Teaching about Native artworks as part of school arts curriculum can serve to pass on traditional ecological knowledge while also contextualizing colonialism's influence on traditional and contemporary Native arts practices. This article explores how schools can actively engage in community arts partnerships with American Indians who have…

In contemporary life and education, the local is marginalized in favor of large-scale economies of consumption that are indifferent to ecological concerns. The consequences of neglecting local human and natural communities include a degraded habitat, loss of wilderness, alienation, rootlessness, and lack of connection to communities. Critical…

In current research, place is a concept with multiple meanings, rich with personal, socio-cultural, historical, and political complexities. Through a phenomenological investigation of place meanings with preservice art teachers, I weave my narrative as a writer with my role as an artist/teacher/researcher who examines their performance art as one…

This article advocates for art curriculum to be guided by the goal of challenging the discrimination, stigmatization, marginalization, and medicalization of disabled people. The Disability Arts Movement provides an important site through which to engage students in exploring the sociopolitical issue of ableism in art curriculum. The pedagogical…

"Art practice as research" casts artmaking as inquiry--as a particularly experiential and constructivist process of learning in which imaginative synthesis and creative image making are ways of constructing knowledge. This article explores how artmaking functions as research through the creation of visual images, especially images that picture…

This article discusses the results of a one-year study in a physically isolated school community in Queensland, Australia. The decision-making processes in the selection of school subjects became the focus for interviews conducted with the school community (students, parents, and teachers) and the vehicle for identifying the held conceptions of…

Although several art educators have called our attention to the importance of studying visual culture, others have widened the discussion to include material culture and its effects on our lives. Because of growing concern for the value of exploring the personal and social functions of visual and material culture, the purpose of this article is to…

This article examines major threats to the validity of Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) in the context of rural schools. Although rural students and their schools made significant academic progress in the past on national and state assessments, the current goal of AYP turns out to be highly unrealistic for them unless states set far lower…

We examine collaborative efforts by employers to provide job training in rural areas and assess how this collaboration affects the willingness of employers to train workers. Data are drawn from a telephone survey conducted in 2001 of a stratified random sample of 1,590 nonmetropolitan firms in the U.S. The literature on job training suggests that…

Professional development practices implemented in rural school systems have often led nowhere. These practices seem to produce adult learning activities with few results other than participants' mounting frustration and another innovation left by the wayside. To encourage the development of productive professional development, many studies are…

Twenty-six work-bound, college-able, rural high school seniors were interviewed regarding their post-high-school aspirations, their views of the transitions associated with leaving high school, and the processes by which they came to think of themselves as work-bound. One of several emergent themes is presented: students' perspectives of the real…

This article examines some of the social, technical, and economic issues encountered in the implementation of an educational technology at an Australian regional university. Reference is made to the implementation of the videoconferencing network at Central Queensland University (CQU). In late 1996 when the implementation process was completed the…

This study explored the social networks and sources of social support for rural high-school adolescents and how these are related to educational and psychological outcomes. We examined quality, frequency. and nature of social relationships of high school students to understand how size, density, heterogeneity, compositional quality of social…

Educators are typically people who have much to offer their profession as well as the communities in which they work. This article analyzes the strategies used to develop a university postgraduate education program that involved input from stakeholders representing different educational systems in regional and rural Australia. The results indicate…

This opening article in this special issue about Australian rural education research develops three key points. First, the Australian literature reflects the complexities of defining the terms "regional," "rural," and "remote," with many definitions deriving from a fixed and disabling urban-rural binary. That literature also contains a number of…