Rural literature teaches rural students to value self, culture

Mar. 7—Dr. Chea Parton remembers her biggest teaching mistake.

She was at a rural school when she asked her students to form groups and discuss Kate Chopin's "The Awakening," a book set in 1890's New Orleans and steeped in late 19th century feminism.

Parton described "The Awakening" as about as far away from 2010 Indiana as one could get.

As she walked among the small groups of students, she came upon two males who she called "self-proclaimed non-readers." They instead were talking about "Where the Red Fern Grows." They reminisced about their hunting dogs and said they wished they could read more books like that.

"They were telling me they liked to read," she said. "And they were telling me what they wanted to read. But I didn't listen. I said 'that's a middle school book. You are sophomores, so could you kindly please go back to pretending to talk about "The Awakening.' Which is shameful on a lot of different levels."

The moment has haunted her ever since.

"It's one of the biggest regrets of my educational career," she said. "So, I feel like the scholarship that I am doing now is an apology to me, an apology to little Chea in the cornfield, an apology to those boys. I should have used my brain to figure out that including their experiences in my curriculum was what they needed to become engaged learners."

Parton, now working remotely from her home in Texas as a visiting assistant professor at Purdue University, has centered her research on how to help both rural teachers and rural students celebrate their culture in the classroom and understand that their experiences matter.

Growing up rural

Parton grew up in Gaston, Ind., a town of nearly 800 people near Muncie.

The only book she could recall reading when she was a child that would be considered rural literature was "Charlotte's Web."

"I always thought that was a stupid book because no farmer is going to save a pig that's gonna put money on the table because some spider learned how to spell," she said. "But my viewpoint wasn't welcomed. We raised hogs. Wilbur is going to processing whether he wants to or not. Farmers have to make money to live. But that perspective wasn't necessarily welcomed in classes."

In sixth grade she read "The Forgotten Door" by Alexander Key, a book she loved. She tried to participate in a class discussion about the book, using what she remembers as possibly being a double negative.

"My teacher didn't pay attention to what I said, the ideas," she said. "She paid attention to how I said it. So, she just corrected my grammar in front of the class and moved on. I learned in that moment that if I wanted people to pay attention to me, I couldn't sound like the people in my family who I loved."

When she graduated high school and attended Purdue, she felt a sense of culture shock. She could fit her entire hometown into her dorm. The only people like her on campus were in the agriculture program. She was an English major.

While working on her Ph.D. at the University of Texas in Austin, she found the city claustrophobic, had trouble navigating parking.

The most difficult part was being a rural person in a program that was urban-focused. She felt the need to change her rural way of speaking.

"It was in that moment when I realized that place has a huge impact on how we navigate the world, on how we see the world, on how the world sees us and how cultural exchange happens or doesn't happen when we cross boundaries," she said.

Rural life is culture

While working on her dissertation and talking with rural teachers she would ask what rural books they taught in their classes.

Most didn't know what rural books were.

Parton did an online search for young adult urban literature and found endless suggestions and lists. She then did a search for young adult rural literature. It brought up four hits, two of them "The Serpent King" by Jeff Zenter.

She started a website, "Literacy in Place", and scoured the web for rural literature. She is now on the Whippoorwill committee, an organization that recognizes 10 young adults books a year for, according to the website, showing the "complexity of rural living by dispelling stereotypes and demonstrating diversity among rural people."

"All of the books that I read that were set in rural areas when I was a kid positioned the rural as something pathologized, something that needed cured or fixed, something inherently wrong about being a country bumpkin, or a redneck or a hillbilly or a hick," she said. "But that's not true."

Because she believed what she read as a child and young adult, she felt she needed to leave her rural home to be somebody. But when she found "The Serpent King" in college she recognized so many of the experiences in the book as being similar to what she had lived. Not only that, Zenter positioned the rural as a way of life, not something one had to be cured of.

"I think a lot of rural people feel neglected and maligned by a system that doesn't recognize their culture as a rich culture or a culture at all," Parton said. "Their language practices are just bad English, which isn't true either. So, I think as a kid, to be able to read a book where you feel seen and you feel like who you are as a human being, where you come from is being honored and recognized as something good, then that makes you feel good. It makes you feel like who you are as a person is an ok person to be and you can do good things in the world as that person whether you are still in your rural community or somewhere else."

Rural knowledge

Parton recognized that she went into teaching at her rural school with the same attitude her own teachers had.

Her teaching philosophy has expanded to understanding that when rural students see themselves in literature that it validates their culture as something that is worth sustaining, growing and evolving.

She said that rural students bring a lot of knowledge from their homes and lives into classrooms. Unfortunately, academia doesn't always recognize that knowledge as valuable, but that doesn't make it any less important.

"So one of the things I wish I would have done differently as a rural teacher—and I hope that rural teachers are doing different than me because they are smarter than me—is rather than to look for the lack, the deficit, look for the assets and use those to build," she said. "Use what students bring with them. Use their love of "Where the Red Fern Grows" to build a reader, to help that reader build a reading life that leaves them feeling fulfilled and helps them learn. Find things that speak to the identities of your students and to the strengths your students already have and use those to continue to build."

"I would have been a much better rural teacher if I had done those things," she said.

Dr. Chea Parton's book, "Country Teachers in City Schools: The Challenge of Negotiating Identity and Place", published by Lexington Books, is expected to release on May 15, 2023. More information about her research can be found at literacyinplace.com She can also be found on Youtube talking about young adult rural literature on her channel "Reading Rural YAL with Dr. Chea Parton."