Learning to Teach in Rural Classrooms
1998; SAGE Publishing; Volume: 79; Issue: 8 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
1940-6487
Autores Tópico(s)Indigenous and Place-Based Education
ResumoMs. Piane describes a class room-based teacher education program that, over course of a year, helps men and women move from other occupations through a period of risky imbalance to meaningful new role of teacher in a rural setting. My supervisory work for a small classroom-based teacher education program takes me into many different schools in villages of Vermont and New Hampshire. As I make my rounds, I think of complexity of modern rural life, especially as it is reflected in schools. There are locals and flatlanders (former suburbanites looking for peace of countryside but bringing with them city ideas); there are closed mills and vanishing farms as well as quaint greens and country stores; there are children dressed in clothes from Gap and children dressed in hand-me-downs; there are schools that seem stuck in generations-old patterns as well as schools that look and feel like caring communities discussed by today's educational theorists. There is often deep confusion about relationship between our village and world. I recall Garret Keizer's tales of teaching in rural northern Vermont. He remarks that the variety [of people] . . . is a noteworthy characteristic of [the area's] public schools . . . [but] all of them are in some sense . . . by living here.(1) That isolation is similar to, though different from, isolation felt in inner-city schools. The latter schools, in particular, have been subject of multifaceted discussions analyzing possibilities for reform in schools that are out of of middle-class American life. For some reason, many of these discussions - whether about rural or urban schools - fall short of addressing issue of source of teachers for these schools. (The recent debate over successes and failures of Teach For America program is an exception.) My sense of frustrated agreement with Keizer's observation that the American mainstream is pitifully ignorant of and indifferent to its rural population(22) is deepened when I realize that, even in world of professional teacher educators, have done little to provide educators with specialized training for work in rural areas.(3) I have worked in three university-based teacher education programs with access to rural locations. Any introduction to local schools through brief visits and later discussion is superficial at best. But a different kind of learning takes place on part of prospective teachers if context of their learning is rural classroom, school, and community. Through an internship in a rural classroom, a prospective teacher comes to understand classroom patterns of growth throughout a school year and begins to work effectively within that context. As interns learn, they also bring to their students their own broad experience in world beyond local hills. When I visit three rural classrooms in which interns are sharing that world experience with students in context of local curriculum, classrooms do not feel isolated to me, but I am assured by one mentor teacher, Joel Proctor,(4) that he doesn't know many classes that push students so hard to look beyond village. Here we are at central point of conflict between old and familiar patterns of local education and new, perhaps risky, innovations. Also at this point is intern teacher, who hopes to go into a classroom next fall understanding elements of conflict but educated to direct learning of his or her students from perspective of both and larger world in which they may have to live. A Classroom-based Program One program that moves beyond superficiality is Upper Valley Teacher Training Program (UVTTP).(5) This is a nonprofit, independent program for adults who have decided to change their chief occupations. Though based in local schools, UVTTP uses services of academics from many New England colleges and universities as well as those of experienced practitioners from a hundred-mile radius. …
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