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Rethinking Rural Literacies: Transnational Perspectives

Our new book has just been released: Rethinking Rural Literacies: Transnational Perspectives edited by Bill Green (NSW,Au) and Michael Corbett (Acadia, CAN).

From McMillan:

rural lit

Linking the terms “rural” and “literacy” often conjures images of deficit and improvement. This book takes a different approach, unpacking both of these laden concepts in diverse national contexts. It explores how people in many rural places understand and experience what it means to be rural and the multiple ways that exist of being literate, including ways that are linked to and situated in a particular place and conception of that place. The chapters in this international collection investigate a wide range of theorizations of rurality and literacy; literate practices and pedagogies; questions of place, space, and sustainability; and complex representations of rurality that challenge simplistic conceptions of standardized literacy and the real-and-imagined world beyond the metropolis.

Table of Contents:

PART I: CONCEPTUALIZING RURAL LITERACIES1. Literacy, Rurality, Education: A Partial Mapping; Bill Green
2. Why not at school? Rural Literacies and the Continual Choice to Stay; Kim Donehower
3. Find Yourself in Newfoundland and Labrador: Reading Rurality as Reparation; Ursula Kelly
4. My Roots Dip Deep: Literacy Practices as Mirrors of Traditional, Modern and Postmodern Ruralities; Karen Eppley
5. Another Way to Read ‘The Rural’: A Bricolage of Maths Education; Craig Howley
PART II: LITERACY/PEDAGOGIES
6. Exploring Rurality, Teaching Literacy: How Teachers Manage a Curricular Relation to Place; Phillip Cormack
7. Rural Boys, Literacy Practice, and the Possibilities of Difference: Tales Out of School; Jo-Anne Reid
8. Reconfiguring the Communicational Landscape: Implications for Rural Literacy; Kathryn Hibbert
PART III: PLACE AND SUSTAINABILITY
9. Thinking through Country: New Literacy Practices for a Sustainable World; Margaret Somerville
10. Literacy, Place-based Pedagogies and Social Justice; Lyn Kerkham and Barbara Comber
11. The Making of ‘Good-Enough’ Everyday Lives: Literacy Lessons from the Rural North of Finland; Pauliina Rautio and Maija Lanas
PART IV: MOBILITIES AND FUTURES
12. Reading Futures: Exploring Rural Students’ Literacy Practices in Neo-liberal Times; Kate Cairns
13. Mediating Plastic Literacies and Placeless Governmentalities: Returning to Corporeal Rurality; Michael Corbett and Ann Vibert

Reviews:

“I found a great deal to think about as a result of reading the thought-provoking essays in Rethinking Rural Literacies. The editors and contributors offer what I regard as a new space to consider where and how education occurs. I recommend this book to researchers and practitioners working in rural studies, but also those who appreciate the idea that we all teach, research and live somewhere. The essays in it are likely to inspire many new studies and new questions related to place-conscious education: in other rural contexts, ‘downtown’, by the side of the road, in high-density housing, and in relation to the place of physical location and online communities. The essays are provocative, reflexive, and truly offer a rethinking of rural literacies.” – Claudia Mitchell, James McGill Professor, McGill University, Canada, and Honorary Professor, University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa

Rethinking Rural Literacies makes multiple important conceptual and scholarly contributions in exploring a variety of issues that lie at the nexus of literacy, rurality and education. Green and Corbett’s volume represents an excellent and essential complement to existing work in the field.” – Kai A. Schafft, Associate Professor, Pennsylvania State University, USA, and Editor, Journal of Research in Rural Education

“This collection is much needed. It will be immensely useful, bridging conceptual and actual sites and spaces with global reach but offering a respectful attention to the sometimes-forgotten literacies of the rural, locating and describing that field more clearly, and drawing on contemporary theory and practice in literacy studies.” – Kate Pahl, Reader in Literacies in Education, The University of Sheffield, UK

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