Introduction: beyond stock photographs – imagining, experiencing, and researching rural education

Editorial introductions to special issues have a number of generic features. They typically include a review of the literature, for example, and a discussion of areas requiring additional research. As we discussed these generic dimensions in preparing to write this paper, we agreed that they should be rightly bypassed in this instance as they have been comprehensively addressed in recent articles published elsewhere (e.g. Pini & Bhopal, 2017; Pini, Carrington, & Adie, 2015; Pini & Mayes, 2015; Pini, Molestane, & Mills, 2014). With a less than secure template, we thus wondered what we might say about the social and cultural dimensions of rural education. In pondering this question we googled the words ‘education’ and ‘rural’. As one of us scrolled through results, which included policy reports, journals, newspaper articles, and academic papers emanating from a general search, another had the wherewithal to place some boundaries around the search by clicking on the tab ‘images’. She was immediately engaged, exclaiming in some amazement at what she had found. We quickly joined in her search.

What we discovered was that an Internet search for ‘rural education’ and then ‘images’¹ elicit a plethora of photographs and graphic illustrations which collectively present a generic, yet sharply defined story of what rural education means, who it is for, and where it takes place. According to stock photographs, rural education is overwhelmingly connected to developing countries. If these images are put to one side, rural education is historical (slates and old wooden desks rather than computers) and very ‘white’. It is also seen as a simple if not unsophisticated endeavour. Children are pictured walking to or from school, or reading a book alone in the landscape. Roads and fields are largely devoid of people and buildings, and otherwise tend to depict a single building or person. The images signifying ‘rural education’ outside of the developing world foreground young children; school buses traversing idyllic, seemingly uninhabited and static landscapes on long empty roads; heritage buildings such as pioneer school houses; and children’s cartoon farm animals. Signifiers of educational advancement and mobility are either absent or confined to spatial mobility within the rural context.

With our interest sufficiently piqued, we quickly wondered what would occur if we lost the descriptor ‘rural’ and simply searched for images of education. Notably, the images are distinctly different. This, in itself, is fascinating suggesting that education is always urban unless otherwise specified. From a pictorial search using the word ‘education’, one is assailed with visually-rich stock-images encompassing ‘word clouds’, graduating university students throwing mortar boards up into the air, and groups of people of various ages and races in well-resourced classroom settings as signified by the number of tablets, laptops, and books. World globes and maps feature in many of the images. The overall, inescapable message is that education is complex, powerful, future oriented, and dynamic. Children are represented as at the start of an educational trajectory – standing in front of a blackboard photographed with mortar boards drawn above their heads in chalk to signify future personal growth and educational attainment. What is communicated is that education is a lifelong, empowering human endeavour closely linked to opportunities, excellence, and success. Indeed, in some images education is represented as a jigsaw piece connected to a matching piece inscribed with the word ‘future’.

The stark contrast in the way ‘rural education’ and ‘education’ are imagined pictorially in stock-images is highlighted by how each uses the book. It is not surprising that, given the Western cultural weight and of ‘books’ as iconic signifiers of education, knowledge and human advancement, that books are a quintessential dimension of the public catalogue of visual representations of both ‘education’ and ‘rural education’. What is surprising, if not profoundly disturbing, is the radical difference in the way in which books are used in representations of ‘education’ and rural education’ (see, for example, Figures 1 and 2).

Figure 1. Image of book from search of ‘rural education’.

Figure 2. Image of book from search of ‘education’.

In urban settings, representations of education books abound: they appear in stacks arranged as stepping stones leading upwards, are densely packed on library shelves, arrayed on desks, and are commonly integrated with other iconic images of culture, advancement, and accrual of knowledge such as, for example, blackboards featuring complex mathematical equations.

Representations of rural education, on the other hand, tend to feature a single book or, at most, two to three books. They are consistently set in the landscape (as exemplified by Figure 1). In these articulations the open book is in some ways out of place; though in the foreground, it is certainly subordinate to the rural setting as the insertion of the flower in its pages makes clear. Rather than constituting a focal point as repository or source of knowledge and education, the lone book when linked to rural education suggests an accompaniment to the idyllic rural. The key focus is the setting. As in Figure 1, these representations of lone books in rural nature evoke romantic connections: one imagines daydreaming in the fields as opposed to ‘serious’ engagement or study. In the rare occasion on which an image of ‘education’ features a single book (see Figure 2), the book as a rich source of knowledge remains abundantly clear. It is important and powerful in its own right.

The meanings given to stock-images, including those that we have discussed above, are clearly not static or singular. Indeed in our own discussions we differed sometimes as to what was ‘meant’ by a photograph. At the same time, as Frosh (2001) has argued, in one of the few critical explorations of stock-images, this is an industry which functions as a core site, not only for the production, but also the cultural circulation of photographic images. Importantly, as he explains, the historical development of this industry and defining characteristics of ‘success’ – principally, the income an image generates which is dependent on its selection by a (maximal) number of users (and imitation by other photographers) – tends to encourage the production/circulation of ‘conservative’ images, that is those with wide and popular appeal. As such, the types of images, we have cited above, are visual global shorthand for ‘education’ and ‘rural education’ and the differences imagined between them. They are consequently powerful visual cues which suggest education is primarily understood as an urban endeavour. Visually, education outside the city limits in the industrial west is almost unimaginable. If indeed it is given pictorial force, it is in romanticised or historical terms, far removed from discourses of achievement, accomplishment and advancement that circulate in visuals associated with the generic term ‘education’.

