatively unrelated to their vocational life” (p. 344).
Research in this vein continued into the 1930s as well. Wolford (1935/1939) conducted a study of persons living in the southern Appalachian Mountains of the United States to determine the appropriate curriculum for an eighth-grade science course. He found that, whereas city schools typically provided teachers with a description of the course of study, “teachers in small town and rural high schools must either make their own … or lean heavily on the adopted textbooks. They usually do the latter” (p. 49). Wolford presented findings related to parental occupations, the students’ planned occupation, and reading interests. The great majority of occupational interests expressed by parents and children related to activities such as “farming, homemaking, and health, industrial, and mechanical problems peculiar to the region” (p. 50). The readings mirrored this interest in local issues.
In a study of “the teaching of biology in the secondary schools of the United States” originally published in the 1940s, Riddle, Fitzpatrick, Glass, Gruenberg, Miller, and Sinnott (1942/1969) attempted to examine all aspects of the teaching of biology. They mailed 16,000 copies of a “rather elaborate questionnaire” to teachers across the United States. However, they cautioned that rural schools and schools of the South were not adequately represented. Apparently the means to find addresses for rural science teachers was simply not adequate, even though 34.7% of replies to the survey were returned from rural science teachers. Given these deficiencies, two results stand out. First, rural teachers reported having “good school buildings” in only 62% of cases, whereas cities reported “good school buildings” in 79% of cases. Second, rural schools reported an average of 36 books on biology available to their students, whereas city schools “reported an average of 150 books of a biological nature” (p. 184).
Johnson (1950/1969) conducted a national study of science teaching in U.S. public high schools in 1947–48. He drew a stratified random sample of the 23,947 high schools with 10 or more students. He found that chemistry was typically not offered in very small schools, but that in high schools with enrollments of fewer than 100 students that did offer chemistry, approximately 25% of the 11th-graders were enrolled. In contrast, physics was much more commonly offered and enrolled about one-third of 12th-graders.
In the late 1960s, a study was conducted to examine the “differences among urban, suburban, and rural children's particular interests in science” (Clarke, 1972) as part of a larger study to examine a variety of factors that influenced elementary school science learning across Massachusetts. Clarke offered a single vague finding regarding the rural and non-rural distinction: “a significant commonality of interests exists regardless of whether the children live in urban, suburban, or rural communities” (p. 135).
Studies of science in rural schools during the first two-thirds of the twentieth century were aimed at creating understanding of a few main issues. Curricular relevance and the nature of science were frequently topics of interest. But the physical isolation of many rural schools, coupled with their small size, tended to remove them from consideration as potential research sites.
The vision of rural as pastoral and happy, yet full of hard work, was alive and well during the first half of the twentieth century. Perhaps this was the time when the daily reality of rural schooling was in the process of becoming the myth. Clearly the negative aspects of the myth—the deficit model of rural education, including the need to alternatively teach portions of the curriculum to reduce teacher work loads, the belief that rural children were interested primarily in the objects of their daily life, and the comparatively poorer quality of buildings—were to varying degrees supported by research. Although there was little research on science education in rural schools during the 1960s and 1970s, in time interest would grow.
RENEWED INTEREST IN RESEARCH ON RURAL SCIENCE EDUCATION: THE 1980S AND 1990S
Horn (1995) noted that rural education in general “enjoyed a new and more positive recognition” beginning in the mid-1970s. Before this time “literally no one in the federal government would claim responsibility for rural education” (Horn, p. 13). Recognition of the need to examine the teaching and learning in rural schools came from a variety of sources beginning in the 1980s. In 1983, U.S. Secretary of Education Bell announced the first policy on rural education (Horn). The policy was labeled the Rural Education and Rural Family Education Policy for the 1980’s and was intended to ensure equal access to funds and services provided by the U.S. Department of Education (USDOE). Horn reported that this policy was announced at the annual meeting of the National Rural Education Association and simultaneously focused attention on both the organization and the problems of rural communities as seen through the eyes of educators.
Although it is not clear whether it occurred as a result of the announcement of the national policy from the USDOE, there was a complementary surge of interest and published studies on rural schools among science educators. The research that produced these reports began in the mid to late 1980s and persisted into the mid-1990s, though perhaps not much beyond. This resurgence led to the formation of a group known as the National Committee for the Study of Options for Rural Science Education (Prather & Oliver, 1991). Much of the research conducted during this resurgence came from needs assessments to determine the status of rural science education.
