Making Space for Interrogation of Place: An Argument for Spatial Equity in Education Research

Abstract

The use of critical spatial perspectives in interrogating spatial inequities has proven essential to understanding rural students’, teachers’, and leaders’ experiences. In this qualitative study, we use spatial (in)justice to examine the socio-spatial challenges rural schools experience across different U.S. geographies. We then explore the spatialized local responses to educational problems through the leveraging of local strengths and partnerships, countering deficit perspectives of rural schools and communities. Disrupting bounds between rural and urban scholarship through a common critical framing of place can serve as a source of resistance to shared sources and outcomes of spatial injustice.

1. Introduction

In spring 2022, a teacher in Pocahontas County Schools, home to the National Radio Quiet Zone in southeastern West Virginia, sparked community-wide debate through the assignment of two books in her English classroom: The Hate U Give (Pattnaik, 2018) and This Book Is Anti-Racist: 20 Lessons on How to Wake Up, Take Action, and Do the Work (Jewell, 2020). Her introduction of these books resulted in a contentious local board of education meeting, with community members expressing fierce support for and opposition to the teacher and her curricular choices. A parent supporter of the teacher argued, “[The teacher is] challenging these students to think about real world situations… Our children, in three years, are going to be considered adults and they’re going to see things in the real world that they don’t see here in Pocahontas County” (Stewart, 2021, para. 18).

Just a few months into the next school year, students gathered at a Monongalia County Board of Education meeting in West Virginia, just 100 miles from Pocahontas County, to protest the superintendent’s ban on Pride flags in classrooms (Karbal, 2022). The ban followed pressure and an interpretation of an old district policy prohibiting political displays. A teacher held up a classroom sign she had been forced to remove, reading “Diverse Inclusive Accepting Welcome Space for Everyone.” Students argued that Pride flags symbolized safety and inclusion, urging the Board not to ban them. One student stated, “These flags mean, ‘you matter’” (Karbal, 2022, para. 13). Despite a mass walkout, the superintendent upheld the ban, reinforcing educational inequities in one of the state’s largest school districts. Such heated school board meetings are often fueled by political divides and special-interest groups, reflecting broader issues of inequitable access to resources and opportunities in rural and metropolitan communities and perpetuating historic educational inequities.

This argument about the inclusion of race in a geographically remote classroom highlights a dual equity challenge for educators in rural Pocahontas County and across the United States: educational inequity (i.e., inequity experienced in school stemming from structural inequalities) and spatial inequity (i.e., social and economic marginalization by virtue of one’s geographic positioning). Practitioners have long recognized the dual challenges of (1) educational inequities—or social injustices—and (2) spatial inequities—or uneven access to opportunities based on geographic positioning—in their schools and communities. However, this two-fold equity-focused problem of practice is not widely recognized by researchers. While place has become a central construct for interrogating equity in the smaller sub-field of rural education research, it is less recognized as a core category for equity-focused scholarship in non-rural publication outlets, limiting our ability to disrupt “dichotomous traps” (Azano & Biddle, 2019, p. 4) that perpetuate the siloing of rural and urban challenges and contribute to deficit perspectives of rural and urban places.

Beyond these arguably more abstract consequences, the tendency to separate studies of spatial inequity and educational inequity translates to a lack of valuable research for practitioners tasked with simultaneous responsiveness to a multiplicity of inequities, which may be mutually exacerbating in particular places. The imperative for place-focused critical interrogation of spatial and educational equity challenges and place-based responses to them surfaced in our development of the National Rural Education Association (NREA) Rural Education Research Agenda, 2022–2027 (Hartman et al., 2022; McHenry-Sorber et al., 2023a; NREA, 2022). The project—a national, mixed-methods study of rural education priorities—included data from a wide variety of rural education participants: PK-12 educators and leaders; higher education administrators, faculty, and researchers; individuals working at rural-serving organizations; government officials; and others across the United States.

In this article, we articulate how spatial inequity, or injustice, is produced and reproduced in rural places, how spatial inequity interacts with educational inequity to create nested equity challenges, and how educational practitioners respond through locally and regionally centered practices to these interwoven injustices. Equity challenges—spatial and educational (e.g., racial, linguistic, gendered, socioeconomic, and other forms of injustice)—are not unique to rural places, but place-specific contexts and spatial injustices shape challenges and potential responses. Although the inequities experienced by rural schools and communities have long been stereotyped as predominantly spatial in nature (i.e., place-centric), spatial inequities are inherently connected to other forms of injustice; teasing them apart as discrete issues devalues the holistic experiences of rural people. Based on these understandings, we offer suggestions for the value and utility of a critical spatial perspective across equity-centered educational research in rural and non-rural places. Through this work, we respond to the call from our Rural Research Agenda participants for research that centers the interplay of spatial and educational inequities to inform local and regional place-specific responses. The purpose of this study is to illuminate spatial and educational inequities produced and reproduced in rural places, with an emphasis on how rural schools respond to and resist these inequities in their everyday practice.

2. The Theoretical Framework and Salient Literature

This research builds across urban-focused spatial (in)justice frameworks and a burgeoning body of rural, place-centric educational equity scholarship to inform our understandings of spatial and educational inequities across contexts. Plante and Hogg (2023) conceptualize inequity broadly, describing it as “an instance of injustice” (para. 4) that reflects unjust conditions or outcomes shaped by social or systemic factors. While we use Soja’s (2010) conceptualizations of (in)justice in our research and honor other critical scholars’ use of justice-oriented language in theorizing, given the propensity of rural education researchers to use the term equity in their work, we align our findings and discussions with that terminology when possible to resist the academic peripheralization of rural scholarship.

