Catharine Biddle and Erin McHenry-Sorber, graduates of the Educational Leadership doctoral program in the Penn State College of Education, both chose the program out of a desire to deepen their understanding of rural education issues. Biddle and McHenry-Sorber have channeled the knowledge and experience they gained through the program into roles as co-authors of the National Rural Education Association’s (NREA) National Rural Education Association Research Agenda 2022–2027.
NREA, according to its website, is the “voice of all rural schools and rural communities across the United States.” The 2022–2027 Rural Research Agenda centers spatial and educational equity with five additional interconnected themes — policy and funding; teacher/leader recruitment, retention and preparation; college and career trajectory; community partnerships and relationships; and health and wellness.
“The purpose of the agenda is to help scholars point their agendas in the direction that practitioners need them to,” said Biddle, associate professor of educational leadership at the University of Maine. “One measure of success is in five years we have more case studies of rural innovation that pinpoint transferable and unique qualities of those innovations.”
Prepared by a subcommittee for NREA’s Research and Higher Education Committee, the agenda was guided by research data collected from a broad representation of rural education stakeholders. Biddle’s and McHenry-Sorber’s collaborators include researchers from the U.S. Division of Education Development Center, Ohio University, Utah State University and Montana State University.
“We are trying to make what has been an academic construct more accessible for practitioners and policymakers as well as researchers,” added McHenry-Sorber, an associate professor of higher education administration at West Virginia University who received her doctorate from Penn State in 2011. “The goal is for policymakers to have a common language to use when talking about rural youth’s access to opportunities and resources.”
As doctoral students, Biddle and McHenry-Sorber benefited from the mentorship of faculty members such as Kai Schafft, professor of education (educational leadership and rural sociology), who directs the college’s Center for Rural Education and Communities and serves as an associate editor for the Journal of Research in Rural Education.
“Cat and Erin both came to Penn State because of their interest in rural education and worked with me, both deeply connected to the Center on Rural Education and Communities,” said Schafft. “It’s tremendously gratifying to me to have worked with them. When people talk about contemporary rural education scholarship, Erin and Cat’s research and outreach is really at the forefront of work in this area.”
Biddle said one of the major issues that the NREA subcommittee seeks to address with the National Rural Education Association Research Agenda 2022–2027 is the concept of spatial equity, which refers to the equitable distribution of resources across space.
“A lot of policy is designed with more urban/suburban places in mind,” she said. “One of the pieces of work we’re hoping the rural education research agenda will do is make this a more commonplace way of thinking about opportunities and challenges of educational equity within rural spaces.”
“This is not a trivial issue given the kinds of changes we’ve seen in this country over the last two decades, in which these spatial disparities have resulted in real urban/rural divides,” said Schafft. “How do we think about these spatial divisions, these social/econ spatial divisions and what are the implications for the health of our democracy?”
Another major area of focus with the agenda, said McHenry-Sorber, is to show the relationships between the various challenges rural education leaders are experiencing to establish suggested lines of inquiry for future lines of research.
“We are intentional that not all rural places are the same. We recognize the unique challenges and assets that can be attributed to particular rural schools and communities,” she said.
The rural education research field has undergone several major shifts in thinking in recent years, according to Schafft. In the past decade, rural education research has shifted to thinking about racial equity in rural areas, dismantling a long-held stereotype that rural America is a mostly white space. Another common misconception, Schafft added, is that poverty is exclusively an urban phenomenon, when, in fact, “poverty has always been higher in non-metropolitan America.”
“There are pervasive stereotypes about rural people being behind the times, not as competent,” said Schafft. “The perception of them as leaders is often colored by anti-rural biases we have in this country.”
Biddle and McHenry-Sorber both sought out the Educational Leadership program in the College of Education out of a desire to expand their knowledge of pressing rural education issues.
“I grew up in a rural place and worked in rural schools and became interested in relationships between rural schools and communities,” said McHenry-Sorber, who taught high school English and middle school reading and worked as a school district grant writer. “I entered into the doctoral program at a transition point for rural education research. I think Kai was really important in helping those early transitions of the field and becoming a much more critical space for scholarship.”
For Biddle, who previously served as the executive director of the Nanubhai Education Foundation, an international education nonprofit working in rural India, and as an out-of-school-time educator for the national nonprofit organization Citizen Schools, she was “looking for a program that would let me think about rural issues domestically and internationally.”
“I found the perfect adviser in Kai, who had his feet in both worlds,” she said. “I received incredible mentorship from Kai and other faculty members. I really feel like so much of the skill development occurred outside of classroom through mentoring relationships.”
In addition to the flexible curriculum and strong mentoring relationships that Biddle and McHenry-Sorber benefited from during their doctoral programs, they had the opportunity to serve as managing editors of the Journal of Research in Rural Education (JREE) in consecutive terms between 2008 and 2012. JREE is a peer-reviewed, open access e-journal publishing original pieces of scholarly research of demonstrable relevance to educational issues within rural settings.
“The program was flexible enough to really allow you to focus on your interests and merge interests together,” said McHenry-Sorber. “We were not only engaging in research and courses but also able to be consistently involved in the publication of current research in rural education.”