Re-Placing Rural Education: AERA Special Interest Group on Rural Education Career Achievement Award Lecture

This article was developed from Michael Corbett's 2020 Rural Education Special Interest Group (SIG) Career Achievement Award Lecture. There has been an encouraging influx of new work, both in the United States and in other anglophone settler societies, as well as in Europe in the emerging field of rural education, influenced by developments in sociology, geography, political science, and area studies. The development of the field in terms of its assumed core pragmatist and idealist sociogeographic theorizations, which remains mired in 19th- and early 20th-century ideascapes that are no longer up for the task of helping to appropriately understand the current moment. An important component of this lingering modernist discourse is a vision of spatial transformation that juxtaposed ascendent urbanism and a parallel rural decline, which has in turn generated a defensive and exceptionalist place-based rural literature that misunderstands and even distorts the complexity of contemporary spatial relations. the box and building back better beyond the pandemic. For those in the field of rural education, this mindset might mean accepting the ambivalent realization that the comfort, hominess, attractions, and seductions of treasured places can inhibit ones ability to look outside them to see how they relate to other places and to look within them with unforgetting eyes to investigate carefully how they came to be what they are. He theorizes an inward-looking rural education field will ossify and become irrelevant. Connecting the multiple layers of place, from home to globe, is essential to building the kinds of understanding required for an inclusive and sustainable future. For this to work, he thinks they need to look outside their disciplinary homeplace and their pragmatic sensibilities to search for the new ideas that will connect to the movements that might help critically engage the concerns of currently and create bold new territory. [Paper presented at the American Educational Research Association (AERA) (Online, Apr 13, 2021).]