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Q&A: How Blending the Personal and the Professional Expands Rural Literacy Rates [1]
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Date: 2024-11-29
Editor’s Note: This interview first appeared in Path Finders, an email newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Each week, Path Finders features a Q&A with a rural thinker, creator, or doer. Like what you see here? You can join the mailing list at the bottom of this article and receive more conversations like this in your inbox each week.
Amy McCleese Nichols’ book, “Rural Literacy Sponsorship Networks: Piloting Mixed-Methods Mapping for Small Communities,” is an academic treatise celebrating rural interconnections. Her research reflects one community’s assets, not deficits, in regards to community literacy, and explores collective oral and written communication skill-building in both everyday and educational settings. By mapping the complex ways that literacy professionals, broadly defined, worked together to create an array of literacy opportunities, McCleese Nichols offers a potential technique for articulating a range of rural collaborations.
Enjoy our conversation about addressing the “rhetoric of lack” in rural, and the blurring of personal and profession and small towns.
Amy McCleese Nichols’ book, “Rural Literacy Sponsorship Networks: Piloting Mixed-Methods Mapping for Small Communities,” celebrates rural interconnections. (Photo courtesy of Amy McCleese Nichols)
Kim Kobersmith, The Daily Yonder: What is your background, and how did you become interested in rural literacy research?
Amy McCleese Nichols: I grew up on a farm in Eastern Kentucky amid a large extended family, and I lived and worked in several rural communities before returning to school for a Master’s degree and then a PhD. My experience living and working in rural communities meant that when I encountered scholarship about community literacy in rural areas, I was surprised to see the language of “deficit” and “lack” often used. While rural communities run differently than those embedded in urban areas, I don’t think they are “less than” as much as they are just different. I quickly became eager to add more professional rural voices to the scholarly conversation in my field.
DY: Your research began with the hypothesis that rural community members create their own literacy networks in unique ways. What preconceived notions by other researchers did you have to contend with?
AMN: I was talking about the differences between urban and rural community literacy while trying to trace the literacy network of one rural town, and someone said, “Well, rural communities just have fewer resources.” It is true that, numerically, there may be fewer options, but I had a sense from my own experience that at least some rural communities leverage deep community connections that cross organizational, personal, and professional boundaries in order to create networked literacy opportunities for their residents. I don’t think it’s fair to categorize those as qualitatively worse than literacy options available in some urban areas.
DY: You created a community-focused mapping approach to understanding rural community literacy. Why were you compelled to try this new technique? How does it particularly illuminate rural approaches to literacy?
AMN: I honestly wanted to address that “rhetoric of lack” around rural communities in my field. My hope was to explore, in detail, one rural community’s literacy structures to see what showed up practically, culturally, and historically. I wanted to ask rural professionals what they were doing, what projects they cared about, and how they were accomplishing those projects from their own point of view. I also wanted to talk to many different members of the community to gain multiple perspectives and show, visually, how organizations were working together. There have been a few studies in my field that explored whole communities, but they are rare, and they rarely focus on what professionals and organizations are trying to accomplish. Successes and failures showed up, of course, but the depth of the community network, the level of collaboration involved, says something about rural community strengths that we might leverage in global conversations about sustaining and growing literacy in many different kinds of communities.
Amy McCleese Nichols mapped the complex ways that literacy professionals, broadly defined, worked together to create an array of literacy opportunities. (Map courtesy of Amy McCleese Nichols)
DY: What were some of the community organizations involved in collective literacy in the community you studied? How did they work together in creative ways?
AMN: One of the better examples of multiple partners acting together was in the establishment of a community college branch. While one woman had started bringing individual community college courses to the town, many members of the community supported expanding that idea. At first, a local attorney paid rent for a basement meeting space until a building site could be found, while a local business donated used furniture. A highly connected student in the program used her local connections to encourage more community members to enroll to meet requirements for additional funding. Ultimately, the K-12 school system offered the physical ground where a community college building could be located near the local high school, and a core group of leaders received state-level funding to construct a formal campus that remains to this day, offering important educational and professional opportunities to the community. Even the local resource and conservation development council got involved, offering free landscaping on the new site. Even tracing this one event is very complex; I wouldn’t feel safe to say that I knew of every person involved in that project. It took on a life of its own through the actions of multiple community members.
DY: What surprised you?
AMN: Learning about the unfair way in which the desegregation of Kentucky schools played out in the 1960s-1980s surprised me, along with the discovery of my own ignorance around the racial history of my state. I worried that I would not do justice to the important narratives from some participants of color in the study. I still worry about it, but slowing down the work, doing more research (and self-education) and asking for additional feedback from participants of color to see if my representations were accurate finally helped me feel confident to move forward.
DY: What can small-town residents and rural researchers learn from your work?
AMN: Rural communities, of course, vary by geography, culture, and history, so taking a detailed look at local realities, who is already doing literacy work, who is working with whom, and who is not being served before jumping in with interventions is crucial. The personal and the professional are blurred heavily in small communities. In the community where I live, I am known not just in my work and personal worlds; instead, I am constantly crossing paths with people wearing my various professional and personal hats. Those overlapping roles and the constant informal communication that happens because of them means that word about people who don’t really understand the culture travels quickly around the network. Trust matters, and it can be difficult to hide when the community can see all aspects of your life on display.
While my research focused on literacy, the way small communities network across organizations to maximize literacy offerings has something to offer national and global conversations about human sustainability. Much of the research I’ve read seems to focus on the urban community as a norm. There are millions of people globally for whom urban is not the norm, and it is not feasible to imagine a future where that is true for all people. I would love to see researchers study multiple rural communities with a more developed version of my model – I think seeing community through this mixed-methods lens could continue to improve our understanding of how humans create knowledge and sustain the good life in small communities.
This interview first appeared in Path Finders, a weekly email newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Each Monday, Path Finders features a Q&A with a rural thinker, creator, or doer. Join the mailing list today, to have these illuminating conversations delivered straight to your inbox. Join my email list By clicking submit, you agree to share your email address with the site owner and Mailchimp to receive marketing, updates, and other emails from the site owner. Use the unsubscribe link in those emails to opt out at any time. Processing… Success! You're on the list. Whoops! There was an error and we couldn't process your subscription. Please reload the page and try again.
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