Spatial Inequity

Harvey’s (1973, 1996) work provides a philosophical basis for spatial justice and equity by linking social justice to spatial arrangements in urban places; Lefebvre’s (1974/1991, 1968/1996) metropolitan-based work argues that access to urban spaces is a fundamental right and, thus, provides a basis for modern spatial equity analysis. Spatial equity is integral to research on urban planning (e.g., Fainstein, 2010; Soja, 1996, 2010), environmental justice (e.g., Agyeman, 2005; Bullard, 1990), and transportation equity (e.g., Handy, 2002; Martens, 2016), as well as in GIS-based equity research (e.g., Talen, 1998; Wang, 2012).

In Soja’s (2010) seminal work on spatial (in)justice, he asserts the need for a critical spatial perspective in the study of equity and justice. “[A]n assertive and explanatory spatial perspective helps us make better theoretical and practical sense of how social justice is created, maintained, and brought into question as a target for democratic social action” (p. 2). Such an approach relocates space from a construct used to understand where things happen to an active contributor or exacerbator of racism, sexism, and economic injustice, among other inequities. These geographies are contested grounds, where we engage in struggles for and against justice. The concept of spatial equity, however, is underutilized when examining the context of rural schools and the people and places they serve. The absence of a critical spatial perspective when considering rural education contexts impedes one’s ability to adequately account for the ways in which spatial inequities impact rural students’ outcomes.

Soja (2010) cautions that spatial justice should not be seen as a sole contributor to (in)justice nor as a component of injustice relative to social (in)justices. Given that our research is focused on experiences specific to educational institutions and systems, we refer to these social injustices as educational inequities. Soja argues for a dialectical approach to the social and spatial: “everything that is social (justice included) is simultaneously and inherently spatial, just as everything spatial, at least with regard to the human world, is simultaneously and inherently socialized” (pp. 5–6); these interconnected constructs are “mutually (and often problematically) formative and consequential” (p. 18). Soja (2010) defines spatial injustice as both a process and an outcome, emphasizing that unequal distribution of essential resources and services—such as healthcare, education, transportation, housing, and employment—represents a fundamental form of spatial inequality.

Distributional inequalities arise from deeper processes of spatial discrimination, which, when recognized as socially constructed and actionable, can be addressed to mitigate the dialectic relationship between spatial and social injustices that exacerbate inequities in specific contexts (Bullard, 1990; Soja, 2010). This dialectic lens allows us to examine how systemic inequities—such as racism, heterosexism, and genderism—are perpetuated through geographically situated educational institutions, requiring intentional focus on both the spatial and social.

3. The Relationship Between Space, Place, and Equity Research

Butler and Sinclair (2020) argue for the critical interrogation of place as an “active agent in shaping our life experiences and institutions” in the search for justice in education. “Justice and injustice shape—and are shaped by—a localized set of changing social, political, and economic conditions” (p. 65). In their review of educational research, they find that place remains underutilized in the field of educational research, specifically, the undertheorizing of the “role of place and its relationship to power, pedagogy, and the social context of schooling” (p. 65).

While place is a peripheralized construct in broader studies of educational equity, it is central to educational practice and rural education research. It is thus necessary to discuss the relationship between place and spatial inequity through dialogue between place and space. Agnew (1987) offers a three-pronged definition of place as: location (geographic positioning), locale (“the material setting in which people conduct their lives at that particular location” (Butler & Sinclair, 2020, p. 66), and sense of place (meanings individuals attach to locations based on their relative social positioning). In our conception of spatial inequity, we draw upon delineations of space versus place, in which space, for example, is geography conceived as being measured in “miles and minutes,” while place is geography conceived as the “social, economic, and political meanings people assign to particular spatial locations” (Bell, 2009, p. 495).

Members in the same school or community may make different meanings of geographic locations, including schools, based on divergent values and interests, or in response to historic legacies of education inequity (McHenry-Sorber & Schafft, 2015; Sutherland et al., 2022) and, therefore, their conceptions of place for the same spaces may differ. Space and place, while distinct, are inherently intertwined (Agnew, 2011). In short, place, for our purposes, constitutes a more complex understanding of geographic space, as it is in place that meanings and social constructions are made and identities are formed and enforced.

Despite Butler and Sinclair’s (2020) conclusions, a burgeoning body of scholarship situated in the subfield of rural educational research builds on urban-centric critical theorizing of place while also drawing on the century-old field of rural sociology. Together, these strands of research examine the complex systems of hegemony and oppression in rural schools and communities while highlighting placed responses to inequities. This corpus of the literature demonstrates the applicability of critical spatial perspectives beyond the geographic bounds of the city and highlights the utility of such frameworks for educational research across place. This research most often takes the form of critical qualitative investigations or critical policy analyses of inequities and responses to them in and across rural schools, including rural teacher staffing challenges (McHenry-Sorber et al., 2023b), anti-queer policies (Whitten & Thomas, 2023), college readiness initiatives (Allen & Roberts, 2019), multilingual pedagogical and educational experiences (Marichal, 2024), Native American sovereign rights and schooling (Whitlow, 2024), and racialized student experiences (Sutherland et al., 2022). Such studies utilize broader frameworks such as Critical Race Theory (Marichal, 2024), critical rural queer policy analysis (Whitten & Thomas, 2023), and Liberating Sovereign Potential framework (Whitlow, 2024) alongside place-centric critical theorizing, including critical place-based leadership (McHenry-Sorber & Sutherland, 2020) and place-based pedagogy (Marichal, 2024) to understand the relationship between spatial and educational inequities within and across rural schools and communities.

