Given recent anti-Queer legislation across the United States and the 16-year gap since "Gray's Out in the Country: Youth, Media, and Queer Visibility in Rural America," this literature review describes the intersections of Queerness and rurality in K-12 educational spaces. Hallinger's process for review provides a framework to analyze…

This study examines the outcomes of non-school internships hosted by two Appalachian Ohio organizations: Rural Action and Building Bridges to Careers (BB2C). As intermediary organizations, these entities work outside the boundaries of formal schooling to address issues of youth outmigration and sustainable community development through high school…

Rural schools and communities across the United States are increasingly diverse--linguistically, racially, and culturally. As rural schools experience this diversity, the need for well-prepared educators (teachers, leaders, counselors, and coaches) has continued to grow. This three-year study consisted of a place-conscious educator professional…

Teacher retention studies often focus on why teachers leave the profession, but this article suggests that focusing on why teachers stay situates rural school and community assets as the foundation to reform. The research design is a collective case study of three rural Wisconsin school districts, and findings are based on interviews and focus…

To understand the social experiences of rural teachers recruited by cohort-based alternative pathway programs in the United States, I interviewed 17 rural teachers recruited by Teach For America (TFA). While many new rural teachers experience social isolation early in their careers when teaching in communities in which they did not grow up, these…

The purpose of this article is to critically probe racial discourse around how the convergence of Black Lives Matter (BLM) and white nationalist organizations complicate the reality of segregation, education, and social change in a rural community in Central Georgia. Critical race studies ground the work, using narratives as a device to frame and…

Research-practice partnerships (RPPs), where researchers and practitioners work in concert to address persistent problems of practice, provide promising mutualistic benefits in urban school settings. Drawing on an integrated framework, this case study explores the initial development of an RPP between six small and rural school districts and two…

Cross-sector, place-based, school-community partnerships seeking to improve educational and other outcomes at scale have experienced a resurgence in the United States. Rather than isolated efforts, this new generation relies on scaling up models in networks, such as Strive Together. However, many of these models evolved in urban contexts, creating…

This conceptual article challenges researchers and practitioners to reconsider the utility of current constructs used to understand the rural school superintendency. We evaluate the rural leadership literature through two waves of scholarship: insider/outsider conceptions and place-conscious/critical place-conscious constructs. We assert critical…

The emotional labor of organizing, leading, or participating in campus protests may affect Black students' involvement in social justice activism at rural, predominantly White, higher education institutions. In this study, we examined the experiences and reflections of three Black students who engaged in a Black Lives Matter-inspired protest at a…

This study is about a seventh-grade classroom in a predominantly White region in the rural northwestern United States where a White teacher led an interdisciplinary unit on African American narratives of enslavement and freedom fighting. Through the lenses of racial literacy, critical Whiteness studies, and discourse studies, authors use data from…

This article reports on the first three years of a teacher-led professional development program on the Navajo Nation. We draw on both quantitative and qualitative data from our end-of-year surveys to highlight some of the early lessons we have gathered from the Diné Institute for Navajo Nation Educators (DINÉ). We highlight two guiding principles…

This article examines the unique features of the rural school context and how these features are associated with the stability of principals in these schools. Given the small but growing literature on the characteristics of rural principals, this study presents an exploratory analysis of principal stability across schools located in different…

This qualitative case study explores college and career aspirations of rural Black and Latinx middle school students in a community- and youth-based leadership program and how various forms of social capital help cultivate and sustain the aspirations of students. Data include student focus group interviews with a total of 14 rural Black and Latinx…

We report on a phenomenological study of the leadership experiences of six novice, rural public school principals in a midwestern U.S. state. We situated our analysis within existing research on leadership for learning, particularly how novice principals interpreted instructional leadership challenges in the context of rural school leadership. Our…