The largest needs assessment study was conducted by Baird, Prather, Finson, and Oliver (1994), who used a 100-item instrument developed by Zurub and Rubba (1983) and administered to 1,258 teachers in eight states. Nearly half of these teachers indicated their school as being “rural.” Thus Baird et al. were able to conduct a comparison between rural and non-rural teachers. Additional needs assessments were conducted by Enochs, Oliver, and Wright (1990) in Kansas; by Carlsen and Monk (1992) in New York; and by Barrow and Burchett (2000) in Missouri. Although Carlsen and Monk (1992) found that rural teachers have less experience than urban or suburban peers, have fewer undergraduate science courses, have fewer teaching methods courses, are less likely to have a graduate degree, and are more like to teach non-science courses, the teachers in the Baird et al. study (and to a lesser degree in the Enochs et al. study) indicated remarkably similar needs across their school size and location. The top four needs identified by rural and non-rural teachers were the same and were ranked in the same order. These needs were (a) motivating students to want to learn science; (b) identifying sources of free and inexpensive materials; (c) using computers to deliver science instruction; and (d) using hands-on science teaching methods. Within the four highest ranked items, the only dissimilarity came from the higher absolute value of the need for using “computers to deliver science instruction.” Science teachers in rural areas rated this need several percentage points above non-rural counterparts. As might be expected from the historical research on rural schools reported within this chapter, updating “knowledge/skills in environmental sciences” was the first item to break the parallel order between rural and non-rural teachers, taking a higher position for the rural teachers.
On the low end of the need scales were items related to issues of planning and implementing instruction. Both rural and non-rural science teachers gave low ratings to these issues. A few items across the spectrum of topics surveyed did show wide disparities between rural and non-rural science teachers. “Learning more about multicultural science education” had the greatest disparity, with 57.4% of non-rural teachers rating this as a moderate to great need, versus 46.1% of rural teachers. This was closely followed by percentages found for “maintaining student discipline.” In this item, 37.7% of rural teachers rated this as a moderate to great need as compared with 47.7% of non-rural teachers.
In like manner, when identifying the frequent or serious problems in the teaching of science, rural and non-rural teachers agreed on several issues. These included insufficient student problem-solving skills, insufficient funds for equipment and supplies, inadequate laboratory facilities, and poor reading ability. Each of these was rated as a frequent or serious problem by 50–70% of each group of teachers. But several problems produced distinct response rates. Lack of science career role models and too many class preparations per day were seen as much more serious problems by rural science teachers. In contrast, large class size and lack of student interest in science were seen as more serious problems for the non-rural teachers.
Baird et al. (1994), by allowing science teachers to classify themselves as rural or not, gave wide latitude to the constitution of rural schools. This wide latitude mirrors the difficultly of creating a definition of rural schools. The variety of schools included furthers the consequential difficulty of focusing the study of rural science education. Many schools look like rural schools because they are situated in rural places or in proximity to agricultural lands and woodland expanses. But as shown in a variety of studies (e.g., Gilbert & Yerrick, 2001), these rural schools sometimes have student populations bussed from city locations who live in communities much more appropriately characterized as urban. At the same time, some validity to this system of classification is offered by the ways in which teachers rate their problems in the self-identified rural versus non-rural schools. Correspondence was found when teachers who reported their schools to be rural also identified less need for professional development related to classroom management. Likewise, validation of this self-identification of ruralness was established when those teachers also reported a greater need for professional development dealing with computers in the classroom.
WHAT IS RURAL IN A CONTEMPORARY SENSE?
One of the major problems for science educators attempting to review the research on rural education is the definition of what is and what is not rural. In many respects, this is largely an intractable problem. Rural schools frequently have physical characteristics that will be recognized when seen, but do not easily lend themselves to description. Horn (1995) saw it in this way: “The simple fact is that rural people, rural communities, and rural conditions are so diverse that one can find evidence to support nearly any characterization” (p. 3). Thus distance from a city, population density, apparent isolation, availability of resources, homogeneity of population, and similar characteristics are all considered important in some places but not in others. To complicate this factor even further, consider the following examples of research that dealt with self-described rural situations.
In the first example, Bradford and Dana (1996) titled their article “Exploring Science Teacher Metaphorical Thinking: A Case Study of a High School Science Teacher.” Rural was not mentioned in the title but was a school descriptor applied by the authors. In the section of the manuscript regarding the participant, the school was described as being in a “rural school district in an economically disadvantaged part of a mid-Atlantic state” (p. 199). The reader learned no more about the school or the district than that single statement. It is difficult to classify this as rural research, although I do not intend this to be a negative reflection on the quality of the research.
Consider a second example. Gilbert and Yerrick (2001) titled their article “Same School, Separate Worlds: A Sociocultural Study of Identify, Resistance, and Negotiation in a Rural, Lower Track Science Classroom.” This was an excellent study of how learners manipulate the classroom environment in order to “lessen the teacher's demands” for accomplishment and achievement and maneuver the teacher to accept work that was only marginal with regard to the original teacher-stated goals. Yet was this research rural? The researchers posed research questions that have the idea of “rural” at their core. For instance, their first question was: “What are key components of lower track science classroom discourse specific to rural contexts?” But the characterization of the school's ruralness seemed to disappear in the ultimate discussion of findings. Identified by the pseudonym Ridgemont High School, this school was defined as rural by its location, 10 miles from a city of 50,000. This was the only criterion for its ruralness. The article stated that the black students come from within the city limits to the rural site to “rebalance” the racial mixture of the district's schools. A central issue from the findings of the research was encapsulated in a single statement: “Instead of sharing a common discourse, lower track students and their teachers maintain separate discourses that are carved in response to and in opposition to the world view of the other” (p. 594). Did these discourse issues arise from the physically rural location of the school and its contrasts to the “in town” and “in the neighborhood” experience of the students? Quite likely the reader will be forced answer both yes and no. But the discourse issue was not really a rural school issue per se as much as an indication of a difficult mixing of socioeconomic class and racial and ethnic groups.