Frosh (2001) explains that the ‘success’ of a photograph (optimal selection and imitation) produces ‘generic images’, calling forth but offering limited interpretations of social categories such as, for example, ‘The Family’, ‘Work’ and, in our case, ‘Rural Education’. While the stock-images that we have examined include both free and fee-for-use material, this logic of popular/conservative cultural resonance and related privileging of images that reproduce dominant, if not stereotyped meanings, contributes to an ongoing flattening of the social and cultural dimensions of rurality in the context of education. How the papers in this special issue breathe life into this limited and caricatured depiction of ‘rural education’ is addressed in the following section.

Overview of papers

Vanessa Anthony-Stevens and Philip Stevens open this special issue with research on an Indigenous charter school in the southwest of the United States, and an ethnographic study of a near-majority Latino high school in rural Nebraska respectively. In the former, the authors draw on a rich and detailed data set compiled over a number of years charting the operation and premature closure of an Urban Native Middle School (UNMS) serving members of the Tohono O’odham Nation, one of the largest American Indian communities in the United States. As the authors explain, the UNMS was not a neighbourhood school for its clientele. Instead students were either bused to the school from a rural reservation and/or lived in neighbouring semi-rural reservation districts or Indigenous or other urban locations. In mapping the students’ experience of schooling, the authors draw on the notion of ‘reterritorialisation’ arguing that the UNMS provided the space for students to create new identities across the bifurcated notions of rural/urban and Indigenous/western. They explain, however, that this type of transformation is not valued in the current neoliberal educational realm where outcomes are defined only in relation to results in high stakes testing. Thus, despite the qualitative and community infused changes elicited by UNMS, it was closed because of poor test results.

Dominant imaginings of rurality as white are further challenged by Jesssica Sierk who uses cosmopolitanism as a lens to explore a school in the rural Midwest of the United States with a large Hispanic population. The young people interviewed by Sierk demonstrate a sophisticated and insightful knowledge of rurality as dynamic and plural. As one comments, ‘There are many different types of rural.’ They express a pride and positivity about diversity in their community and view their experience of difference as critical to their immediate and future educational success. Sierk highlights that any unilateral response to addressing rural education will fail as there are many different rurals which need to be taken into account in terms of policy. Such a call to multiplicity sits uncomfortably alongside the ways in which rural education is homogenised visually in the types of representations discussed earlier. There is clearly a considerable chasm to overcome to merge the multiplicity of rural living with how rural living is conceptualised and constructed – not merely in terms of images – but also in relation to public policy.

While the collection of stock-images which emerge from the search term ‘rural education’ and ‘education’ differ racially in very pronounced ways, there is also a difference in relation to sexuality. Overall, sexuality is largely muted in both. It is the case however, that some heterosexual images appear in photos elicited from a search of ‘rural education’, but no such images emerge in a search on ‘education’. The heterosexual images associated with ‘rural education’ are of adult couples. They are conservative and familial and tied to farming. In one of the first images elicited a young heterosexual couple are pictured wearing jeans and checked shirts, leaning into each other and against a barnyard full of dairy cows. In another photograph a mother and daughter hold a cob of corn in a field with a male (presumably the father) tending the crop behind. Afforded no recognition in the images are the lives of queer youth living in rural spaces. In contrast, in their contribution to this special issue Wendy Keys, Elizabeth Marshall, and Barbara Pini demonstrate that Young Adult Fiction is an arena which is today giving important social and cultural visibility to rural queer youth. The authors examine three contemporary novels for young adults which feature lesbian protagonists living outside the city. They focus specifically on how rural space is represented in the texts. While one of the books suggests that queer and rural are antagonistic, the remaining two texts provide evidence that a fulfilled queer life can also be a rural life.

Just as the stock-images of people in ‘rural education’ are coded heterosexual, so too are they coded as middle-class. This is conveyed socially and culturally (although ownership of property as a marker of class is also evident). Thus, we can ‘read’ class status through signifiers such as deportment, dress, and actions. As with the authors of the previous paper, Carissa Massey offers a corrective to this visual hegemony with an analysis of the reality program Here Comes Honey Boo Boo which aired from 2012 to 2014. Massey demonstrates that Honey Boo Boo and her family were depicted as uncouth and outlandish. As emblematic ‘white trash’, they were positioned as the antithesis of the virtuous and moral middle-class family.

