by Cathie English
Thirty-four years ago, I moved to a small town in Southwest Iowa, fresh out of my undergraduate degree in English/Language arts. Like any new teacher, I was excited and motivated to begin my first teaching job, ready to apply the pedagogical theories to my instructional practices in the secondary classroom. My enthusiasm quickly waned. I was so overwhelmed, I hardly had time to socialize. My fellow teachers came to my room only once in that first year. By spring, I had made the decision to leave my first teaching job.
I first had to understand why I failed. Why did things go so badly? It’s not that they went completely south, but I was so exhausted each day, I barely had time to think. My first mistake was accepting a job that required too many responsibilities than I had the capacity to fulfill. This is common in rural schools, simply because of the lack of funds for more personnel. I taught junior English (emphasizing American literature), humanities (which emphasized several existentialist novels), the yearbook, and speech classes.
In addition to teaching, I was also assigned as the speech and theater coach which meant producing a three-act fall play and a shorter play for competitive theater and a fall and spring speech season. I also helped direct the spring musical. I knew I was in trouble in mid-March when I abandoned teaching Crime and Punishment in the humanities course because the novel choices in that course that I had not chosen were so depressing, I thought, “Good god, the students must be depressed by these too.” It was the set curriculum, but I never regretted the decision to abandon Dostoevsky.
I began applying for jobs in metropolitan or micropolitan locations; I told my husband, “I don’t want to teach in a small town ever again!” I grew up in a rural village and knew quite well the pain of being under the microscope and scrutiny of my fellow citizens. If you made one small move that the community considered offensive or was contrary to its values, you were the talk of the town. I longed for the anonymity of a larger community.
Several months later, I had not received any responses from any of these schools. Reluctantly, I applied to two job openings in small towns, and in mid-July both schools contacted me about an interview. I chose to respond in alphabetical order, so Aurora, Nebraska received my first phone call. Despite the discouragement I felt after my first year of teaching, I drove to this community, unknown to me, but not far from the village where I grew up. Miraculously, I got offered the job on the same day I interviewed.
In less than a month, I had to assess what I needed to do to shift my framework for teaching in rural spaces. Like many rural citizens, I had believed the cultural myths about my own upbringing, that is, we were lesser than, or not as intelligent as our urban and suburban counterparts, albeit, I had always been a successful student. Even though I was raised in a rural village, I didn’t know what I did not know. After graduation, I thought I wanted to return to teach in rural spaces but I soon learned if you’re raised rural, it does not prepare you to teach in a rural school. Many of the instructional practices I learned in my own teacher education program didn’t transfer well into a rural school.
Upon reflection and with new awareness in mind, I shifted my framework. I asked questions in the interview about what kinds and how many extracurricular activities I would be required to coach. My new community, although rural, was affluent and many new graduates and veteran teachers wanted to teach there, so the extracurricular assignments were taken up by several teachers. Despite being a second-year teacher “learning the ropes,” I made a concerted effort to get to know my peers as quickly as possible. In Aurora, my colleagues stopped by frequently. I attended as many school activities as I could so administrators, colleagues, students, and parents knew how invested I was in the community. In rural spaces—in communities smaller than 5,000—the school and its events are the center of the community. In Nebraska, particularly, much of the community attended Friday night football games and Tuesday and Thursday night volleyball games.
The Importance of Knowing Your Community
Amy Azano, et al (2020) have noted the importance of getting to know your community in rural spaces by building community within the rural space you’re inhabiting which also means living in the community; many teachers commute from suburban spaces. Azano, et al offer actionable steps for rural teachers:
- Attending extracurricular activities of your students is the first step in getting to know your students and their parents;
- Bumping into students outside the classroom at their part-time jobs, or church, or community events can be used to your benefit by learning their interests and what their families are like outside of school—visibility in the community is vital;
- Driving around the community to get to know the lay of the land and developing an understanding of why place matters and why “this” particular place matters, including the cultural, economic, and ecology/environment of the place;
- Challenging pre-existing ideas about the community in the classroom—I learned to do this through the curriculum.
One of the most rewarding experiences of my teaching career were the opportunities I had to enact community literacy projects with my students because it emphasized how I created allies with families and many other community members. My first multi-generational project of collecting the stories of nursing home residents opened up to me and my students a chance to dispel myths about the elderly from the adolescent point of view and myths about adolescents from the elderly point of view. We made a connection most people would think was not possible. But it was. The nursing home residents’ stories were priceless.
A critical aspect of shifting my framework to teaching in rural spaces was learning the importance of self-care. Because of the amount of work and time commitment to both daily teaching, sponsoring, or coaching extracurricular activities, I had to find time for myself and my family and protect that personal time so that I could be successful in the classroom. Teaching in rural spaces necessitates time for deep reflection. With deep reflection, I was able to know my community in profound and lasting ways.
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Cathie English, Ph.D., is Professor of English and English education faculty at Missouri State University in Springfield, Missouri. She teaches undergraduate and graduate English education courses after a twenty-two-year career as a secondary English educator in rural Nebraska. Her research focuses upon place conscious pedagogy with an emphasis in ecological, rural, and community literacy; teacher leadership; and composition theory and practice.