A common thread across these studies is a cognizance of the historical, persistent, and pernicious consequences of spatial inequity in shaping community values related to education, as well as practitioner and student experiences. For example, Allen and Roberts’s (2019) study of the implementation of a college-readiness program in two rural Ohio school districts illuminates how relative spatial positioning influences access to college opportunities, including postsecondary access and dual enrollment, and, consequently, influences community members’ perceptions of postsecondary education across place. One school’s proximity to colleges generated opportunities for students and, in turn, programmatic funding and community support for college-going initiatives–opportunities and benefits less available in the second school. In contrast, this spatial divide exacerbated community members’ fears in the second school that college-going would facilitate outmigration as opportunities existed farther away. Such spatial positioning thus influenced the meaning-making of place as well as the value and lifespan consequences of postsecondary education.

Spatial positioning also influences rural schools’ relative ability to recruit and retain teachers, creating differentiated challenges for educational leaders. McHenry-Sorber et al. (2023b)’s study finds rural teachers’ shortages as one outcome of spatial injustice: peripheralized places experience more persistent staffing challenges; they are simultaneously less attractive to community outsiders and less likely to have a local qualified pool of potential teacher candidates. These challenges are compounded by an uneven distribution of financial resources and social services, placing greater burdens on rural leaders to expend scarce resources to recruit, and sometimes train, new teachers. The research “highlights the interconnectedness of place and spatial in/justice as it relates to schooling” (p. 457) and showcases how spatial injustices ultimately create inequitable learning experiences for students. They conclude as follows: “the recognition of this spatial in/justice by school leaders, in turn, influences their perceived ability to be responsive to staffing challenges and defines their responsive leadership practice as they attempt to overcome such in/justice” (p. 458).

Interrogations that include critical spatial perspectives also highlight inequitable student experiences within a single school. For example, Sutherland et al.’s (2022) study investigates inequitable experiences of white and Black students at a southern rural school. They find “educational equity and the related leadership practice constrained by strong bonding social capital… a status quo reinforced through a legacy of racism, and segregation, and supported through controlled land and home ownership in the community” (p. 49). The process of spatial inequity over generations, across these studies, in interaction with historic social injustices, contributes in unique ways to spatially unjust or inequitable educational outcomes.

While the centralizing of place in rural equity-focused education research illuminates complex ways to understand inequitable student experiences, this lens remains largely relegated to the margins of broader equity research, perpetuating unhelpful divides between rural and urban scholarship and practice. This marginalization of place-based research and critical spatial analysis results in missed opportunities for transformative scholarship that could foster liberation and equity across all geographic contexts. One needs to look no further than a recent article in Urban Education that attempts to define the construct of rurality—a goal the author asserts as a novel one—for an exemplar that highlights the lack of awareness and resulting marginalization of the corpus of rural scholarship (see Welsh, 2024). This presents a continued struggle to engage in critical place-centric research across diverse spatial contexts. However, in recognizing this challenge, rural education scholars offer opportunities and imperatives for critical place-centric research across spatial divides.

Tieken and Auldridge-Reveles (2019) critically examine the perceived neutrality of school closure policies, revealing how such policies create spatial inequities through their uneven impact and the harm they cause to both rural and urban schools. “As gentrification and industrial restructuring force urban and rural residents to leave to find work or affordable housing, populations decline and schools close” (p. 939). School closures act as both a symptom and a cause of injustice, perpetuating cycles of marginalization, outmigration, and appropriation that deepen spatial inequities. Closures often signal a community’s decline, discouraging investment and leaving spaces vulnerable to exploitation (Tieken & Auldridge-Reveles, 2019). Tieken and Auldridge-Reveles (2019) argue that separate rural and urban studies on school consolidation may obscure its broader role in producing spatial injustices, which are better understood through research that bridges these contexts.

Azano and Biddle (2019) expand this argument by presenting imperatives for rural praxis that counter dominant educational narratives through resistance to place-based stereotypes and the promotion of ecojustice and critical place-based pedagogies focused on community sustainability. They argue that educator preparation programs can disrupt rural-urban dichotomous understandings of place while spatializing social justice frameworks across rural- and urban-focused programs.

These arguments highlight how critical spatial perspectives can disrupt core–periphery dynamics of a socially constructed urban–rural divide. Such action, when combined with scholarly resistance to hegemonic economic, political, and spatial norms, can serve as a “jumping off point for more critical discussions of the intertwined nature of education, political economy, and freedom” (Azano & Biddle, 2019, p. 9), creating opportunities for equity-focused research that critically interrogates place across geographies. Such place-centric research, as Butler and Sinclair (2020) argue, “has the potential to reveal counternarratives of place and how systems of power function in places” (p. 80). Through this work, education researchers “can help advance equity, liberation, and social justice” (p. 80).

A growing body of scholarship has engaged rural education through critical spatial and sociocultural lenses (e.g., Beach et al., 2018; Corbett & Donehower, 2017; Green & Letts, 2007; McHenry-Sorber & Hartman, in press; Walker, 2023), demonstrating how rurality is socially produced and how schooling participates in broader processes of spatial stratification. This scholarship illuminates the cultural politics of rural schooling, the mobility and identity negotiations of rural youth, and the everyday forms of resistance that challenge deficit constructions of rural communities. This work underscores the analytic power and nuance of critical spatial perspectives, particularly in tracing how local actors navigate and contest marginalizing spatial imaginaries. At the same time, much of this scholarship centers on micro-level practices, identity formation, and community-based resistance within particular rural contexts.

Building on these contributions, this research responds to the call for place-centric critical scholarship that illuminates spatial and educational inequities. In our attempt to resist deficit framing of rural places and people, we offer examples of placed responses to inequities–localized praxis responsive to problematic historical and contemporary stories of rural people and places as deficient (e.g., Cubberley, 1914). In this article, we offer multiple and diverse stories to interrogate spatial and educational inequity and placed responsive practices that highlight spatial assets. These anecdotes highlight the geographic and demographic diversity of rural schools and communities, fostering the “potential for resistance” to inequities (see Lundholt et al., 2018, p. 2).

