This is the second blog in our Rural Teaching Preparation series in which we have conversations on preparing and supporting rural teachers. In our first blog, rural expert Dr. Devon Brenner shared why preparing teachers for rural schools requires learning about rural communities’ assets and the unique responsibilities of rural teaching.
New teachers get surprisingly little information on how to learn about rural communities.
Dr. Ann K. Schulte saw this firsthand while preparing future teachers at California State University, Chico. She recalled one former preservice teacher describing driving into a rural community each morning, parking at the school, teaching all day, and driving home to Chico.
“‘I never really thought about spending any time there,’” Schulte said the teacher later told her.
That stuck with her.
If rural teachers rarely venture beyond the school building, they can miss the people, places, histories, and local strengths that shape their students’ lives. They may also carry assumptions about rural communities that they have never had reason to question.
Schulte wanted future teachers to do something different. So she sent them for a walk.
Community walks became a transformative assignment in Chico State’s rural teacher preparation work. The idea was straightforward: spend time in the community, pay close attention, talk with people, and reflect on what you learn.
Despite the name, a community walk does not have to happen entirely on foot. In rural communities where homes, businesses, schools, and gathering places may be spread across a wide geographic area, teachers might drive between locations as part of exploring the community.
The goal was deeper than getting familiar with area. For teachers, learning to see a community more fully can change how they understand the students in their classrooms and what they recognize as possible in their teaching.
“What you think about this place, that is how you see your students,” Schulte said. “Your students are from this place.”
Schulte, a coauthor of Teaching in Rural Places, 2nd Edition, spent years preparing teachers at California State University, Chico. Her own connection to rural education reaches back further. She grew up in Yankton, South Dakota, and taught for eight years in small towns in South Dakota and Iowa before eventually moving into teacher education.
Her thinking about rural preparation sharpened when Chico State launched a rural teacher residency program.
The program was placing future teachers in rural communities, but Schulte found herself asking a basic question: What was the program actually doing to prepare those teachers specifically for rural places?
Simply arriving at a rural school did not automatically help candidates understand the community around it. Like Schulte described, some drove into the school parking lot in the morning, taught all day, and drove home without spending meaningful time in the community. Others arrived with misconceptions about what rural communities lacked, or the assumption that students would eventually need to leave the community to find success in life.
Schulte wanted future teachers to look more carefully, and she found community walks were a powerful way to do it.
Teachers interpret students through what they believe about students’ families, communities, opportunities, and futures. A teacher who sees a community mainly through its deficits can carry that view into the classroom. A teacher who takes time to understand what people value, how the community works, and where its strengths live has a fuller picture of the students sitting in front of them.
As part of the assignment, Schulte encouraged preservice teachers to have coffee or lunch at a local café and start a conversation. They could ask, “What do you love about this community?” “What would you like a new teacher to know?” or “What helps kids thrive here?”
Learning about a community also means paying attention to local norms and approaching people and places respectfully. Teachers should consider where visitors are welcome, how people typically connect with one another, and when it is appropriate to enter a space or start a conversation.
Schulte’s preservice teachers visited local museums and businesses. They paid attention to public spaces, gathering places, local industries, churches, and other institutions that shaped community life. They talked with residents as well as school staff.
Schulte also had them draw community maps. Some questioned why they should draw one when they could simply pull one up online. But she kept the activity, seeing the value in the slower process of looking closely and deciding what goes on the page. Mapping encouraged the teachers to truly see the community. The maps became records of what they saw, what they initially overlooked, and what they still needed to understand.
“I don’t think you get the same feeling if you’re just going to copy something off of Google,” Schulte said.
She also asked candidates to examine themselves as part of the process.
Before studying a community, they considered what they already believed about rural places and about the specific place where they would teach. They reflected on where they came from and how their own identities and experiences shaped what they noticed.
Afterward, they returned to those first impressions and reflected on what surprised them, how their thinking may have changed, and what questions they still had.
Schulte cautioned against letting a few new insights harden into a new set of assumptions about the place. She wanted teachers to leave the experience with an inquiry stance, saying that learning about the community should continue throughout a teacher’s career.
“I need them to go in there saying, ‘I am now a perpetual student as a teacher. I need to continue to learn and I need to continue to ask questions,’” she said.
That curiosity can change instruction, too. Preservice teachers in Schulte’s program were also asked to consider how something they learned during their community study could become part of a meaningful lesson or unit.
Schulte recalled several examples of this. In Oroville, California, teachers could draw on the community’s fish hatchery when teaching fish ecology. Local experiences with a nearby dam created other possibilities for instruction. In agricultural communities, crops such as walnuts and almonds could offer starting points for lessons connected to science, economics, history, or other standards. One group explored how documents from a tiny local museum could become classroom learning materials.
These connections give teachers another way to show students that the knowledge, experiences, and places surrounding them belong in school.
A strengths-based approach still requires clear eyes. Schulte acknowledged that some rural communities can face serious issues such as poverty, substance use challenges, or joblessness. Teachers need to understand those realities. But they also need to see the rich relationships, histories, knowledge, institutions, and local assets that exist alongside them.
That fuller view helps teachers understand what a community already has to build from. It also changes the teacher’s role.
Whether teachers live in the town or commute in each day, Schulte encourages them to think about what they bring to the relationship they have with the area and how they might contribute to the strengths already present.
“You’re now a member of this community, whether you live there or not,” she said.
About Dr. Ann K. Schulte and Teaching in Rural Places
Dr. Ann K. Schulte is a coauthor of Teaching in Rural Places: Thriving in Rural Communities, Schools, and Classrooms, 2nd Edition. She grew up in Yankton, South Dakota, taught in small rural communities, and spent 22 years at California State University, Chico, where her work included teacher preparation, civic engagement, and rural education.
Teaching in Rural Places is designed for preservice teachers, beginning teachers, teacher educators, and others supporting educators in rural schools. The book provides practical strategies for understanding rural communities, recognizing local strengths, building relationships, and developing place-conscious instruction.
This blog is for educational and informational purposes only and does not necessarily represent a Marzano Research endorsement of any product or program.