Chapter 13: Rural Incubators: Re-Visioning Rural Districts as Centers for Innovative School and Community Collaboration

Rural schools, now more than ever, must take up the challenges of transforming how they educate students in the global, 21st century context. As Edmondson and Butler (2010) argued, an educated hope can be cultivated in struggling rural communities only by developing educational models that include collaboration with multiple local stakeholders and the use of democratic processes to define the purpose and culture of schools. As we discuss in Innovation and Implementation in this chapter, rural schools have unique advantages if viewed optimistically. Rural districts can be reconfigured to be more flexible and responsive to change than non-rural schools simply because they are smaller. Local community expertise can provide unique contributions to the broader economy if local resources are valued and marshaled instead of dismissed. In this chapter, we explore a school–university–community collaboration model employed in a small rural district in Ohio. Informed by research on rural schools, we discuss program descriptions and share personal reflections to provide an example of how districts can respond innovatively to the challenges and opportunities facing rural education.