El papel describe un curso para graduados que despliega materiales instruccionales innovadores (por ejemplo, el uso de novelas para proporcionar contexto para constructos teóricos) y actividades de aprendizaje (por ejemplo, ventaja de comunidad que traza) comprometer asuntos de liderazgo en ajustes rurales. Antes de describir el curso mismo, el papel desarrolla una base para la importancia de enfoques de liderazgo que acentúan la receptividad y la atención culturales colocar y el contexto (Johnson, 2007; Johnson, Thompson, & Naugle, 2009). Además de una revisión de la literatura pertinente de varias disciplinas académicas (por ejemplo, la sociología, la antropología, la economía, las ciencias políticas) proporcionar fondo y desarrollar un vocabulario compartido y armazones conceptuales, el curso combina textos de académico asuntos notables que simpáticos de la política y la práctica en la educación rural con representaciones ficticias apropiadamente posicionadas de contextos rurales para proporcionar una base común para discutir las interrelaciones entre comunidades rurales y escuelas rurales.

Educational leadership happens within particular places—i.e., within the intersecting and layered geographic and cultural contexts of school, community, and region. Traditional leadership models tend not to be attentive to culture, context or place (English, 2005; Howley & Howley, 2007; Ryan, 2005), and can be problematic for that reason—particularly in rural communities where place embodies a land ethic (Leopold, 1949) and where the legitimate authority of leaders (Weber, 1924/1968) is embedded in the history and culture of the place (Johnson, Hess, Larson, & Wise, 2010; Johnson, Shope, & Roush, 2009). Rural communities contend with many of the same challenges faced by their urban and suburban counterparts (e.g., fiscal stress, recruiting and retaining quality teachers and leaders, demographic shifts in the student population, high stakes accountability pressures); those challenges tend to be exacerbated in rural communities, however, due to (a) rural characteristics like remoteness and population sparsity that make it difficult to implement the kinds of programs and services that are typically deployed in the service of improving schools and (b) one-size-fits-all policy contexts that make it difficult for leaders to utilize the attributes and resources that rural contexts afford.

To work effectively within rural communities, educational leaders need a broad operational definition of community asset and must be able to identify and engage human as well as institutional assets within their local communities (Beaulieu, 2002). As operationalized here, a community asset is an existing element of the community (a natural environment, a physical structure, an organization, an individual, etc.) that offers the potential for benefitting both the element itself and those who engage it. An example would be a wetlands that offers the school an opportunity to do outdoor science projects that include water quality testing that can ultimately provide benefits to community well-being (while engaging students in authentic learning). In other words, leaders must be attentive to place. Leaders who utilize a place-conscious model of leadership emphasize responsive practice (as opposed to best practice), engage community members in decision-making and governance, increase stakeholder capacity, and ensure sustainability (Johnson, Thompson, & Naugle, 2009), resulting in positive educational outcomes for students.

This paper presents a conceptual/pedagogical model for a recently developed graduate course deploying innovative instructional materials and activities to examine leadership in rural settings. The course explicitly considers the nature of and potentiality for relationships between schools and rural communities, and construes educational leadership as a vehicle for contributing to the well-being and vitality of both educational institutions and the communities they serve. The following essential questions provide structure for the teaching and learning activities.

The course content and conceptual underpinnings are interdisciplinary, with material drawn from across the social sciences: education, sociology, anthropology, geography, and political science.

In terms of sequencing, the current iteration of the course follows a survey course engaging leadership theory and another course exploring organization theory and organizational change. Positioned as such, the course operates under the assumption that students have a solid grounding in traditional approaches to leadership in educational organizations, and is intended to prompt critical reflection and re-investigation of common assumptions and understandings.