4. Methods

In order to understand the ways spatial and educational inequities manifest in rural places and how rural practitioners respond to these intertwined injustices, we utilize our data gathered to create the National Rural Education Association (NREA) Rural Education Research Agenda, 2022–2027. Created every five years, the Rural Research Agenda is a project facilitated by the National Rural Education Association to identify research priorities for rural education in the United States. The goal of that mixed methods research was to gain a comprehensive snapshot of both geographically unique and collective problems of practice for which rural education practitioners, policymakers, and scholars believe additional scholarly attention is needed.

4.1. Participants and Data Collection

In order to garner as many perspectives as possible, data for the creation of the Rural Research Agenda were collected using multiple data collection strategies from a wide variety of rural education researchers, leaders, practitioners, and policymakers. In this article, we report on qualitative data collected through nine semi-structured individual interviews lasting 25–60 min with rural education researchers and policymakers, and six 60-min focus groups with 4–6 participants each. Focus group participants included a variety of rural education participants who were solicited from, and included all interested attendees at, the National Rural Education Association’s annual conference, the National Forum to Advance Rural Education. Participants included rural education practitioners (including district- and school-level leaders and classroom teachers) as well as rural education scholars and nonprofit and state-level education employees. Individual interview participants were chosen via purposive sampling (Patton, 2015) by the research team to include diverse perspectives from a broad range of leading rural education experts from across the country. Focus groups were held in person at the conference, and individual interviews were conducted remotely via videoconferencing platforms utilizing best practices for virtual qualitative research (Roberts et al., 2021). Semi-structured questions were designed to garner participants’ perspectives on the issues, trends, strengths, and priority needs in U.S. rural education research. Combined, these data allowed the research team to assess scholars’ and practitioners’ perspectives on the most needed areas for future rural education research as well as to gain a deeper, more nuanced understanding of research trends and needs.

As researchers, it is important to acknowledge our positionality (Creswell, 1998). The research team consisted of six white women living in communities and working in institutions that are situated in geographically diverse locations, each with its own unique rural context. Amongst our team, we are former rural educators in a variety of roles, parents of children who attend rural schools, former rural school students ourselves, and current faculty in postsecondary institutions or nonprofits that serve rural schools and communities. As such, we bring a unique and varied collection of etic and emic perspectives to this work. Furthermore, we share a passion for understanding and supporting rural people and ensuring the futures of rural places. However, cognizant that our team also has areas of homogeneity, we intentionally sought to address diverse voices (including geographically diverse voices) in our purposive sampling of rural education experts to participate in individual interviews.

4.2. Data Analysis

Qualitative data from interviews and focus groups were coded to identify recurrent themes and patterns (Esposito & Evans-Winters, 2021; Patton, 2015; Saldaña, 2021). Data analysis included using a priori codes to draw upon the previous NREA research agenda’s priority areas, as well as open and axial coding (Charmaz, 2014; Corbin & Strauss, 2015). Data were individually coded by two researchers and then dual-coded by the same researchers to ensure a high degree of trustworthiness (Creswell, 1998; Saldaña, 2021). Researchers met at least weekly to discuss the coding process, themes that emerged, discrepancies in coding, and to revise the single consensus-based codebook that was used for axial and a priori codes. Additionally, researchers generated rich analytic memos during the analysis process, which served as a mechanism for tracking particularly salient participant quotes for further reflection, emerging themes, and areas of discussion for team meetings.

From these analyses, the team constructed a substantive theory grounded in the data with a central, or core, category of equity (inclusive of spatial and educational equity) and five interconnected themes: policy and funding; health and wellness; partnership and community relationships; teacher and leader preparation, recruitment, and retention; and college and career trajectory (see

Table 1. Intersections of Equity and Research Agenda Categories.

	Equity-Focused Topics from Participant Responses
Policy and funding	Nimble policy/funding response to changing demographics Equitable funding formulas for rural communities Political discourse and local governance (e.g., CRT)
Health and wellness	Environmental health and disproportionate impacts Effects of COVID-19 Access to specialized staff Support for student and family mental health
Partnerships and community relationships	Nimble response to changing community demographics Access to partnership opportunities
Teacher and leader preparation, recruitment, and retention	Identities of the education workforce Preparation that addresses cultural/linguistic diversity Specialized skill shortages that disproportionately affect certain groups
College and career trajectory	Access to postsecondary information Deficit ideology (e.g., racism/classism/ableism) imposed/perpetuated by adults in the community (i.e., families, educators, and institutions)

). The data supported the inclusion of each of these categories in their own right, but also highlighted the interconnected nature of each area as participants often explicitly or implicitly discussed the ways in which a given challenge touched on several different areas as functions of the problem and/or ways in which their rural school/community could work or were already working to address it.

Supported by its prominence in participant data as well as our analytic memos, equity emerged as the core theme because, although overlaps between other core categories occurred, nearly every problem discussed across categories was rooted in a broader issue of equity. Indeed, participants often explicitly discussed the ways in which inequity shaped their rural schools and communities. We conceptualized equity in two ways: (1) educational inequity, or the socially and demographically inequitable schooling experiences of rural youth (i.e., race, class, language); and (2) spatial inequity. We conceptualize these constructs as parallel to social and spatial injustice, respectively. A visualization of the intersecting nature of our data is provided in a prior publication on the creation of the Rural Research Agenda (McHenry-Sorber et al., 2023a).

