A Conceptual Model for Engineering Educators in Rural Places: Critical Reflection and Engagement

First Author

I am a white, nondisabled, queer person from Appalachia. I was trained in mechanical engineering and received a degree from a four-year institution. My positionality is informed by the privilege I experience due to being white and nondisabled in a society built on white supremacy and the marginalization I have experienced due to being queer and Appalachian. Additionally, I have always had access to education and had the support from my family to pursue an engineering degree, and I am now pursuing graduate degrees, all of which further contribute to the privileges I experience. My positionality is further informed by my experiences in undergraduate education, where I first realized that my experience with and access to engineering before college was significantly different from my peers, and rarely felt as though my identity, my experiences, and my interests in engineering were reflected throughout my education. As such, I have begun to explore this further as part of my own research. Throughout my graduate education, I have come to understand and value the importance of context and community in all aspects of research and practice.

Second Author

I am a white, nondisabled man who grew up mostly in Virginia and attended Virginia Tech to earn degrees in both engineering and education. While my parents did not earn university degrees, my educational pursuits were strongly influenced and supported by my parents and by my being the youngest of four children who financially supported themselves earning degrees, including two older brothers who became engineers. These experiences have caused me to reflect on the many sociocultural factors that expand or constrain students’ educational and career goals. Prior to working in engineering education, I was a faculty member in the university center for student engagement and community partnerships which strongly informs my beliefs about the responsibilities and roles university faculty should have in collaboratively addressing urgent community issues that align with their expertise and/or are influenced positively or negatively by their academic field. I have supported or led multiple collaborative applied research projects with rural schools and focused on rural youth and these experiences have further shaped my motivation for and approach to the work discussed in this article.

Joint Statement

Together, our experiences significantly shape our inquiry and synthesis in this paper. For example, we both consider ourselves to be pragmatic and seek connections to action and practice that are informed by theory and literature. In fact, we have both been engaged in prior applied work in the Appalachian region as a PI (second author) and a research assistant (first author) with varying degrees of engagement throughout the duration of the project. From this experience, we approached this work with the understanding that prior work was incomplete and needed to improve moving forward by better recognizing the Appalachian context and engaging in asset-based approaches in this context. Because of this, many examples in this paper lean on the Appalachian context as an example. This paper was also informed by work completed for the first author’s dissertation milestones, which the second author advises. However, we approach this work as outsiders to P–12 education as neither of us has ever worked as an employee in a P–12 setting. Therefore, our understanding of the P–12 context is lacking an insider perspective, and we try to acknowledge the challenges related to the conceptual model presented in this paper as we perceive them as partnering educators and researchers.

Understanding the Appalachian Context and Spatial Justice

Because much of our work takes place in Southwest, Appalachian Virginia, the following section describes more about the demographics and history of the region as it is informed by a lens of spatial justice. Appalachia is a region largely defined by the Appalachian Mountain Range in the Eastern United States. The region itself includes 420 counties in 13 states, and accounts for about 25.7 million people (Appalachian Regional Commission [ARC], 2021). Of the 420 counties, 82 counties have been designated as distressed, 109 as at-risk, and 218 as transitional (ARC, 2023). The remaining 14 counties have either been classified as competitive or attainment, meaning the economies are stronger in those counties (ARC, n.d.) These designations are determined by comparing Appalachian counties to national averages in metrics like three-year unemployment rates, per capita market income, and poverty rates (ARC, n.d.). In 2019, the median household income in Appalachia was $51,916 compared to $62,843 nationally (ARC, 2021).

As a whole, rural students are underrepresented in higher education (Ardoin, 2018). According to data from 2019 from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES, 2021), only 24.7% of people aged 25 and older from rural areas earned a bachelor’s degree or higher, compared to 37% from cities, 36.7% from suburbs, and 22.5% from towns. More specifically, Appalachian students, who are also often considered rural students, are also underrepresented in higher education and engineering. As of 2019 in Appalachia, 24.7% of the population over the age of 25 held a Bachelor’s degree or more, compared to 32.1% nationally (ARC, 2021). When looking more closely at the context of Appalachian Virginia level data, 20.9% of the population over the age of 25 in Appalachian Virginia held a Bachelor’s degree or more, compared to 40.6% for non-Appalachian Virginia (ARC, 2021). Of the Bachelor’s degrees held by the population over the age of 25 in Appalachia, 30.9% of them are in science and engineering compared to 35.1% nationally (ARC, 2021). In Appalachian Virginia, 35.3% of the Bachelor’s degrees held by the population over the age of 25 are in science and engineering compared to 40.9% of those degrees in non-Appalachian Virginia (ARC, 2021). These trends of underrepresentation in higher education and engineering are consistent with previously conducted research focusing on Appalachian students pursuing engineering (Boynton, 2014; Carrico, 2013).