An older article raised a slightly different issue with regard to identifying rural science education research. Brown, Fournier, and Moyer (1977) titled their article “A Cross-Cultural Study of Piagetian Concrete Reasoning and Science Concepts among Rural Fifth-Grade Mexican- and Anglo-American Students.” The authors’ primary motivation came from the lack of research done with Mexican-American children at that time. They chose the rural school for this study out of convenience, as this school was willing to allow the needed testing. The children of Mexican-American heritage scored lower on both tests given, but the authors did not relate this to their ruralness. We were left to assume that rural schools of the U.S. West were simply where Mexican-American children were found.
Finally, a fourth study, which presented a picture of a rural community and ethnography of science education within this community, made an important point about rural science education research. In an article titled “Classroom and Community Influences on Youth's Perceptions of Science in a Rural County School System,” Charron (1991) set the stage by writing, “Rural communities, like their urban counterparts, are composed of individuals with diverse backgrounds and points of view” (p. 671). These characteristics of individuals over long periods of time created “local universal understandings.” These understandings in turn created community perspectives on schooling and the value of learning; Charron attempted to capture how these understandings “influence children's ideas about science.” Within the study of this rural community, it is impossible to discern how the findings might contrast to a non-rural setting; nor was this the author's goal. We are not able to say in fact that the findings were uniquely rural, but rather were an ethno-graphic characterization of this particular community.
When two local parents were interviewed about the value of science, neither mother could name a single instance where she had made use of science knowledge in her daily life. Likewise, when the learners within this district's schools reported their perceptions of science, characteristics emerged that are common among students from a wide range of locations and school settings. The students perceived that a description of science equated to a “laundry” list of topics, that science was a body of facts rather than a process of discovery, and that the activity of science led to the resolution of one correct answer that all scientists can agree upon. But in one statement there was a recognizable link to historical and contemporary findings from rural schools. Charron (1991) reported that “many students seem to focus almost exclusively on natural history content when discussing science out of class” (p. 684).
Charron (1991) reported that the community, although close to a university community, “maintained a large measure of commercial and cultural separateness” (p. 673). This statement suggested agreement with the condition suggested by Shroyer and Enochs (1987) that the rural schools lie outside the “sphere of influence” of the city. Charron's conclusion that “educators need to first identify community influences, and then build upon them” marks another point of convergence with this story of research in rural schools.
In the examples above, research was conducted and defined as rural, though it is not clear that each study would meet a test of ruralness based on demographic characteristics or governmental definitions. In each case, to the degree it was knowable from the publication, the school and community did not completely meet a set of criteria, including physical isolation, and size needed for identification as rural. In most of these examples, important contributions to the research literature of science education have been accomplished. But are they rural? To answer this question we are left in the position of the teachers in the Baird et al. (1994) study, mentioned earlier, where classification as to ruralness was allowed entirely by self-report. In that case, the researchers found reasons to believe their approach to classification as rural was valid; perhaps we must allow other researchers the same freedom even when we cannot match their classification scheme to any rational typology that used quantifiable statistics or data.
Perhaps statistics and data are the real issue. As has been shown in a great deal of research across the discipline of science education over the past 20 years, qualitative assessments of science education can sometimes supersede quantitative methods for their value of description and communication of understanding. And thus qualitative methods and especially ethnographic explication may signal an end to the long search for a definition of rural education that may no longer exist.
THE RURAL SYSTEMIC INITIATIVE REFORM IN RURAL SCIENCE EDUCATION
The Rural Systemic Initiatives in Science, Mathematics, and Technology Education Program (RSI) were the third in a set of systemic reform initiatives to be created by the U.S. NSF (Russon, Paule, & Horn, 2001). Offered on a competitive basis to governmental, educational, and foundation-based groups, these grants were funded to “enhance mathematics, science, and technology education in economically disadvantaged rural areas through community development activities and instructional and policy reform” (p. 1). Thus the RSI reform was aimed at schools that were the educational institutions for concentrations of rural poor (i.e., counties with at least 30% of the school-age population living in poverty as designated by the U.S. Bureau of the Census; Horn, 2001). As such, the RSI program provided directives to its grant recipients that pointed their efforts toward “policy, leadership, and work force issues by involving communities in creating a comprehensive and sustainable system of mathematics, science and technology education that reflects current advancements in the area” (p. 1).