5. Findings

While our research agenda is organized into five discrete themes around educational and spatial equity, in practice, our data show that inequities are related in multiple and complex ways. Our analysis revealed two major themes related to rural educational practice and spatial and education equity: (1) responses to spatial inequities through coalition-building and leveraging community strengths and (2) responses to the intersectional nature of spatial and social inequities. These research themes cut across Special Issue themes, with an emphasis on how spatial inequities influence rural leaders’ and teachers’ innovative practice around issues of teacher staffing, educational opportunities, and local and regional place-based initiatives and innovations.

5.1. Responses to Spatial Inequities Through Coalition-Building and Leveraging Community Strengths

Urbanormative statewide policies and funding schemes that privilege non-rural schools and communities or that ignore the unique needs of rural places create complex spatial inequities for rural schools and students. Our data highlight two main approaches rural schools engage in to respond to these spatial inequities: (1) regional coalition-building with other schools and districts and (2) leveraging local strengths at the individual rural school or district level.

5.2. Coalition-Building

Practitioners across states described critical coalition-building between rural schools and districts to respond to inequitable statewide funding policies, generate positive storytelling about rural schools, and provide increased curricular offerings. Through these cases, practitioners work to respond to current challenges that disadvantage rural students and, through efforts such as positive storytelling, disrupt deficit narratives of rural schools stemming from spatially inequitable policies.

A participant from Ohio described a decades-long unjust funding legacy that negatively affects rural schools, despite a lawsuit filed against the state about 25 years ago. Despite the Ohio Supreme Court’s determination that the state’s funding system was unconstitutional, no changes have been made to rectify the policy or consequent spatial inequities that stem from it. “So after finding it unconstitutional four times, the Ohio Supreme Court eventually turned it back over to the legislature and said by statute, it’s their responsibility to fix. And their ways of fixing it have always been bandaid approaches.” As an Ohio policy advocate explained, “It’s a question of equity. We are systematically, whether it’s intentional or not—I can’t guess intention—but systematically we are giving less to rural schools.” These quotes demonstrate not just how statewide funding formulas create spatial inequities for rural schools, but also the entrenchment of longstanding spatially inequitable policies. Without policy relief, Ohio rural schools collaborate with each other to support student learning: “[It’s] because our resources are limited. We really need to share and learn from each other.” Coalition-building and collaboration across rural schools become necessary to resist unjust policies that harm rural students.

Similarly, a South Carolina participant explained the value of partnerships across a consortium of “collaborative districts” and research organizations as a way to add capacity to rural districts. The consortium’s goal has been “to create the data that will give a positive picture of the rural schools so that people can see the great work that they are doing.” This participant finds these partnerships particularly useful because, she notes, standardized assessment results fail to capture the important work of rural schools and can make rural educators feel as if the “state of affairs…is dismal”—an outcome of unjust policy schemes. She believes this partnership work provides “hope” and helps to attract newcomers, including teachers, to the rural schools.

Finally, an Indiana educator discussed the value of collaboration across rural schools as a valuable strategy for responding to spatialized staffing challenges and uneven curricular opportunities. However, the participant noted that these partnership efforts were inhibited by statewide open enrollment policies that position neighboring rural schools as competitors for student enrollment dollars. “We’re finding that it’s difficult when policymakers want us to compete, but yet, because of the resources and people, we also have to collaborate.” As this educator notes, “It’s hard to collaborate—Coke and Pepsi working together next door to each other. But that’s what we have to do, so we’re trying to overcome that.” In the case of Indiana, then, rural practitioners’ efforts to build coalitions to support justice-oriented practices aimed at mitigating spatially limited access to curricula and teachers are constrained by state funding policies that encourage school choice and competition at the expense of rural schools with limited resources and capacity.

These educators from diverse rural geographies highlight the perceived necessity of coalition-building and collaboration across rural places to resist spatial inequities created or exacerbated by inequitable state policies and support increased opportunities for rural students. Additionally, coalition-building can serve as a platform for resisting deficit narratives of rural communities grounded in spatially inequitable policy schemes. However, the Indiana case illustrates how even when practitioners are cognizant of the imperative to create a networked response to spatial inequities, their efforts can be hindered by statewide policies that unintentionally create division, inhibiting rural equity-driven praxis.

5.3. Leveraging Community Strengths

Inequitable access to funding and underresourcing is a challenge that spans rural geographies in the United States. Leveraging the collective resources of regional and statewide networks can help build capacity across rural schools and districts to mitigate or resist spatially inequitable policy systems. However, when coalition-building is not possible, many practitioners leverage local community assets to support equity praxis.

Rural schools find individual success in capitalizing on local community strengths in unique and diverse ways. Our participants who engaged in local partnerships described innovative ideas to manage transportation challenges, build educational opportunities for Navajo Nation students, and provide academic and social supports for students and families during the COVID-19 pandemic. These cases illustrate possibilities for unique and diverse responses with the support of local communities.

One focus group participant discussed the spatialized inequities affecting rural reservation schools in Arizona that generate a lack of “resources… up-to-date books… computers… terrible HVAC systems” and facilities that “can’t be sustained.” These injustices are not lost on students, who see their own social value reflected in the underinvestment in their schools. “If you go to school in a place like that, that feels dilapidated, unsafe, what does that convey to you about how important you are, how important your mind is, how important your growth is?” These injustices are compounding, diminishing the practice of teachers and leaders: “If you don’t have resources to make your school a learning, growthful place for your teachers, they’re not going to be lit up with the joy of teaching, with the joy of their own learning.” In turn, lack of teacher joy influences teachers’ relationships with students and students’ relationships with learning, with “implications for teachers’ practice.”

