IAP BOOK SERIES

Current Research in Rural and Regional Education

Call for Proposals

Information Age Press is currently soliciting proposals for book-length manuscripts that present scholarship in rural and regional education. This series comprises research that highlights contemporary scholarship in the field of rural and regional education. The series will feature original work that addresses current research and critical questions in rural/regional education from an international perspective. Current Research in Rural and Regional Education offers new, substantive contributions composed by established and emerging scholars in the field. While there is great diversity, rurality represents a space of educational inequality that affects, in one way or another, millions of children, and approximately one-in-five children in advanced capitalist democracies. Of course, the proportion of people living rurally is much higher in the global south, which makes the topic of rural education increasingly relevant in a globalized, mobile, and networked world.

The spatial turn in social and educational theory has been widely influential and generative to scholarship, policy and practice. At the same time this increased attention to geography has tended to reproduce what might be called a metrocentric bias. There has been much needed attention to cities, as a central phenomenon in contemporary global capitalism. Nevertheless, there has been far less attention given to spaces outside the metropolis. This series will highlight emerging international work in the field of rural education today. Rural citizens represent an under-studied, marginal and often misunderstood population group. This series attempts to address this gap in the literature by contributing new analysis of specific rural research initiatives and by offering meta-analysis of contemporary work in rural education.

The series includes two specific strands.

Strand 1
Globalizing the local and localizing the global
The first strand is entitled globalizing the local and localizing the global and it takes up contemporary challenges that appear in the global-local nexus. Rural education scholarship is now emerging from a persistent tendency toward localization and immersion in the particular struggles of local school communities and regional place-sensitive emphases. While this local emphasis continues to be important in rural education research, the field is internationalizing and new questions arise in the wake of ubiquitous and unavoidable effects of globalization which simultaneously influences life in multiple and seemingly disconnected places. Work in this strand considers the ways in which rural places represent both face-to-face locales and part of larger sociospatial networks at the same time. The general intent in this strand is to present work that advances the field of rural education into the mainstream of theoretical and policy-related debates in social science and educational research.

Strand 2
Curriculum and pedagogy in rural education
The second strand addresses issues of curriculum and pedagogy in rural education. These texts focus on pragmatic policy and practice issues associated with rural education, including the related issue of rural teacher education. Here we invite analysis that takes up questions of rural teaching practices, curriculum in and for rural areas, partnerships and alliances in rural education, and questions of assessment with a rural focus. Work in this strand features authors who have developed locally focussed research projects in rural education contexts particularly in the emerging area of rural literacies, and place based pedagogies. While scholarship in this strand is typically local and place-sensitive analysis, it also attends critically to the way that contemporary rural education is increasingly connected to larger geographies. This work not only connects scholarship to teaching practice, it also connects that practice to the importance of space and place to theory building and methodological research orientations.

Current Research in Rural and Regional Education present authors with an opportunity to make important contributions that advances knowledge in the field of rural education and in educational and social science scholarship more generally. We are particularly interested in proposals that feature international linkages, and work in rural education relating to the global south.