Critical Rural Pedagogy

Critical Rural Pedagogy

Sharon Mitchler argues for a reconfiguration of critical pedagogy to empower and engage American literature students at rural community colleges. She constructs an intersectional pedagogy that draws on feminist pedagogy, critical pedagogy, and conceptualizations of rural places and builds on the work of various other scholars. This approach addresses the multiple positions of power and marginalization rural students occupy, often concurrently. Critical rural pedagogy actively seeks to engage rural students to bring their lived experiences to college, and not only to individual classrooms, but to other forms of higher education, as community college students transfer on to university settings. The book includes activities and examples to model classroom practice. 

Drawing on her experiences in her American literature survey course at Centralia College, a small, rural, community college, Mitchler: 

• Offers an insightful and effective response to lack of engagement and empowerment of rural students in the English classroom.
• Outlines a variation of critical pedagogy that explicitly addresses the multiple, concurrent positions of power and marginalization that rural students may occupy.
• Empowers instructors to enact scaffolding that empowers rural students to enter conversations about classroom texts in ways that connect to rural life.
• Provides sample activities and written assignments that model critical rural pedagogy in the American literature classroom.