Harnessing the power of community connectivity in this reservation community, educators actively engage in active resistance to cascading and sustained spatial inequities through the collaborative hosting of math festivals. “One of the festivals we had was a two-day festival, and we had more than 700 students,” along with families. “Many of them drove more than three hours each way to get there.” The participant noted that family commitment to make the journey to these events “signals the extent to which parents and guardians are willing to go to connect their student to educational opportunities.” In this rural Tribal community, partnership between the school and tight-knit Indigenous community creates opportunities for renewal and joy in a system that, whether intentionally or unintentionally, perpetuates a harmful colonial legacy that devalues rural Indigenous youth through chronic underresourcing.

While math festivals provide one specific example of how rural schools can partner with local communities to support academic opportunities, participants from other rural places described unique and nimble responses to new and exacerbated challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic, made possible by building upon local assets and leveraging community partnerships. As one North Carolina participant explained, the practices needed to manage the challenges of the pandemic were “the kinds of the things that rural schools do: close attachments to community, creativity, and improvisation.” Given their sustained lack of resources relative to other school types, this participant attributed part of rural schools’ pandemic response success to their practiced ability to “spend on a dime.” He noted that while rural schools “often go unrecognized in the kind of urban-suburban centric way of thinking about what schools should look like and do,” other schools and policymakers might draw useful lessons from rural schools’ COVID-19 responses.

For example, one participant shared that “extensive community outreach” and “creative and innovative problem solving” allowed rural schools in Washington to respond to local inequities effectively. “So out here you see [rural schools] going above and beyond, making sure everybody has lunches.” She explained that rural schools worked with bus drivers to repurpose school buses for meal drop-offs and as hotspots at “the Subway or Dollar General.” In communities similar to this, where economically marginalized students rely on schools to provide meals and infrastructure for internet access, schools serve not just as a social hub but also as an essential institution for mitigating inequities. Practices such as meal delivery and hotspot creation showcase how rural schools, used to caring for the needs of economically marginalized students in geographic places without widespread broadband access or access to public transportation services, pivoted quickly to meet challenges that were exacerbated by COVID. This participant also described the teaching practices of a kindergarten teacher at a rural island school off the Washington coast. Relying on connections to parents and the community and the ability to “do things outside of the bureaucratic regulations that are in big districts,” the teacher housed an “outside forest school with all the kindergartners when they couldn’t meet in person.”

These cases highlight the innovative ways rural schools leverage community strengths, such as close-knit bonds, locally owned school buses, outdoor spaces, and the nimbleness that accompanies small schools to respond to new or exacerbated spatial equity challenges unique to rural communities. Such local innovative responses to the COVID-19 crisis exemplify how rural schools can respond to wide-ranging equity issues if they are both empowered and supported. As one focus group participant explained, “I think the piece that is important right now in the climate we’re in, is this notion of adaptability.” The participant explained that the desire of rural communities to maintain local control of their schools can sometimes be perceived by policymakers as “a sign of war or a fight.” However, this participant asserted that the ability of rural schools to quickly adapt to COVID-19 challenges and reopen schools with low rates of infection is “critical to look at.” He continued as follows: “small rural districts have the ability to adapt to crisis, retain local control. They don’t need heavy handed oversight… They need support. They need support both in policy and finances, but even if that’s not given to them, they’ll still adapt.”

These examples of responsive practices and practitioner beliefs about the value of rural schools illustrate the diverse initiatives rural educators engage in to create greater educational opportunities, bolster teacher staffing and curricular offerings, ground learning in place, build infrastructure, and respond to social inequities, even in a spatially inequitable policy environment. At times, these locally based initiatives can be impeded by statewide policies and funding schemes that harm rural schools and create competition where collaboration is needed. Even in these cases, our data show how rural educators and leaders adapt, finding avenues of resistance and opportunities for rural youth.

5.4. Responses to the Intersectional Nature of Social and Spatial Inequities

Funding and policy inequities are some of the most pernicious challenges to overcome at the school level, resulting in uneven educational opportunities, difficulty recruiting and retaining teachers and mental health experts, and a lack of capacity. Our data illustrate not just the ways rural schools and districts respond to spatial inequities broadly, as described in the previous section, but also how spatial inequities intersect with social inequities to complicate equity praxis for minoritized rural students. One participant shared critical questions about the intersecting influences of spatial and social inequities for minoritized rural students: “How do these [spatial] inequities lead to other inequities?… How is policy implicated in recreating, reproducing the disadvantages of rural places, particularly places that have a lot of People of Color or Indigenous people?”

The compounding influences of spatial inequities on rural schooling experiences for minoritized students are identified in two main ways in our data: uneven access to representative and challenging curricula, and inequitable recruitment and retention capabilities for specialists in rural schools serving minoritized students. Explaining the uneven and marked challenges teachers in small, rural schools encounter when talking about issues of race and racism, a teacher expressed concern about how her state’s conservative legislature has limited racially inclusive curricula: “I think rural schools are really struggling with talking about race and racial inequity and what these new [restrictive curricular] policies mean and what Critical Race Theory is and what you can and can’t do.” She asserted that these classroom censorship laws have an outsized effect in rural places with smaller and more conservative local communities: “I feel like [in] some of the bigger districts, you’ve got some of that buffer of a bigger community.” In rural communities in states with anti-DEI legislation, racially minoritized students may experience exclusion through silence as their teachers attempt to comply with new laws that attempt to erase the historical legacy of slavery in the United States.

Curricular censorship coupled with underresourcing in rural places creates a sharp contrast to the normative educational opportunities for “creativity, and art, and adventure, and discussion, and exploration” in well-resourced, non-rural schools, as one participant argued. She continued, “the way we are structured” leads to inequitable experiences for “poor kids, Black kids, Indigenous kids, and kids in rural communities” whose experiences with schooling rarely mirror those opportunities available to wealthy white communities. As this participant concludes, “these systems are the air that we breathe and they say lots to us, whether we are aware of it or not.”

