By Laura Buenning

It’s hard to fight the notion that you can’t “keep ’em down on the farm after they’ve seen Paree,” as Joe Young and Sam Lewis put it in their 1919 lyrics.

The draw of the city with its promise of good jobs is tough competition for rural communities striving to hang on to their younger, working population.

Just as difficult are prejudices about rural Appalachian poverty, lack of opportunity, and the view that almost nobody graduates from high school, let alone college, says Vena Long, professor of math education and co-director of ACCLAIM, the Appalachian Collaborative Center for Learning, Assessment and Instruction in Mathematics.

The $10.6-million project, funded by the National Science Foundation for an eight-year period that ends this year, targeted mathematics teaching and expertise in the Appalachian regions of Kentucky, Ohio, Tennessee, and West Virginia. Collaborating partners include the universities of Kentucky and Louisville, and West Virginia and Ohio universities.

Confronting Stereotypes

Of course, we recognize that the stereotypes of mid-twentieth-century television show exaggerated rural naïveté, home-grown intelligence, lack of education, and ignorance in such series as The Beverly Hillbillies, Hee Haw, Green Acres, Mayberry RFD, Petticoat Junction, The Andy Griffith Show, and Gomer Pyle, USMC, not to mention Universal’s Tammy movie series.

Still, Long says, rural teachers and students often accept that they are worth less than their urban counterparts, especially if they don’t leave home and use their brains for something “important” elsewhere. Teachers in rural schools frequently add to the problem, dispensing education as the means to “get out of here.”

Small wonder, then, that rural communities are wary of advanced education, says Long.

In contrast, our philosophy—the message ACCLAIM took to rural Appalachian communities—is that you don’t “learn to leave,” Long says.

“Education, particularly math education, can be an economic engine in our technologically advanced world, where you can do all kinds of work almost anywhere.

“We took the approach that math was a good thing, a way to keep the kids at home, or at least bring them back.”

Place matters

Long says prejudice also appears in the problems and examples used to teach mathematics.
“If you ask rural students to calculate the best way to use the public transportation system, the question makes no sense to them. Just like figuring out how much fertilizer to use on a corn crop has no meaning for kids from Kansas City. Examples that make no sense to one or another group of people turn up in every textbook.

“Even the best textbooks need to be connected with the place where the students live. We call this adding place value to math education—a bit of a pun,” Long says, because in math they use place to assign values to digits in a number. For example, the digits in the number 382 tell us we have three 100s, eight 10s and two ones.

“Place-based education helps teachers and students value their community and learn about it.”

Training future teachers: What if the mountain cannot come to Mahomet?

“In math education there are three jobs for every Ph.D. we produce,” Long says.
Part of the difficulty is that “we expect our candidates to have teaching experience prior to entering the program.

“So, let’s say you graduate with a degree in mathematics and a teaching certificate and go out to teach for three years. Now add up the years: you’re 25 years old; you’ve a house, a spouse, a child, and a car payment; and we expect you to quit your job, come back to the university for $12,500 a year—if you’re lucky—and spend three to five years to get a job making less than you were earning when you left the classroom,” Long says. “It doesn’t work.”

The ACCLAIM team argued that a different model was critical if we were going to prepare the number of teachers we need, rural or otherwise.

“We surveyed central Appalachia and found more than 100 teachers with bachelor’s and master’s degrees in mathematics looking for a way to pursue advanced degrees,” Long says.

“The desire is there, but they lack the access.”

Not only that, Long says, “These people are geographically anchored. They want to stay where they are because of their families, their culture, their jobs. So we designed this program to take the education to them. These people could stay at home, keep their jobs—because we didn’t want to pull math teachers out of the classroom, we need them so badly—and complete a doctorate.”

Long laughs, “Our punch line was, ‘You don’t have to give up your job; you just have to give up your life,’ because it was an intense, demanding program.”

Professors and students in the same cohort (group) were required to show up at their computers for class on Tuesday and Thursday evenings at the same time. Microphones attached to their computers allowed on-the-spot discussion; professors lectured using PowerPoint slides. In the summer, students came to one of the participating university campuses for five weeks. After completing their coursework over three years and four summers, they finished their doctoral research through the institution of their choice.

ACCLAIM’s model forced Long and her colleagues to confront prejudices about distance education head on.

“Many people think that unless you come to a university for three to seven years, you don’t really have a doctorate. But we found real strengths in this approach,” Long says. “The students stayed grounded in their profession. They took what they were doing in the program directly to their students and, vice versa, brought their classroom experiences into the courses we were teaching.”

Long says ACCLAIM’s approach to improving mathematics education in rural areas has “way outlived my expectations.

“Many students were the first in their families to pursue an advanced degree. We found that about half of our [advanced degree] students—brilliant people with degrees in mathematics—had accepted or suffered from attitudes denigrating their rural roots. This program changed that for them, for the first time.”

This approach is incredibly powerful, says Long. Every person who changes his or her internal attitude exposes his or her family, and everybody around them, to a new way of thinking. And so the message trickles out to the community to permeate the environment of future generations.

Tags: Distance Learning • Education • Math