“Systemic reform” was a descriptive term developed by the NSF to describe an innovation in funded projects from that agency. Bruckerhoff (1998) reported that “systemic reform is the ‘third wave’ in contemporary educational reform” (p. 4) in the United States. Launched as a way to accomplish the government's Goals 2000 objectives, systemic reform was a product of the first Bush presidency and was created to “emphasize the federal government's leadership role in systemic educational reform” (Bruckerhoff, p. 4). The idea of systemic reform was centered on the concept of reforming education comprehensively across a system. And though “system” was defined across a range (e.g., the schools of a district, city, state, or rural region might be considered a system), changing the system was believed to be key to profound and fundamental reform. In practice, the RSI program was one component of a much larger systemic effort that included local systemic initiatives, urban systemic initiatives, and statewide systemic initiatives.
At the heart of the systemic educational reform movement was a set of essential educational elements formulated to describe the range of goals around which the participating educational systems would attempt to change. Operationalized as the “drivers” of systemic reform, and tailored to the rural educational systems involved, these six principles became the force behind the implementation and evaluation of the RSI projects. And yet, these drivers did not always represent what rural educators as well as rural residents thought of as ideal educational goals. In the words of Russon et al. (2001), “the values and beliefs of some rural residents run contrary to the tenets and assumptions of systemic reform” (p. 8). Part of this rift was based in the assumptions of the degree to which the federal government should have any impact whatsoever in rural schools. As Fenstermacher (2002) has pointed out, the federal government must, if we are to have a liberal democratic government, maintain a minimal interest in education. In the United States, the state's role in education is “deeply embodied in American history and heritage” (p. 22).
The six drivers of rural systemic reform cross the spectrum of educational provenance. These drivers were intended to be guideposts or standards about which the progress of systemic reform could be measured. Driver 1 was created to focus efforts on the implementation of standards-based curricula. Included was a companion notion that the assessment of student learning would occur across every classroom, laboratory, or other learning venue. Driver 2 focused reform efforts on the development of consistent sets of policies aimed at accomplishing high-quality science education. These polices included the need for excellent science teacher education, professional development, and administrative support toward the goal of improving achievement of all students. Driver 3 complemented Driver 2 by providing direction to the convergence of all resources, regardless of their source, and the ongoing monitoring of progress in the implementation of reform ideas. The fourth driver sought to provide a directive through which all stake-holders were brought into a single effort. Parents, policy makers, businesses, foundations, and others directed their efforts in consistent support of the systemic reform. Driver 5 was a statement regarding the need to accumulate a body of evidence, both broad and deep, so as to ensure that the program enhanced student achievement. Finally, Driver 6 spoke to the improvement of achievement of all students, including those historically underserved.
In order to create a tool for measuring how the various rural systemic projects were accomplishing the drivers, Horn and his colleagues (Russon & Horn, 1999) at Western Michigan's Evaluation Center created a list of 123 indicators. These indicators were drawn from the research literature of three areas: systemic reform, evaluation of systemic reform, and rural education literature. The indicators were then subjected to a matching process through which they were aligned with one of the six drivers. Using a two-round Delphi technique, for which the Research Advisory Team for the RSI Evaluation project served as judges, there was ultimately an 80% agreement regarding 75 indicators from the original list with regard to their driver match.
This list of indicators was then used as the basis for both the quantitative and qualitative evaluations of the RSI projects. When used quantitatively, the indicators presented a picture of the factors that school stakeholders found most important in the accomplishment of rural systemic reform. Indicators related to Driver 1 (implementation of a standards-based curricula) tended to be rated highly by all respondents (mean = 4.06 on a 5-point scale). Interestingly, the lowest ratings for the importance of this driver came from the stakeholders of the schools of a Native American community. Those respondents in Gila River, Arizona, rated this item with a mean of only 3.68 out of 5. The highest rating was for Driver 4 (administrative support for all persons … to improve student achievement). With an overall mean of 4.13, 5 of 6 site visit locations rated Driver 4 the most important (Horn, 2001).
Within the evaluation data for the RSI projects, there were also indicators of the status of rural schools and the science teaching in these schools. Across the six data-reporting categories, teaching experience showed a progression toward more experienced teachers. The data reported were as follows: less than 1 year, 7.7%; 1 to 5 years, 17.1%; 6 to 10 years, 16.9%; 11 to 20 years, 25.2%; and more than 20 years, 33.1%. These figures did not stray in significant ways from the national averages, though it has been commonly reported that more experienced teachers migrate to urban/suburban districts. Demographics related to race pointed to the distinctive nature of the schools within the RSIs. Overall, just over 26% of the teachers and other school personnel were African American, and almost 70% were reported to be Caucasian/white. At the level of individual sites, wide disparities come to the fore. An eastern Kentucky site in the Appalachian RSI reported 98.6% of its personnel as white. A Mississippi delta site reported that 75.2% of its personnel were African American. Llamas (2000) reported that the Utah, Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico (UCAN) RSI included 46 Tribal Nations as well as historic communities. Within these communities, 53% of students were Native American and 25% Hispanic. A commonality among these communities also was that the sites were home to large numbers of people living in poverty. Although populations within RSI sites were often homogeneous with regard to race or ethnicity, across sites almost all major cultural and racial groups of the U.S. population were represented.