For example, an environment of spatially inequitable policies that limits rural school service delivery for specific student populations perpetuates harmful educational inequities for socially diverse students. One participant explained how a spatially inequitable system limits her school’s ability to support students with disabilities: “You can’t get access to in-person live teaching in some of the hard-to-staff subject areas. You can’t ensure that kids in special education have access to qualified special education teachers.”

Similarly, a participant from North Carolina described how rural school districts in her region struggle to respond to spatial inequities that leave transient, Spanish-speaking families without access to appropriate educational resources: “We have a lot of migrant families in our farming communities around here. And they’re seasonal. So lots of movement around our migrant families. And with our migrant families, one of the things is language barrier. So that’s not surprising or not new.” In these farming communities, rural school leaders have attempted to act responsively to address inequities, including increasing “Spanish translations, and Spanish resources, and ELL teachers.” Multilingual-responsive practices are limited by spatially inequitable policies that underresource rural schools in the state. For example, small rural schools struggle to find multilingual teachers. “Then you have recruitment issues with ELL. You have the [lack of] funding for the actual translation services, all of those kinds of things that still keep going into this rural [problem of practice].” As this participant explains, in rural North Carolina schools serving transient farming communities, work to foster social equity through the disruption of monolingual frameworks can be stymied by unjust funding formulas that ignore the multilingual justice efforts of rural educators and reduce their capacity to act in meaningful ways to address social or educational inequities.

A California participant described the spatial injustices that limit her rural district’s ability to serve students with emotional needs, a problem she refers to as a “systemic issue.” The community lacks mental health specialists, creating spatially inequitable access to services. In response, the district has tried to recruit and retain mental health professionals in the school system, but this has proven to be a difficult hurdle. “Once you’ve recruited them, okay, well now where are they going to live?… There’s a neighborhood, and there’s agricultural housing, and there’s nothing else. And the neighborhood is mostly, it’s an impoverished neighborhood.” She explained that the peripheralization of rural places in the economic and social landscape of California has resulted in deep pockets of rural poverty. “In California people don’t move out to the country to get away from city life. They go out to the country because they can’t afford city life.” The coupling of geographic remoteness with economic marginalization results in unattractive housing options. “Do we put modular housing on a section of the field [next to the school building] because we need more teachers? I mean, what do you do?” In this case, spatial inequities exacerbate the district’s challenge to recruit and retain specialists needed to foster more socially equitable academic spaces for economically marginalized rural students with emotional needs.

Across rural geographies, our data illustrate how spatially inequitable funding policies and economic marginalization that generate deep pockets of rural poverty and perpetuate chronic underresourcing of rural schools exacerbate social and educational inequities in rural communities. Even as rural educators strive to create more equitable educational opportunities for diverse students, including multilingual learners and economically marginalized students with emotional needs, spatial inequities related to housing and financial resources work to reproduce disadvantage for diverse rural students.

6. Discussion

Our task, in undertaking the Rural Research Agenda, was initially to outline the contours of where research was needed in the field of rural education to support practitioners. However, in responding to this imperative, we were struck by participant stories of how rural educators work to resist spatial inequities in the myriad forms those inequities take and how they navigate the challenges of creating socially equitable educational opportunities in the context of spatially inequitable systems. At the heart of this is the underrepresentation of rural places in educational research that centers equity (Butler & Sinclair, 2020). Even when rural settings are included, analyses often overlook how place is fundamentally intertwined with structures of power, inequality, and justice. For example, recent mainstream media narratives have suggested that immigration enforcement activities are concentrated primarily in metropolitan areas. In practice, however, these dynamics of power and justice are also unfolding in rural communities, where enforcement actions and their consequences occur alongside local responses. Yet acts of resistance and advocacy in rural areas are frequently absent from dominant public and scholarly representations of current sociopolitical issues of equity (Newman, 2025).

One challenge in exploring the social and spatial challenges rural schools and students experience is the pitfall of framing rural people and places from a deficit perspective. A critical spatial perspective allows us to (1) reframe these problems of practice not as a consequence of rurality but as a consequence of inequitable structures, systems, and policies that harm rural places in unique ways and (2) illuminate the place-based responses rural educators and schools initiate to resist or mitigate inequities through the leveraging of regional coalition-building and local community strengths. This framing of the findings supports our efforts to resist hegemonic narratives of rural people and places while offering opportunities for connection across rural–urban dichotomies.

A second challenge in exploring rural problems of practice is resisting urbanormative frames that suggest rural problems are best solved by non-rural outsiders and metrocentric policies and practices (see Higham et al., 2025). To that end, our work is grounded in the voices of rural practitioners, advocates, and scholars who understand the unique problems of practice and possibilities for equity-oriented action in place.

We argue that place-based examples such as these are needed across the rural–metropolitan continuum to foster a well-developed understanding of complex dynamics of education-in-place across diverse geographies. These intersections are especially consequential for minoritized students in rural settings, who navigate overlapping inequities that shape their educational experiences in complex ways: the intersection of spatial inequities and economic, racial, and linguistic inequities perpetuates disadvantage and marginalization for diverse rural students. It is necessary to consider how spatial inequities related to mental health and linguistic specialists, as well as support services, diverge between rural and metropolitan places, specifically how small size or geographic remoteness creates additional burdens for rural schools serving minoritized student populations or how statewide funding schemes uniquely disadvantage rural economically marginalized communities through chronic underresourcing. At the same time, it is important to consider the ways spatial inequities collectively harm rural and urban schools with racially and linguistically minoritized populations through avenues such as standardized testing mandates. Recognizing these layered intersections deepens our understanding of how spatial inequities function and why place-based practices are so impactful. This need has important implications for how we conduct education research and contains lessons for both rural and non-rural places and spaces.