As a required course in a doctoral program (Ed.D.) in educational leadership that primarily enrolls practicing educational leaders, the course is presented in full-day sessions held over several Saturdays as part of a weekend cohort delivery model. In addition to the face-to-face class meetings, the course engages students through multiple avenues to build upon the sense of community that develops within the cohort of Educational Administration doctoral students. For example, students participate in structured conversations outside of the class through the use of Blackboard in three ways: (a) discussion of formal questions and discussion topics posed by the instructor (b) discussion of topics and prompts initiated by other students that reflect issues of policy, practice, and context directly and indirectly related to the course content, and (c) discussion of topics and shared materials (e.g., outside readings, current news items) posted to Blackboard by individual groups prior to group presentations to encourage reflection and function as an advance organizer for class discussion.

The course includes some fairly traditional learning activities designed to reinforce knowledge acquisition and application (readings, a book review, leading a class discussion about one of the shorter readings), along with innovative activities designed to engage students in the kind of contextual approach to leadership that the course seeks to promote and support. The section of this paper describing course activities highlights two primary learning activities: (a) community description and policy analysis, and (b) a community asset mapping activity in order to call attention to their innovative application in a course on rural leadership.

Course content draws on varied social sciences (e.g., sociology, anthropology, economics, political science) to develop a multifaceted theoretical framework through which students can consider leadership that is responsive to rural contexts and seeks to overcome uniquely rural challenges by building on uniquely rural opportunities. The approach is not limited to rural contexts, however, and has application to other settings—particularly in low resource communities. In addition to engaging relevant empirical works that provide a general grounding for understanding rural community dynamics, the course combines the use of texts engaging salient issues of policy and practice in rural education (Carr & Kefalas, 2009; Corbett, 2007; DeYoung, 1995) with appropriately positioned fictional representations of rural contexts (Berry, 2001; Drury, 2006; Proulx, 1999) to provide a common foundation for discussing the interrelationships between rural communities and rural schools. The following sections offer descriptions of the readings comprising each of the three categories, with an emphasis on how the pieces fit together to build a cumulative learning experience and encourage a layered perspective on leadership in a particular context.

In its current iteration, the course is taught as part of a doctoral program in educational leadership and thus is not subject to accreditation standards (e.g., Educational Leadership Constituents Council or ELCC). The course could be readily adapted for use in superintendent or principal licensure programs, however, as indicated by its alignment with established standards (National Policy Board for Educational Administration, 2002). While the course content and activities support and reinforce all six ELCC standards, the focus on community and context is especially pertinent for building knowledge and capacity for application in the leadership areas described by standard four (candidates who complete the program are educational leaders who have the knowledge and ability to promote the success of all students by collaborating with families and other community members, responding to diverse community interests and needs, and mobilizing community resources) and standard six (candidates who complete the program are educational leaders who have the knowledge and ability to promote the success of all students by understanding, responding to, and influencing the larger political, social, economic, legal, and cultural context). Moreover, in addition to shaping program content, the community asset mapping activity presents the basis for an ELCC key assessment (e.g., assessment #7 covering organizational management and community relations, for which the current version of the community asset mapping project would meet the following ELCC elements: 1.4, 1.5, 1.6, 3.1, 3.2, 3.3, 4.1, 4.2, 4.3, 5.1, 5.3, 6.1, 6.2, and 6.3).

The readings selected for this course bring awareness to the challenges facing rural schools and communities, but encourage educational leaders to work against the deficit thinking that often pervades discussions of rurality and to instead consider rurality from an assets-based perspective. In this course, blending empirical works with fictional texts provides a common foundation and context for discussing the challenges facing rural schools and communities (e.g. the influence of poverty on schools and communities, demographic shifts in student populations, and educational policies that too often impede rather than contribute to the development of social capital), as well as the interrelationships between schools and communities.

Although the specific context and content of this course is rural, the underlying approach can be applied in other settings (particularly under-resourced settings), including urban environments. Indeed, reading material that would support a parallel inquiry into leadership in urban contexts—both empirical and fictional readings—abound. The activities described within this paper provide educational leaders with the opportunity to build relationships with community members through substantive and meaningful work with and within their communities (i.e. community asset mapping). Cultivating the dispositions, knowledge, and skills to value and enlist members of the leaders’ own local communities (i.e. seeing community members as assets) in improving the school as well as the community itself is a worthwhile pursuit for programs preparing educational leaders for any locale.

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