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Discourses Of The Rural Rust Belt: Schooling, Poverty, And Rurality, Alexandra Panos, Jennifer Seelig

Teaching and Learning Faculty Publications

This article addresses the ways in which elementary teachers in the rural rust belt both reproduce and contest dominant discourses of schooling, rurality, and poverty in their particular local context. Situated within a 4-year postcritical ethnographic study, this analysis of teacher discourse took part during an embedded, 4-month-long teacher study group. Within this context, the authors examine how the group’s discourse on poverty claimed that inequity was the fault of those experiencing it, as well as that a neoliberal discourse of education emphasized a flattened accountability and growth-only perspective within teacher’s professional interactions. However, through the addition of a spatial …