Book Review: Qualitative Research Design: An Interactive Approach (2nd ed.):

Edward W. Soja, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2010, xviii+256 pp., indices, $24.95, ISBN 978-0-8166-6668-3 (paperback) The main argument of this book is that the spatial dimension has...

Seeking Spatial Justice

Some previous histories of southern education, such as Charles W. Dabney's
classic Universal Education in the South, slighted the role of American
Americans in shaping their own education. James Anderson's new book, the
best single volume on black education in the post-bellum south, commits the
opposite error. Anderson exaggerates the power and autonomy of southern
ex-slaves during Reconstruction and of southern blacks in general during the
Jim Crow era, and correspondingly underemphasizes the significance for their
education of the efforts of former free people of colour, northern blacks and
whites and white southerners. While meriting praise for its uncovering of the
role of ordinary people struggling to improve their educational lot, Anderson's
revisionist book almost wholly excludes electoral, legislative and administrative
politics. The exclusions and lopsided emphases make it nearly as one-sided
and incomplete as the white-centred, bureaucrat-dominated history that
it seeks to replace.

The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860-1935 [Book Review]

American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass. Douglas S. Massey , Nancy A. Denton

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Learning to leave: The irony of schooling in a coastal community

Recent mass closings of schools have rocked cities across the United States. Though these urban closures—and widespread community protests—have made headlines, rural schools have also long experien...

Rethinking the School Closure Research: School Closure as Spatial Injustice:

The college-going rates of rural students lag behind those of more urban students, a gap likely due, in part, to rural students’ lower educational aspirations. These lower aspirations appear to be tied to the dilemma that higher education presents for many rural students: whether to remain in their rural home, working in traditional trades and industries that do not require a college degree, or to leave in pursuit of an education that is often the first step toward an adult life lived away. This study seeks to better understand this dilemma by examining the messages that rural, first-generation students receive about the value of higher education. Drawing upon interviews and observations, it shows that high school guidance counselors, college admissions officials, and the staff of community-based college aspirations organizations adopt a strikingly consistent message: they cite struggling rural economies in their argument for the necessity of a practical degree for all students, one that can be easily lev...

College Talk and the Rural Economy: Shaping the Educational Aspirations of Rural, First-Generation Students

In this article, Mark R. Warren, Soojin Oh Park, and Mara Casey Tieken explore the training and development of community-engaged scholars in doctoral programs in education. Community-engaged scholars working in the field of education collaborate with families, teachers, and communities to support their efforts to address educational inequities, marking an important way that researchers can promote social justice in public education. Yet these collaborations require particular skills and orientations of researchers, which traditional models of doctoral education are not designed to develop. Additionally, much less attention has been paid to the process of training and equipping emerging community-engaged researchers. This article presents the findings of a self-study of a research project designed to build among doctoral students the skills, dispositions, and commitments of community-engaged scholarship. The authors argue that by fostering collaborative learning and creating a community that embraces proje...

The Formation of Community-Engaged Scholars: A Collaborative Approach to Doctoral Training in Education Research.

This analysis recounts and examines the history of American public education, focusing on the experiences of poor urban and rural students of color. Using the lens of critical race theory, it suggests that educational inequity is not just raced and classed but also spatialized—that is, embedded in and maintained through geography. The mechanisms of this spatialization similarly disadvantage rural and urban schools serving poor children of color, and educational reforms have failed to dismantle the relationship between inequity and geography. Offering a clearer understanding of today's inequities, this analysis shows that these schools should be seen less as opposites than as allies with a shared interest in expanding educational opportunity across geographies.

The Spatialization of Racial Inequity and Educational Opportunity:Rethinking the Rural/Urban Divide.

The rural America of today is fundamentally different from rural places and communities of decades past. Crop dusters now swoop across thousands of identical green acres, and wind towers slowly spi...

Mara Casey Tieken

Papers

Rethinking the School Closure Research: School Closure as Spatial Injustice:

College Talk and the Rural Economy: Shaping the Educational Aspirations of Rural, First-Generation Students

The Formation of Community-Engaged Scholars: A Collaborative Approach to Doctoral Training in Education Research.

The Spatialization of Racial Inequity and Educational Opportunity:Rethinking the Rural/Urban Divide.

Rural Aspirations, Rural Futures: From “Problem” to Possibility