S04E01 - Rural Framing and data-informed exploration of the changing landscape of Rural America with Dr Brad Mitchell

In the first episode of the new season of the Rural Voice, we talk about the research of place and process of rural education from a data-informed perspective. We discuss the role of Ground Truthing and connecting data within the domains of politics, culture, and fear of consolidation. Dr. Mitchell talks about somewhere (rural) and anywhere (urban and suburban). The politics of these are what many would expect. Somewhere, lean more conservative, and anywhere is more liberal. However, these trends in the data are not uniform. In some rural areas, some voters lean liberal, particularly for those people of color. More rural suburban locations vote more conservatively. These spaces include many small business owners. More diverse suburbs lean more liberal as well. Similarly, we are seeing a shift toward skills-based education in high schools, such as trade education (e.g., Information Technology). Thus, educational pathways should be more connected to local needs. We discussed the role of emotion and between-group conflict, such as city and rural tension, the reemergence of populism, women's rights, diversity, and others. These trends have a trickle-down influence on education. We discuss psychology's role in explaining the American shift toward being "groupy" and how it insulates us from perceived threats to our values and groups. We talk about access to resources such as money, natural resources, services, etc. This directly connects to educational offerings and how policy influences local schools, particularly concerning policy and law. From the cultural perspective, it relates to migration and the changing rural demographics. At the same time, we see a change in Hispanic populations in rural America, but African Americans also move to rural areas, including the Southeast United States. This can place a financial strain on these small communities as, in some cases, these communities are seeing an increase in migration, particularly for public schools. This will create new challenges for educators in rural education to meet the needs of these populations (e.g., ESL services). The final domain concerns the fear of consolidating small communities to merge services where rural communities may lose their identity. Dr. Mitchell suggests that these issues will play a role in rural education in the future. Much of the curriculum and policy will be related to places, resources, and job markets and how rural education changes to meet these challenges through the somewhere versus anywhere paradigm.