Higham et al.’s (2025) conceptual framework for praxis responsive to spatial and social injustices in South Africa offers multifaceted possibilities for action. Their framework suggests rural schools can respond to inequities in two distinct but related strategies: (1) implementing “practical solutions to more immediate problems” and (2) engaging in practices that disrupt structural inequities through the reshaping of “underlying dispositions, agency and imaginative scope of children and adults in rural areas” (p. 15). Such an approach makes sense for rural educators and leaders tasked with solving current problems of practice while working to dismantle the very policies and systems that continuously generate problems of practice stemming from spatial and social inequities. Further, this framework provides one approach to bolster educators’ need to be responsive to nested social and spatial inequities as they respond to the marginalization of rural schools and communities at the same time they respond to social and educational inequities that further marginalize diverse rural subpopulations. We can see this dual approach in practice, for example, through regional coalition-building efforts designed to both respond to immediate underresourcing problems and empower coalition partners to disrupt spatially unjust policies that lead to chronic underresourcing of rural schools.

Butler and Sinclair (2020) argue that the use of spatial methods and place-based interrogations can simultaneously “surface patterns of inequality and oppression” while illuminating “localized opportunities for people and communities to challenge these patterns in the context of education policy and practice.” Beyond this new awareness, such inquiry may assist in the development of “explanations for why these patterns exist and how the collective power of individuals can disrupt these patterns” (p. 84). We further argue that inequities are perpetuated when researchers and policymakers fail to recognize the impact and role that place takes in shaping access to learning supports and opportunity. Additionally, researchers and policymakers have the power to support the equity-focused praxis of rural educators through the interrogation and subsequent disruption of inequitable policies, systems, and structures.

Critical spatial perspectives are useful for highlighting the multiple, complex, and wide-ranging spatial injustices across places, sites, and processes of resistance. Rural practitioners and scholars working together to disrupt systemic injustices—so hegemonic that they seem to exist in “the air that we breathe”—through school-to-school networks, school-community partnerships, and school-community-university collaborations demonstrate that, once named and drawing upon spatialized assets, the outcomes of spatial injustices are not immutable. Examples of resistance, coupled with an emerging line of rural educational research, highlight an enduring challenge of praxis and scholarship: rural schools seem siloed in their resistance to spatial injustice. Rural education research needs depictions of rural schools and communities working collectively with their rural and non-rural counterparts to resist spatial injustices.

Despite the efforts of many communities to mobilize in order to overcome these intersecting challenges, we must look beyond solutions crafted by rural schools in partnership with other rural schools or with their communities. It is time to grapple with the broader question of what all peripheralized children and families deserve with regard to public and subsidized private infrastructure from other places whose food they grow or catch, whose lumber they harvest, whose energy they produce, and whose reserve workers they raise. As educational researchers, we must grapple with these intersections and take responsibility for contextualizing our research adequately to effect strategic, political change. To attain this, we must elevate rural, intersectional experiences across diverse contexts and draw out policy implications for systems-level change and movement towards coherent rural development policies.

7. Conclusions and Recommendations

Importantly, the spatial inequities shared by our participants lie in sharp contrast to the realities of schooling for well-resourced white suburban communities. Attending to and further developing critical spatial perspectives is essential for disrupting spatial inequities in education in all contexts, but especially in rural communities where it is all but impossible to disentangle space and place from the social and organizational context. While some of these inequities are unique to rural communities, such as remoteness from multilingual and mental health specialists, others, such as unattractive housing and underresourcing, are spatial challenges shared with many metropolitan schools serving diverse students. There has been laudable work in this area across the rural–urban continuum, but too often space/place are absent from discussions of disrupting inequitable systems, focused instead on schools solely as organizations or using school-community frameworks that attend to other social identities without attention to the positioning of those identities within place and space. Indeed, given the centrality of place to considerations of equity in rural contexts, a reliance on other critical theories devoid of considerations of the intersection of power and place creates an incomplete understanding of inequities and thus possibilities for equity-focused action that disrupt hegemonic power structures and policies.

Rural educators are well aware of these relationships. Given nested challenges of spatial and social inequity to which rural educators must attend, we echo Higham et al.’s (2025) call for practitioners to consider how they might engage in multidirectional equity-oriented praxis responsive to immediate outcomes of spatially unjust policies or hegemonic norms and generative of greater agency (often through coalition-building, but also through the elevation of local assets) to disrupt longstanding sources of spatial and social inequity.

However, an emphasis on praxis alone provides only a partial response to the complex intersections of spatial and social inequity affecting rural schools. We are not arguing that all educational researchers need to become geographers. However, basic fluency in place/space—in the same way that we ask for care in the discussion of and attention to other characteristics of communities and individuals—will enhance the field’s ability to resist the broader metrocentric trend in both educational and community development policy that has created and sustained the spatial inequities our participants describe. Therefore, we join others (see Butler & Sinclair, 2020; McHenry-Sorber et al., 2023a, 2023b) in recommending that educational researchers and policymakers consider the intersecting role of place in examinations of oppression and injustice.

Further, Azano and Biddle (2019) argue that just as rural places are “socially constructed as a geographic periphery,” rural education research is “relegated to a sociocultural periphery” (p. 4). In alignment with these authors, our data demonstrate that the dichotomous boundaries between rural and urban—spaces and scholarship—further propel spatial injustices. Disrupting these bounds through a common critical framing of place can serve as a source of resistance, elevating the power of rural and urban scholars, schools, and communities towards a more spatially just future for rural and urban youth.