The evaluation of the RSI projects used quantitative measures to assess the impacts of the resources provided. Across the three RSIs that were first evaluated, professional development activities were rated as having had the highest impact. Specifically, the most valuable professional development resulted from those activities that were aimed at changing the way teachers perform. Close behind, however, the districts’ stakeholders rated the impact of new resources and curriculum changes brought to the district (Russon, Stark, & Horn, 2000).
Findings throughout the sites validated the important role of school administrators in encouraging reform. When asked about the factors that facilitated reform, stakeholders reported that district administration and school principals were far and away the most important. Approximately 88% of respondents identified these two groups as the most important facilitators of reform. The existence of state curriculum standards ranked third, followed by the school board, computer availability, and other educational materials. In contrast, the primary barriers to systemic reform in school districts were money, lab equipment, and science materials, followed by teacher turnover, community support, and expectations for students. The other less-mentioned factors included such things as teacher preparation, teacher subject knowledge, educational materials, and other district projects. The three factors with the lowest ratings with regard to putting up barriers were state standards, school boards, and school consolidations (Russon, Stark, & Horn, 2000).
Driver 1: Standards-Based Curricula
In small rural schools, a variety of factors converged to make the accomplishment of the RSI Drivers a reality. In the area of Driver 1 (curriculum-related), small school size and the availability of human resources presented considerable challenges (Russon et al., 2001). The small school, for instance, might have been unable to offer higher level courses in mathematics or science. As Russon and his colleagues stated, these were precisely the courses favored by the advocates of systemic reform. In answer to these concerns, RSI school districts responded by using those tools and techniques available to them. Course “audits” were conducted by the RSI staff to examine the match between curricular/instructional activities of a particular teacher in a specific course and the state-level assessments for that course. At the Appalachian RSI, a web site of standards-based curriculum materials was maintained and supplemented professional development and course audits. A school district on a western Native American reservation created curricula that were not only standards-based, but also culturally relevant. In accordance with the historic farming tradition that has characterized the Gila River Indian Community, members of the community aided the school in creating a garden that was the centerpiece of the school's curriculum. The Appalachian example was clearly a product of NSF resources funneling to the district through the RSI, but the Gila River project probably happened independently of those particular resources.
Analysis of other sites within the RSI projects showed that long-term planning based on standards-based curricula was not possible in any realistic sense. One southern Mississippi county had such a high turnover rate among science teachers that it was impossible to consistently deliver a standards-based curriculum. Other rural districts in states with high-stakes testing programs reported that the curriculum was as much a mirror for the testing program as it could be made to be (Russon et al., 2001).
Driver 2: Consistent Policy
The rural school districts sampled as part of the RSI evaluation ranged across the social and political spectrum with regard to the population from which they were drawn and the governance from which their policies were built. Thus a district's ability to respond to Driver 2 (development of a coherent and consistent set of policies) was somewhat at odds with its strictures. One school district on a Native American reservation consisted of a set of schools that were overseen variously by community, district, tribal, county, state, national, and/or religious governance. Different schools within this single district were overseen by different combinations of these seven, including one school that was governed by a combination of religious and tribal boards (Russon, Horn, & Oliver, 2000).
Driver 3: Convergence of Resources
The third Driver was probably the most successful across the spectrum of RSI districts. The financial resources of the RSIs were used to bring together all resources to support science and mathematical education. The evaluators felt that “RSIs mostly worked to promote the convergence of human resources. This was primarily accomplished through professional development and directed assistance in utilizing state and federal grant funds to support a common effort to improve science and/or mathematics education” (Russon et al., 2001, p. 37).
Driver 4: Broad Support from Stakeholders
Traditionally the belief is that schools in rural areas receive the support of their communities, and clearly some do. But the full accomplishment of Driver 4 (broad-based support from parents, policy makers, institutions of higher education, business and industry, foundations, and other segments of the community) among RSI projects was rarely seen. “Some schools received an abundance of support from parents. Math and science nights were common across the RSIs, and in some cases they were well attended. In other cases, the parents were far more likely to support the football or basketball team” (Russon et al., 2001, p. 38). Likewise, some districts and RSIs were successful in bringing institutions of higher education into their sphere of financial and resource supporters. The Appalachian RSI was notable in its success in creating collaboratives with five partner institutions of higher education (Horn, Oliver, & Stufflebeam, 2000). Other RSIs had more limited success.
The UCAN RSI designed its primary approach for working within the community: “From the outset, UCAN RSI believed and acted on the premise that the ‘community’ as locally defined would best represent the constituents that we wanted to serve. Operationally this meant correctly identifying and working with the unit of change at the local level” (Llamas, 2000, p. 16).
