Editor’s Note: This interview first appeared in Path Finders, an email newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Each week, Path Finders features a Q&A with a rural thinker, creator, or doer. Like what you see here? You can join the mailing list at the bottom of this article and receive more conversations like this in your inbox each week.
Rural schools across the country face challenges like teacher shortages and funding disparities. A new book, “The Middle of Somewhere,” aims to highlight the ways in which rural schools and communities have partnered to improve educational opportunities for rural students.
I spoke with the book’s authors, Sara L. Hartman, Ph.D., an associate professor of Teacher Education at Ohio University’s College of Education, and Bob Klein, Ph.D., chair and professor of the Department of Teaching, Learning, and Foundations at Eastern Illinois University, to learn more about their new book.
Enjoy our conversation about innovative partnerships, how to reduce spatial inequity, and the power of “somewhere,” below.
Lane Wendell Fischer, The Daily Yonder: Tell me a little bit about yourself and how you came to studying partnerships as a vehicle for improving rural schools.
Sara L. Hartman: I was raised in beautiful southeastern Ohio and spent countless hours of my childhood exploring and playing make-believe in the lush, deciduous forests that surrounded my home.
As a preservice teacher during my undergraduate degree in elementary education, some of my most impactful clinical experiences were in rural schools.
Being welcomed into these rural school partnerships began a nearly 30-year interest in rural education partnerships. Later, as a graduate student at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, I lived on an acreage in rural Otoe County and had the opportunity to become involved in a totally different rural context.
Now, I find myself calling home a 130-year-old farmhouse in the middle of the woods in southern Athens County, Ohio. My husband and I have been privileged to be able to raise our two daughters in this home.
I’m fortunate to partner with mentor teachers and school leaders as we work to prepare teacher candidates in our region. It’s essential that they understand the challenges that the region experiences, but equally important is helping them see the region’s strengths, one of which is its many partnerships that improve the lives of the region’s children.
Bob Klein: I started with a desire to better understand and support rural education in the United States. With many collaborators, I’ve looked at place-based education approaches (a number of place-based references are on DY), math circle approaches to Indigenous rural education, and several rounds of co-authoring Why Rural Matters.
That desire to support rural education efforts bifurcates into a policy approach (Why Rural Matters) and an effective engagement approach (Partnerships).
Indigenous communities have experienced waves of interlopers who want to “bestow” a best practice and my collaborators and I sought something more humble — to only go where we were invited and to work hand-in-hand with teachers, students, parents, organizations, tribal elders (and more), to build relationships and interventions that made the kinds of differences that our partners wanted to see in their communities. This has been the approach in the Southwest predominantly and we have worked for a decade now connecting mathematicians across the United States with Indigenous teachers and students in summer camps, classroom visits, community festivals, and more.
As an academic, I wanted to not only work to build those partnerships, but to research what lessons could be gleaned from the broader research on partnerships and how different models to building, sustaining, and transforming partnerships happen.
DY: Explain this concept of innovative partnerships. What do these relationships look like and why are they so important for rural schools and rural education?
SH: Rural schools and communities use partnerships to address spatial inequities, marking the continuation of decades of collaboration. Rural partnerships are like rural places; no two are exactly alike. That being said, rural partnerships do share some commonalities.
We all know that many rural schools and communities experience challenges related to issues of funding and geographic isolation. However, rural schools consistently meet these challenges with innovative practices that are applicable across other rural contexts. Yet, because of the invisibility of rural spaces, innovation happening in rural schools and communities too often goes unnoticed and unreported.
BK: The point of “The Middle of Somewhere” is to bring together engaging examples of these kinds of partnerships to provide a reader not only variety, but the opportunity to look for meaningful and useful patterns among the different examples in the book. People who live in rural spaces wear many hats — living in rural communities usually involves sharing of resources and talents toward some common purpose. Sara and I thought that if you were looking for examples of excellent, responsive partnerships, there is no better place to start than rural places.
DY: “The Middle of Somewhere” showcases three different areas that can benefit from partnerships: prospective and current teachers; rural education networks; and justice, equity, and inclusion. Why are these areas particularly important to addressing issues that many rural schools presently face?
SH: If you talk to anyone who works in a rural school, one of the first things you will hear about are the challenges associated with preparing, recruiting, and retaining teachers in rural schools. It was clear to us from the beginning that our book needed to provide partnership examples that addressed this need.
