Abstract
One of the challenges that rural schools face is a lack of school change models developed from a rural standpoint that position schools and their organizational improvement as a critical component of rural community development policy. This case study of the Rural Aspirations Project draws on an evaluation of their decade of work with 18 small and rural schools in Maine to provide curriculum support and responsive professional development. Positioning their work as a revelatory case, this article explores the organization’s embodiment of a central component of care theory—mutuality—and the ways in which this principle enabled ecologies of care between school leaders, teachers, students and their communities as they enacted rural school design to subvert the modern school model and better inflect education around the needs of rural communities. The study draws on 20 interviews with school leaders, teachers, and community partners to understand the ways in which the design-centered approach to working with school staff (a) subverted the effects of rural school leadership turnover, (b) created new possibilities for codesigning community vitality, and (c) centered youth futures in rural places as an achievable reality. The study demonstrates a model of critical rural hope, achieved through mutuality and care, and presents a counternarrative to discourses of rural decline and school closure.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Recommended Citation
Biddle, C.
(2025).
Rural School Redesign: Enacting Care and Mutuality Through Responsive Professional Development.
The Rural Educator, 46(4), 17-34.
https://doi.org/10.55533/2643-9662.1636