Llamas went on to describe at length the means by which community partnerships and collaborations were formed in the UCAN states:
In a similar vein, RSIs had only scattered success with business and industry partnerships. A few sites within the projects found ways to create meaningful partnerships that resulted in new resources or grants. Ultimately, the evidence related to this Driver demonstrated most effectively that school districts considered the RSIs to be a valuable addition to their pool of resources, but not a universal remedy. Discussions with school personnel showed that it was not always possible to separate the effect of RSI resources from the input of other funded and gifted projects. In some districts, there were many of these “other” projects. (Horn et al., 2000)
Driver 5: Evidence of Student Achievement
The current tenor in the United States and elsewhere requires increased student achievement as the most important justification of funding. But in the rural districts of the RSIs, many problems were encountered in the accomplishment of Driver 5. Although the body of research that had accumulated regarding rural school curricula over the past 100 years suggested the need for local relevance and applicability in science and mathematics study, there is no evidence arising from the RSIs that standardized assessments can measure this. In fact, as Russon et al. (2001) wrote in their summary to the case studies of the six RSIs under study,
There is no clear evidence that standardized tests prepared for mass administration across all school districts in all states are related to the missions and goals of the schools, the focus of the schools’ curricula, or the classroom instruction students receive. Failure to meet the standard for any one of these three conditions would invalidate the results as being a fair assessment of student achievement or even instructional/school effectiveness. (p. 39)
Driver 6: Improvement of Achievement for All Students
In the site visits of the RSI evaluation team, the results regarding Driver 6 were difficult to discern. (This is probably an example of needing to wait a bit longer before reaching a conclusion.) Because the requirements for inclusion in an RSI were that the site be an isolated rural place as well as one with a high number of students qualifying for free and reduced lunch, the ethnic and cultural variability among the students tended to be greatly reduced. In other words, these schools were typically completely or almost completely homogeneous with regard to race and ethnicity. In two study sites, the white students attended private academies, leaving the public schools almost entirely attended by African Americans (Horn, 2000). A study site on a Native American reservation was attended by an entirely Native American student body. Thus within these study sites, almost all students could be described as historically underserved.
So what can be said about the RSI evaluation data at this point in time? First and foremost, the evaluation process is ongoing, and a final report may shed light in places that the formative reports did not. But the idea that a single large-scale project can have a substantial impact on the rural poor school districts of a region that included six states and hundreds of qualifying schools may simply be too much to ask. Regardless of this, the evaluation of the rural sites for the RSI projects is providing an important source of information about the status of schools that hold the responsibility for educating rural students living in poverty.
CONTRASTING RURAL AND NON-RURAL SCHOOLS
Studies that contrast characteristics of teachers or students in rural schools with their non-rural counterparts are relatively rare. A few were mentioned in the previous “Needs Assessment” section. Three other recent studies that examined science education in rural and non-rural schools are considered here.
In 2000, Deidra Young examined the impact of ruralness on student achievement in Australia and the impact of student perceptions of their own academic ability. This longitudinal research was part of the Western Australia School Effectiveness Study. Involving a total of over 1000 students, data were collected during 1996 and 1997 from students in 21 schools representing 106 classrooms. Instruments included a version of the TIMSS achievement test and an instrument to measure classroom climate and academic self-concept of students (Young, 2000).
This study challenged the belief that there was a value-added component of expected student achievement that resulted from the school's special characteristics. Rather, Young (2000) found that most of the variability in the construct of student achievement occurred at the student and classroom levels.
In keeping with typical beliefs about rural schooling, Young (2000) found that “students in country schools [described as both rural and remote] appeared to be more satisfied with their schools. They felt that their teachers were more supportive, friends were more supportive and generally felt safer” (p. 212). However, with regard to achievement, the author concluded:
… while rural differences were apparent to student outcomes such as science and mathematics achievement and academic self-concept, these differences were of no consequence when investigated using sophisticated multilevel modeling techniques. That is, rural students were not disadvantaged by their location. Rather, rural students were disadvantaged by their self-concept. Students in rural schools did tend to have a weaker belief in their own academic ability to perform, irrespective of their actual ability. (p. 221)
In the United States, Simpson and Marek (1988) found a somewhat different result. Building from an assumption that rural students have fewer opportunities for intellectual development, the authors conducted a study to test the hypothesis that “students attending large schools [would] show more instances of understanding … of the concepts of diffusion, homeostasis, classification, … and food production” (p. 363). They found that students attending large high schools developed greater understandings of the concepts of diffusion and homeostasis. However, with regard to the concepts of classification and food production in plants, there was no relationship of understanding to school size.
Simpson and Marek (1988) hypothesized that the difference in the learning accomplishment observed could be due to a variety of factors. One factor that figured prominently in their thinking was that the differences “could be due to a higher percent of students in large schools capable of formal operations; sound understandings of diffusion and homeostasis required students to use formal operations” (p. 372). But they also pointed to occurrences in the daily lives of the students. In the rural schools within the study, Simpson and Marek indicated that many students were children of cotton and wheat farmers. Their experiences on these farms “allowed them [the students] to develop some understandings of food production in plants and prevented instances of misunderstanding from being developed” (p. 372). The idea of the importance of teaching and learning within the local context again was thus a recurring theme.
Two researchers from Utah State University conducted a large-scale study (Fan & Chen, 1999) of the data generated by the U.S. National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988. Overall their results suggested that “rural students performed as well as, if not better than, their peers in metropolitan schools” (p. 31). Their work covered the entire curriculum and included an excellent review of the relevant literature.
