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<p> </p> <p>     The purpose of this study was to explore the rural schooling experience of ten high school students attending a small high school located in a rural county in Indiana regarding college and postsecondary aspirations. Specifically, do they have a positive, negative, or neutral view of college? Who or what is influencing their perceptions, values, and beliefs regarding college? Also, this study focused on rural Indiana, providing a Middle America “rural focus” because it is not prevalent in the literature. This qualitative single case study used a sociocultural framework and utilized information gathered from student personal essays, and semi-structured focus group interviews, which provided insights into how rural students perceive college. In addition to the student perspectives, the high school principal and college and career guidance counselor were also interviewed to provide context regarding the culture of the school, community, family involvement, and socioeconomic metrics and how these factors influence the educational and occupational aspirations of students at the site school. Each interview was recorded, transcribed, and coded for data analysis. The data were analyzed using open coding as articulated by Given (2008) as well as the eight-step focus coding process articulated by Tesch (1990) to identify emergent themes. Six themes emerged as providing perceptions, attitudes, and beliefs regarding college as well as the sociocultural and habitus influences concerning educational and occupational aspirations: (1) schooling experience; (2) juxtaposition of postsecondary education; (3) college is expensive; (4) guidance counselor- too many hats and limited resources; (5) influences of educational and occupational aspirations; (6) athletics – more than an extracurricular activity. Results showed the significance of the secondary schooling experience and the juxtaposition of postsecondary education, specifically concerning skilled trade occupations, especially for male students. The cost of college was discerning for the students as well as the burden of paying for college. Attitudes, perceptions, and beliefs differed based on perceived academic ability and gender. This study offers insights into the cultural role of the family, school, and community regarding postsecondary aspirations and how to increase postsecondary matriculation rate of rural youth. </p>

Public school districts play a pivotal role in the well-being of rural communities. To help mitigate the impact of labor market trends, societal shifts, and the skilled labor shortage, rural schools are in the initial stages of expanding innovative career pathways. As such, career and technical education (CTE) administrators serve their rural communities by facilitating robust career pathways to support local labor markets. Due to a skilled labor shortage, a declining labor force participation rate, and a rapidly evolving labor market, there is a lack of qualified and certified personnel to fill industry jobs (Davis et al., 2022). School districts can impact career readiness and CTE administrators are tasked with facilitating robust career pathways, including increasing access to programs of study, developing new partnerships, and expanding industry certifications and early postsecondary opportunities to support local, regional, and national labor markets and community vitality (Kim et al., 2021). This narrative inquiry investigated how CTE administrators facilitated the development of career programs of study in rural secondary settings. This study explored the journeys of CTE administrators through their stories of career pathway design, facilitation, and improvement in the context of rural secondary education. Narrative interviews were conducted via one-on-one video conferencing with nine rural CTE administrators from one Grand Division of Tennessee, in addition to organizational document reviews and annals. Two levels of data analysis were used to compose the final research text, with the first level of field texts coded with narrative coding and the second level coded through the identification of resonant narrative threads. Research findings included participant accounts related to resilient and visionary leadership, intentional strategic alignment, ecosystem of collaboration, funding opportunities and barriers, and responsive and adaptive programming. CTE administrators identified systemic changes that when implemented strategically integrate innovative programs of study and partnerships into their rural districts’ broader education system. The findings expand the current body of literature and recommendations for practice.

It is impossible to imagine our schools or community without framing such a view around a corporate structure. Money, capital, and economic stakeholders are all around us, building a corporate landscape that all members of the community must travel through in the course of their everyday lives. To suggest that education should be void of any type of economic influence would be to deny that a very important thread of our communities' tapestry exists. As we look at the way that these education intentions move outside our own communities and connect us to other communities and the world, we see corporate education economics framed in either a global or communal perspective. A corporate science education perspective tends to treat science with strict positivism, and technology with hard determinism. Communal theories of science education view science as post-positivistic and technology with a softer determinism; as a result social implications emerge, and the science becomes more socially constructed. It supports the personal capital of all students, regardless of their view of science or technology. It allows students to "border cross" more easily so they can "scaffold" new science information onto previous learning. This research consists of exploring how biotechnology education emerged within the state, how the resources intersected within a biotechnology conference and how teachers conceptualized biotechnology practices in their own classrooms. The researcher pieced together a sketch of the history of how biotechnology curriculum arose in high school biology classes. The researcher also explored the hybrid nature of biotechnology resources such as an educational conference where teachers attend workshops and lectures. The practices of two teachers in a public high school and one in a private school setting were also analyzed. / Ph. D.

The recent growth of Teach For America (TFA) has enabled it to substantially expand the teacher labour supply in many rural Southern communities, one of its largest and fastest-growing partnership subsets. Though it is generally accepted that these areas face more severe teacher shortages than most other regions in the country, there is little research as to how these staffing challenges arise or how they might be resolved; TFA’s potential to grow the rural Southern teacher supply thus signals a promising opportunity in need of further research. This work offers a case study of teacher labour outcomes in the Mississippi-Arkansas Delta, TFA’s oldest and largest rural Southern partnership site. In this region, local schools have experienced a 600 per-cent increase in corps member presence since 2008; consequently, TFA provided anywhere from a quarter to a half of the area’s new teacher labour supply each year from 2008 to 2010. A mixed-methods analysis illuminates both the causes of Delta teacher shortages and TFA’s potential to address these vacancies. Within the Delta, local schools face chronic teacher shortages because the communities they serve are overwhelmingly poor, geographically isolated, and racially segregated. TFA appears to have targeted the Delta communities where teacher labour policies have systematically fallen short, as it partners with districts bearing the greatest share of the region’s aggregate teacher vacancies. Additional statistical testing reveals that amongst these hard-to-staff districts, TFA has further focussed its resources into the schools that serve more rural, less educated, and/or predominantly African American populations. In this way, TFA funnels its corps members into the very districts where state reform efforts have struggled most, thus serving as a powerful resource for realigning ‘sticky’ outcomes in the most hard-to-staff Delta school districts. These findings notwithstanding, closer examination reveals significant drawbacks and limitations to current TFA outcomes in the rural Southern Delta. TFA does not saturate hard-to-staff school districts enough to produce statistically significant changes in local teacher vacancy rates. Instead, the programme appears to have established an unofficial threshold for the number of teachers placed per district; once this ceiling has been reached, additional corps members are funnelled into a new area regardless of the original district’s remaining need. Additionally, there is no long-term ‘exit strategy’ to help Delta districts employing TFA corps members to eventually cultivate their own high-quality teacher labour supply, thus leaving them perpetually dependent on TFA to staff their classrooms. Preliminary evidence suggests that state governments could address these shortcomings through 1) increased financial support for TFA to fully saturate vacancies in current partnership districts, as well as 2) the simultaneous development of grow-your-own teacher certification programmes in rural Delta districts. The evidence suggests that these two strategies would improve TFA as a targeted teacher recruitment strategy for hard-to-staff communities both in the Delta and across the programme’s nine other rural Southern partnership sites.