Friday, April 07, 2006
Rural Ed SIG Business Meeting
Well, the Rural Education SIG had its business meeting earlier this evening. It started with Stephen A. Swidler of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln discussing the research project that culminated in his recent book, Naturally Small: Teaching and Learning in the Last One-Room Schools. This talk introduced us to two one-room schools: one with a very traditional orientation and one with a very progressive orientation (largely based upon the individual teacher in both schools).
In the traditional school, the older female teacher had been the teacher at that school for most of her life. She began at the age of 18 with her four weeks of training and a provisional license and had taught at that same school for the next thirty-forty years. Originally from the community and a graduate of that one-room school, she very much shared the values of the community. Her teaching style was a very traditional one, where she would instruct each of the students individually in their grade level and subject area for 15 minutes and then send them back to their desk to complete some form of seat work taken from a commercially available textbook/workbook series. Then the next student would come up and so on. This would continue throughout the day for twenty-five or thirty individual sessions. Remarkable, all of her twelve students in this K-8 school were at grade level in all subject areas. While this teacher was valued a great deal by the community, as her style was structured in a way maintained a way of life that everyone was accustomed to, but realized was going away in the name of progress. On the other hand, she was largely disliked by her own students.
The second school, a more progressive one, was staffed by a teacher who was not from the community and did not even live in the community while he was teaching there. He was from an urban area and had graduated from a large school, he even continued to live in the larger center nearby the community that the school was located in. Unlike the structured lessons of the teacher at the traditional one-room school, this teacher would instruct his class in a full group setting, even though he had eleven students that spanned all levels of this K-8 school. This instruction would usually take the form of conversations or discussions with the class that would last for an hour or more, usually based upon some provocative reading. While his philosophy for teaching was that he wanted the kids to be able to think for themselves and not appear stupid (as he felt that people who appear stupid get taken advantage of), it was also interesting to note that all of his students were also at grade level in all of their subject areas (something that was greatly valued in both of these communities). This teacher was also loved by his students and because of their consistent progress, respected by the community.
The sad part of this story is that recent legislation in Nebraska has consolidated all of these one room school districts into larger neighbouring rural districts and it appears many, if not all, of these one room schools will disappear.
The other business of the SIG was conducted, which included the awarding of the dissertation awards (more on those in a future post), the treasurer's report (our fiscal situation is healthy), and an update on the website (which included a request for anyone who had anything of interest to the SIG to send it to mkb-at-uga-dot-edu and it would be added to our regular updates).
While there was no election of officers (as our terms are for three years), the Program Chair David Callejo Perez had indicated that if there was someone willing to serve the final year of his term, he would be willing to step aside. Kai Schafft and Patricia Hardre volunteered to be Program Co-Chairs for next year's conference in Chicago.
Tags: AERA 2006, AERA, small schools, rural, education
In the traditional school, the older female teacher had been the teacher at that school for most of her life. She began at the age of 18 with her four weeks of training and a provisional license and had taught at that same school for the next thirty-forty years. Originally from the community and a graduate of that one-room school, she very much shared the values of the community. Her teaching style was a very traditional one, where she would instruct each of the students individually in their grade level and subject area for 15 minutes and then send them back to their desk to complete some form of seat work taken from a commercially available textbook/workbook series. Then the next student would come up and so on. This would continue throughout the day for twenty-five or thirty individual sessions. Remarkable, all of her twelve students in this K-8 school were at grade level in all subject areas. While this teacher was valued a great deal by the community, as her style was structured in a way maintained a way of life that everyone was accustomed to, but realized was going away in the name of progress. On the other hand, she was largely disliked by her own students.
The second school, a more progressive one, was staffed by a teacher who was not from the community and did not even live in the community while he was teaching there. He was from an urban area and had graduated from a large school, he even continued to live in the larger center nearby the community that the school was located in. Unlike the structured lessons of the teacher at the traditional one-room school, this teacher would instruct his class in a full group setting, even though he had eleven students that spanned all levels of this K-8 school. This instruction would usually take the form of conversations or discussions with the class that would last for an hour or more, usually based upon some provocative reading. While his philosophy for teaching was that he wanted the kids to be able to think for themselves and not appear stupid (as he felt that people who appear stupid get taken advantage of), it was also interesting to note that all of his students were also at grade level in all of their subject areas (something that was greatly valued in both of these communities). This teacher was also loved by his students and because of their consistent progress, respected by the community.
The sad part of this story is that recent legislation in Nebraska has consolidated all of these one room school districts into larger neighbouring rural districts and it appears many, if not all, of these one room schools will disappear.
The other business of the SIG was conducted, which included the awarding of the dissertation awards (more on those in a future post), the treasurer's report (our fiscal situation is healthy), and an update on the website (which included a request for anyone who had anything of interest to the SIG to send it to mkb-at-uga-dot-edu and it would be added to our regular updates).
While there was no election of officers (as our terms are for three years), the Program Chair David Callejo Perez had indicated that if there was someone willing to serve the final year of his term, he would be willing to step aside. Kai Schafft and Patricia Hardre volunteered to be Program Co-Chairs for next year's conference in Chicago.
Tags: AERA 2006, AERA, small schools, rural, education