Fan and Chen (1999) subdivided their analysis across racial/ethnic subcategories (e.g., Asian/Pacific, Hispanic, Caucasian, and African American), locational subcategories (e.g., rural, suburban, and urban), grade-level subcategories (e.g., 8th grade, 10th grade, and 12th grade), geographical subcategories (e.g. Northeast, Midwest, South, and West), and subject matter areas (e.g., reading, mathematics, science, and social science). The analysis used multivariate statistics to test hypotheses across these many subcategories instead of more commonly applied univariate tests. They showed that univariate tests lacked the power to discern statistical significance between the categories of variable in their data. Ultimately, they concluded: “Students from rural schools perform as well as their peers in metropolitan areas in the four areas of school learning: reading, math, science, and social studies. These results did not support the conjecture that students in rural schools nationwide are at a general disadvantage in terms of the quality of their education, at least, as reflected in their performance on a standardized achievement test” (p. 42).
This study did not allow for the inclusion of “extreme rural communities” because the data was classified according to U.S. Census categories that do not provide that degree of specificity.
RURAL SCIENCE TEACHER EDUCATION
The preparation and continued professional development of rural science teacher education have been the subjects of a variety of research efforts over recent history. These efforts have tended to focus on inservice rather than preservice science teacher education, though there has been representation across the levels. Much of what has been written regarding rural science teacher education and development is not research in the rigorous sense of the word, but rather what might be characterized as documentation and comment. The overall depiction of research on rural science teacher education is and has been one of neglect (Finson & Beaver, 1990; Shroyer & Enochs, 1987).
However, consistent throughout the literature of rural education teacher education is the idea that rural education and the context in which it occurs combine to form a core construct that must always be considered. Science teacher education designed to produce teachers for the rural areas must be cognizant of this issue. Nachtigal (1995) was speaking at least partially about teacher education when he wrote, “Science education in the rural schools, rural student and rural communities [has] not been well served by the mass production, one-best-system of schooling” (p. 116).
Yerrick and Hoving (2003) pointed to the writings of Nachtigal when they suggested that science teacher education for rural students must be cautious not to promulgate ideological positions that promote “injustices against … underserved students” (p. 414). These authors found that effective preservice teacher education that prepares prospective teachers to teach rural African American students in early high school physical science courses could be accomplished through a combination of strategies. These strategies include formal opportunities to make recordings of teaching sessions and conduct examinations of them; collaborative reflection; focus groups with students; “access to exemplary teaching curriculum” (p. 414); modeling alternative teaching strategies; and course readings that are helpful in creating dialogues about common problems (Yerrick & Hoving).
Inservice professional development for rural science teachers was the subject of a study by Shroyer and Enochs (1987). They worked with a group of teachers drawn from a pool of 141 U.S. school districts “outside the sphere of influence of cities with populations over 100,000 and [having] less than 600 students K–12” (p. 39). Their work began with a “needs analysis” recognizing that small schools must identify their unique needs as a first step. The program of professional development continued through “strength assessment” and then to “action planning.” In the action planning phase, the teachers created a plan for implementation as a means to ensure that the reform initiatives were in keeping with the nature of this rural school.
In research on rural schools, it is often true that the rare study that takes a comprehensive look at the entire rural school is particularly enlightening. A study by Scribner (2003) accomplished this by examining teacher professional development in three rural high schools. These schools were identified based on two criteria— small dispersed school populations and seasonally based community economies. Although not specifically about science teaching, the article was highly relevant to science teacher professional development in the rural school. Scribner found that the small rural high schools did not have a departmental context as is found in larger schools. In the absence of these departments, Scribner reported that the most important context for the teachers was the classroom “or at times, their professional community external to the school” (Discussion section, paragraph 2). Interestingly, he also found that in these schools, teachers of “well-defined knowledge bases such as math and science” (Discussion section, paragraph 3) tended to focus their efforts on the transfer of conceptual knowledge. Teachers of other disciplines, specifically identified by Scribner as language and social studies, “used the content of their subject area to broadly address student needs” (Discussion section, paragraph 3). Furthermore, teachers in these schools found professional development that was locally sponsored by the school or district to be of little value, in contrast to the value they seemed to place on state “legislated” support. Overall, Scribner found that teachers were tightly wound into the student-teacher interaction of the classroom and tended to value only the “most practical and immediately applicable knowledge/skill” (Discussion section, paragraph 4) as a means to inform their practice.
These few studies of preservice and inservice teacher education represent much of the research available on science teacher education for the rural school. This paucity of research is a reflection of the field of rural science teacher education. Although there are many college and university science teacher education programs that serve areas that are largely rural, they only rarely serve areas that are exclusively rural. Thus one does not find teacher education programs aimed at producing science teachers exclusively for the rural school, but rather science teachers for the bigger markets.
