ABSTRACT
Hydraulic fracturing has altered the face of rural communities across the United States, creating new demands for educational leaders. This in-depth qualitative study explores how rural educational leaders in a heavily drilled community experience and respond to these challenges with a focus on increased local student transiency, homelessness, and the influx of newcomers, including English language learners. The research finds that leaders respond to transient outsider needs through a discourse of compliance and engage in contextually responsive, collaborative responses to meet the needs of community insiders. The authors find little evidence of critical place-conscious leadership in this rapidly changing social and economic context.
Notes
1. Critical place-conscious leadership, critical place-based leadership, and critical leadership of place are used interchangeably in this study, as all terms are found in the literature. At other times, the terms place-based education, place-conscious education, and place-based pedagogy are utilized in the literature.
2. Furman and Gruenewald (Citation2004, p. 58) rely on Berg and Dasmann’s (Citation1990) definition of reinhabitation as “learning to live-in-place in an area that has been disrupted and injured through past exploitation” (p. 35).
3. Pseudonyms were assigned to all place and people in the study.
4. This report can be accessed at http://files.dep.state.pa.us/PublicParticipation/MarcellusShaleAdvisoryCommission/MarcellusShaleAdvisoryPortalFiles/MSAC_Final_Report.pdf
5. While no respondents overtly discussed racism, some of their descriptions of community outsiders align with Tatum’s (Citation2013) conceptualization of “otherness” on the basis of race, ethnicity, or other markers of difference that creates some form of oppression for the “othered” group. Similarly, the majority of participants seemed unaware of the negative implications of their actions or beliefs on these community outsiders, akin to Roppolo’s (Citation2013) use of “dysconscious racism” to explain engagement in oppressive practice without cognizance that it is, in fact, marginalizing or discriminatory.