The disjuncture between the narratives of rural education captured by contributors to this special issue and imaginings of rurality is further pronounced in Sherilyn Lennon’s paper. In an exemplary ethnographic study of a small Australian rural community in which she was employed as a teacher, Lennon unveils a culture of gender-based violence and harassment. It is a portrait of rurality far removed from the idyllic representations of rural education on stock-images. A less overt departure from the images is also evident in Lennon’s paper in her detailing of a classroom intervention against normative gender regimes. Rural education, as depicted in the images, is not about complex, critical pedagogy and curriculum. In fact, teachers rarely appear in images once the descriptor ‘rural’ is inserted before education. Lennon inserts the otherwise absent teacher into debates about rural education revealing the important role they may play as change agents in rural schools and the broader communities of which they are part. Simultaneously she recognises the challenges teachers may face in rural areas as they manage conflicting subject positions and the power relations in which they are embedded as rural residents.

A more sophisticated rendering of pedagogy in relation to rural education is a topic furthered by Anne Cassidy in which she examines the role of the farm as an educative tool in the development of place attachments among Irish farm youth. The paper utilises interviews with 30 Irish university students raised on Irish family farms who did not intend to become full-time farmers in the future. Cassidy shows how deep emotional connections to place are established and maintained over a life-time for family farm offspring who will not succeed to landholding. The pedagogies through which this occurs include foundational narratives of sacrifice and labour around the farm’s establishment by previous generations. Also important pedagogically are parental memories of the farm and the offspring’s own childhood memories of the farm, including the gaining of farming and local area knowledge. Cassidy’s analysis provides new insight into the continuities (and potential discontinuities) in succession norms in family farming, as non-successors are educated to become emotionally attached to the farm and thus to reject its sale.

The theme of the educative force of emotions is extended in this special issue’s next paper by Matthew Cole and Kate Stewart. As we have done in examining stock-images, and as other authors in this special issue also do (Keys et al., and Massey), Cole and Stewart take popular culture seriously in seeking to enhance knowledge about rural education. The focus for their analysis is the farming simulation game Hay Day. Through a careful and close reading of the game, Cole and Stewart reveal how it presents farming in idyllic terms with no reference to non-human animals’ birth, maturation, sexual reproduction, relationships, or death. Furthering softening of the realities of farming occurs via the cartoon and anthropomorphic depiction of the farming animals. Importantly, the authors show that the game not only mobilises discourses about the nature of farming (as ‘happy’ and ‘caring’), but more broadly, the necessity of Western norms of animal use for food. Games such as Hay Day are thus crucial pedagogic tools for industrial agriculture and require further ongoing critique and challenge.

The final three papers in this special issue address the broad theme of mobilities in varying ways. As highlighted in the opening section of the paper, mobility is given visual emphasis in stock-images associated with ‘rural education’ but it is a very instrumental and circumscribed notion of mobility. It is about walking along a long, dusty road or travelling on a school bus. However, as Robyn Mayes and Ruth McAreavey, Michael Corbett and Martin Forsey and Nicole Gerada Power demonstrate, questions of rural education invoke much more complex geographies than these visuals suggest.

Robyn Mayes and Ruth McAreavey explore mobilities in rural education attending labour migration in new immigration destinations in rural Australia and Northern Ireland. Their analysis of migrant women’s encounters with informal and formal education highlights the heterogeneity of actors in rural education while also foregrounding the cultural and social roles of informal adult education in rural communities. The authors point to the ways in which experiences and perceptions of rural places are closely entwined with experiences of education, just as mobility/ies in the context of rural education encompasses much more than the ‘local’ bus journey to and from school.

In a paper which further complicates understandings of mobilities and rural education Michael Corbett and Martin Fossey present case study data from two rural areas with differing economic circumstances – one from Atlantic Canada which has experienced a long period of economic decline and one from the Pilbara in the north of Western Australia which has enjoyed a period of economic boom. What emerges from the cross case analysis is that youth are positioned as central figures in economic discourses about both rural areas, and that their mobility or immobility is always problematic.

The labelling of rural youth, and their employment and educational choices, as problems are further examined in the final paper by Nicole Gerarda Power. As with the previous two papers, mobility (or immobility) is a central focus of the study which is based on interviews and focus groups with trainers, apprentices, pre-apprentices, and tradespeople in rural parts of the easterly province of Canada, Newfoundland, and Labrador. In echoes of Corbett and Fossey’s findings, Power writes that rural youth receive mixed messages about staying and going. She concludes with a salutary argument that framing rural places primarily in economic terms – and, by association, rural youth as industrial fodder for capitalism – ignores structural inequalities which mediate access to training and education.

Conclusion

In this special issue, authors speak back to the stock-images of ‘rural education’ as being largely a concern to developing countries or to developed nations only if considered historically. They similarly counter the notion that rural education in industrial nations is centred on a narrow range of actors, that is, white children from farms. They draw queer and classed lines through the photographs exploring representations of rural youth whose lives are marginal in the stock-images emerging from a search of ‘rural education’. Alongside this work contributors contest characterisations of rural education as simple and unsophisticated showing not only its complexity within the classroom, but also beyond in embedding it in explorations of patrilineal inheritance on family farms, international migration, and globalisation and economic restructuring. Collectively the types of robust, complicated, and multifaceted imaginings and experiences of the confluence between ‘rural’ and ‘education’ documented within these pages invite further engagement and investigation. We look forward to continuing the conversation.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. All images discussed and cited in this paper were found at https://stock.adobe.com/au/search on 3 January 2017.