Consistent themes run throughout these studies of teacher education and development. These themes center on the need for rural teachers to teach science within a frame of reference that consciously builds a curriculum with a cooperative inclusion of community, the unique student and school needs found in that community, and the inimitable capabilities of the teachers found in those schools. The aspects of these themes hark back to the characteristics of rural schools suggested by Sher (1983). Thus science education in the rural school must be constructed from the building blocks that exist in rural schools.
SUMMARY AND IMPLICATIONS
A major chapter in the life of rural U.S. schools has ended with the closing of the ERIC Clearinghouse for Rural Education and Small Schools (ERIC Clearinghouse on Rural Education and Small Schools, 2003). And yet, almost simultaneously, U.S. Secretary of Education Rod Paige announced a new recognition for the needs of rural schools: “too many rural students have not received the high-quality education they deserve… . Although our nation's rural schools may be physically removed from urban areas, they are no longer isolated from policy-makers” (USDOE, 2003, paragraph 5).
Perhaps it is a good moment to ask, what has really happened in rural science education? The 1970s and 1980s renaissance noted by Horn and others (Horn, 1995; Prather & Oliver, 1991), after such time when “literally no one in the federal government would claim responsibility for rural education” (Horn, 1995, p. 13), seems to have run its course. The excitement among a group of science educators, which resulted in the formation of the Committee for the Study of Options for Rural Science Education and the completion of several significant projects (for instance, Baird et al., 1994), has faded. In educational research, such conditions often signal that a rebirth is just around the corner. It is for a new group of educators to take up this torch, if it is to be taken up at all.
Rural science education research has quite often lacked the theoretical sophistication of other work, though the research of Charron (1991) and Gilbert and Yerrick (2001) provides excellent counterpoints to this assertion. Rural science education research has tended to reflect the myth of rural America with its emphasis on pragmatism and resourcefulness. The RSI program made an impact by focusing attention on the areas that are home to the rural poor. It is perhaps here, where a concentration of individuals exists and shares a set of “local-universal understandings” consisting of socioeconomic, political, cultural, and ethnic characteristics, that we find the definable rural place. But so often this definable rural place also faces a harsh reality that is mired in poverty. Thus, there is great need for the people of this place to bring forth any available pragmatism and resourcefulness to address the issues of schooling and especially science education. This is what Prather (1995) meant when he wrote, “The necessities of rural school teaching have made thoughtful and determined risk-takers of many teachers and school officials” (p. 40).
In 1935, Wolford found that rural high schools usually had to either create their own curricula or follow the textbook. He concluded that most did the latter. This was not a surprising finding in the 1930s, or in any later decade. Horn (1995) described the rural school curricula as minimal, including only what is required by the state. In those districts, the observer would expect to see science teachers following a textbook. But what else could that rural district do? Hope has persisted across the past 100 years that locally relevant curricula could be enacted in rural and small schools in the United States and throughout the world. These locally created and locally relevant curricula have been seen at various times and locations as the means to motivate learners and to address needs of the community. But the realities of standardized tests, frequent turnover of teachers, lack of material support, and lack of administrative support conspire to suppress curricula creation and enactment. And yet the hope remains alive. Perhaps best stated by Blunck et al. (1995), “Science education in rural settings may be able to provide the most conclusive and useful examples of successful reforms due to the ability of personal experiences to drive knowledge exploration in real life contexts” (p. 90).
Studies of the teachers of science in rural areas and the students in their schools have suggested a lack of difference between them and their non-rural peers. From the needs assessments, distinctions can be drawn between teachers of rural and non-rural places, but these fade into the scenery created by the similarities. Likewise with students, there are differences to be noted, but the bigger picture is one of similarity. If we look at the individual trees of this forest, we might miss the bigger picture. Clearly and quite importantly, the RSI evaluation has shown that there are unique forests, or at least groves (to fully expend the metaphor) within that sphere that stand apart from the norm where students with great educational needs are well educated. The response to these needs will quite likely come from researchers and educators who have a particular interest in a specific aspect of the rural schooling story.
And finally, where do we leave the question of technology and its potential to bring universal access to knowledge to all persons regardless of location? Finson and Dickson (1995) found that geographic isolation of rural schools became less of a barrier to student learning when distance learning technologies were employed. The World Wide Web offers a distance learning technology a quantum leap above the technologies to which Finson and Dickson referred. The day is quickly coming when the number of books in the library simply will not matter, because all of the important books will be accessed through electronic media. The day is also quickly coming when the substance of the textbook will not be the most important source of the structure of science-based curricula. Computer-based technologies that re-create the curricula with the use of animations, simulations, digital video, and hypermedia, combined with the powerful search capabilities within the World Wide Web, will offer learning opportunities that are truly new and widely available. Whether these learning opportunities are able to capture the relevance of a local community's science issues, measure outcomes with assessment tools complementary to these approaches, and not merely rely on the learner's knowledge of science facts remains to be seen.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks to William Baird and Jerry Horn, who reviewed this chapter. The author would also like to thank Dr. Jim Spellman, who as a graduate student assisted in the search for the research literature reviewed in this chapter.
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