Assimilation, Resistance, Rapprochement, and Loss: Response to Woodrum, Faircloth, Greenwood, and Kelly

To begin I would like to thank Michael Barbour for suggesting this themed issue in the Journal of Research in Rural Education. I would also like to thank Kai Schafft for taking up this suggestion and recruiting such an outstanding group of scholars concerned with rural education broadly defined. These scholars suggest in similar yet different ways that we need to think more broadly about what rural means and indeed how the connections between people and place matter. As each commentator seems to agree, all manner of these connections are currently under threat. In addition to the established historical stories of dispossession so well articulated by each author, contemporary economic upheavals have destabilized the connection between people and place secured by stable financial systems and real estate markets. Little seems certain these days and rural North America feels the heat disproportionately, as usual. Further, each of the commentators seeks to problematize simplistic notions of rurality, thinking through what it is that more nuanced understandings of the rural and place might point toward in education. This is the kind of theorizing we need in rural education at this moment. The most powerful thread in the commentaries is the consistent focus on issues around the education in Aboriginal communities and the potential for dialogue between educational scholars in rural education and in Aboriginal education. It is perhaps here that we might find space to pursue Paul Theobald (1997) and Chet Bowers' (2006) vision of imagining a non-commodified commons of/in education. I think this is exciting and suggests that a future set of articles in this journal might be devoted to exploring this connection further. It has been my impression that one of the biggest problems with the idea of the rural is the way that it has tended to have an exclusive focus on a monoethnic farming demographic. Without getting into convoluted debates about what counts as rural, suffice it to say that people who are connected to the land and sea in a variety of ways and for a variety of historical reasons often have similar kinds of struggles. It is obvious that the longstanding struggles of Aboriginal people represent particularly strong claims to connection between specific cultural, environmental, productive, and spiritual practices and so I am gratified that three of the four responses to Learning to Leave deal with these questions specifically and directly.1 The other piece takes up questions of alterity and identity in different ways, I think troubling the idea that people and place ought to be intimately connected and suggesting that learning to leave a variety of social and physical spaces represents an important objective for contemporary rural schooling. Assimilation I think Arlie Woodrum's piece (2009), speaking forcefully to the assimilatory project of modern education, probably comes closest to my own analysis of the challenges faced by rural people-be they situated in Appalachia, New Mexico, or Atlantic Canada. Woodrum situates the problem historically, tracing the history of immigration to New Mexico as well as the history of schooling and curriculum in the United States. Interestingly the one chapter from the dissertation upon which Learning to Leave was based that is not in the trade book recounts a similar history in Canada.2 What my chapter failed to address was the schooling of Aboriginal people in Canada, and it is wonderful to see Woodrum take his argument in this direction. Rural education is indeed more complex than perhaps my book allows and there is a particular danger in a community study to treat the community as a space cut off from other overlapping spaces. This is a very important critique of place-based education generally and various attempts to rethink or revive simplistic notions of community in social theory (Bauman, 2001) and in educational thought (Nespor, 2008). Woodrum also seems to wonder if there is any hope for a different kind of education, or a different way of doing school that is not an assimilatory project or that does not disembed and displace people. …

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