Rural education networks typically involve many partners across multiple rural contexts. Consequently, they have the ability to impact large numbers of students. Knowing this, we wanted to feature several chapters that illustrated how rural education networks could be implemented across a greater scale.
Justice, equity, and inclusion are at the heart of most educational conversations right now. Although each of the chapters in “The Middle of Somewhere” are connected to these themes, we felt it was essential to specifically call attention to partnerships that named these topics as foundational goals of their partnership work.
DY: One of the key themes touched on so well in the book is this idea of “spatial inequity.” Could you explain what spatial inequity is and how it relates to rural students? Why is it important to address?
SH: Spatial equity is the way equity/inequity is connected to place. Spatial equity impacts how resources are allocated, the availability of services, and access to learning supports and opportunities. Given how important those things are in any educational setting, you would think you would hear about spatial equity more often, yet the term is used infrequently.
Without centering these challenges — long bus rides, expensive transportation costs, state-mandated assessment policies that are not easily implemented in a rural setting, funding inequities, lack of broadband access, and childcare deserts, to name a few — as issues of spatial inequity, rural school challenges too often go unnoticed and unaddressed. Spatial equity must become part of our common educational lexicon. As authors, we sought to make this term more readily understood and hopefully used to describe inequities that are linked to place.
BK: Spatial equity matters because students absorb latent messages about where they live into their identities and then frame their opportunities based on their rurality. Said more plainly, all too often rural students see their locale as an inherent deficit — one built on prejudices reinforced by popular media, political discourses, and structural disconnects.
DY: What are some common characteristics of partnerships that succeed?
SH: Rural partnerships that succeed share several commonalities. They are guided by a shared vision and goals that unite and inspire the members of the partnership team. They are developed and sustained despite challenges that arise, which may even include conflict between collaborators. The notion that all rural people get along because they live in close-knit communities is a myth.
Successful rural partnerships are not solely reliant on one person for their sustainment. The image of a solo-led rural partnership is both common and romanticized, yet from our research, we maintain that partnerships that are person-dependent quickly lose momentum when that person steps away.
DY: What is your advice to a rural educator, administrator, or community member looking to create education partnerships in their own communities?
BK: Be bold and start the conversation with a group of people with different backgrounds, job titles, beliefs, and talents than yours. Make your pitch catchy enough to bring in collaborators who might otherwise feel like an outsider, then do the work of asset mining to figure out how the different talents and affiliations can combine to start building the actions needed to address the goals — the partnership will come from that.
SH: Do not expect a successful rural partnership to come to fruition overnight. Successful partnerships take time and patience to develop and even longer for sustaining procedures to be established. If you are the leader of the collaborative work, be willing to release the reins of control to allow multiple perspectives to be heard. As you ask partners to collaborate, be inclusive in your invitations. Exclusion of key members often leads to resistance during implementation.
Lastly, remember that rural partnerships are powerful tools for spatial equity advocacy on regional and state levels. Collectively using their resources and voices, rural education partnerships are powerful in their ability to lobby for resources as well as create supports that will benefit their rural schools and communities.
DY: Lastly, I adore the title of this book. As a former rural student who only recently stopped referring to his hometown as “the middle of nowhere,” I’m curious, why’d you choose to call it “The Middle of Somewhere”?
SH: I could not possibly tally the number of times I have heard someone use the statement that is the opposite of “The Middle of Somewhere.” The use of the euphemism is pervasive, even within rural regions themselves. While it may not seem like a big deal, I invite others to consider the consequences of telling someone that they are from nowhere.
Of course, this issue is bigger than just one saying, but it gets to the root of the stereotypical ways in which rural people and places are viewed. The title of “The Middle of Somewhere” was chosen specifically to counter this messaging.
The bottom line is this… rural children’s homes are somewhere, rural schools are somewhere, and rural communities are somewhere.
BK: Addressing mass-stereotypes begins with a careful look at the language we use. The “middle of somewhere” was our act of rebellion against a phrase that obscures the beauty of all rural spaces.
This interview first appeared in Path Finders, a weekly email newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Each Monday, Path Finders features a Q&A with a rural thinker, creator, or doer. Join the mailing list today, to have these illuminating conversations delivered straight to your inbox.
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