Looking at these numbers alone, however, does not provide a full picture or explanation of the Appalachian region—there is also a deeply rooted structural and historical explanation. As Peine et al. (2020) highlight, there is a history of systemic exploitation of people and resources, and expropriation of power and resources by entities outside the Appalachian region, often by extractive industries (e.g., coal mining) that have provided resources for much of the United States. The intentional and systemic expropriation and exploitation in Appalachia has led to people experiencing years of dispossession which has deeply affected the “sociocultural bedrock of [Appalachian] communities” (Peine et al., 2020, p. 45). This means that while the region provides greatly needed resources to many places, there is little to no investment of the rewards from these resources back into the communities, which enables the conditions of poverty and further exploitation. This has ultimately led to many outsiders pushing narratives around the “culture of poverty” and wield stereotypes around the “backwardness” and supposed low ambition of the people who live in Appalachia as a way to blame communities and people for their experiences (Peine et al., 2020). These stereotypes are harmful and can be challenging to overcome, especially when they have become embedded in and perpetuated by systems and structures that continue to affect the region.

This systemic dispossession and decontextualized curriculum deeply affect how rural students might see themselves and their experiences reflected back to them throughout their education. Therefore, making explicit connections to students’ places is key for students to connect their experiences with their learning, and reclaim power in their communities (Gruenewald, 2003a, 2003b; Peine et al., 2020). Having a deeper understanding of place allows for an understanding of spatial justice, defined by Biddle et al. (2019) as “the power dynamics governing [a] phenomenon [that] should be unpacked with regard to how they may or may not differ with regard to rural space” (p. 10). Geographers, like Edward Soja, have argued that the term spatial justice suggests that justice “has a consequential geography” (Soja, 2010, p. 1), meaning that justice is related to the actual geography of places. Though the term is generally used in conversations about city planning, urban spaces, and related policies, Soja (2010) argues that a spatial lens can be used to further sociological and historical understandings of our conditions which might often pertain to exploitation and oppression. Spatial justice emphasizes the importance of place when it comes to those in power, for example researchers, practitioners, and policymakers, making informed decisions about how policy and practice should or should not differ between communities (Biddle et al., 2019). In the case of Appalachia and many other rural places, this understanding of spatial justice can help bridge the historic, structural contexts of places and the current understandings of life and education.

Understand self and context rooted in place

Understanding how the impact of place is related to ourselves and the contexts in which we work is incredibly important. This tenet requires us to engage more deeply with how everything is rooted in the concept of place and can be interpreted through a lens of place—including how we understand ourselves individually, how we are perceived, how we participate, and how issues present themselves in places.

When thinking about how we understand ourselves, there is some familiar language we might already use. For the field of engineering education, this often comes in the form of positionality statements. Recently, two groups of scholars in engineering education (Hampton et al., 2021; Secules et al., 2021) have emphasized the importance of researcher positionality in engineering education research. Between Secules et al. and Hampton et al., positionality can be roughly defined as how one’s personal, cultural, social, or political position and identity in the world informs their research design. Secules et al. (2021) reflected on important ways positionality informs research topics, epistemology, ontology, methodology, relation to participants, and communication. Hampton et al. (2021) also argue that positionality is a critical component of research and impacts the research decisions made at every step of the research process. We must also consider our positionality as it relates to how we view rural places and how we, as researchers, are often situated and perceived in these places.

As many rural scholars have identified, researchers working with rural communities must contend with insider/outsider dynamics when dealing with their positionality (White & Corbett, 2014). While in many cases, a researcher can embed themselves in a community to build relationships and trust, this does not necessarily make them an insider. As some authors have noted, even living in a community as a researcher or being a researcher from a rural community does not necessarily guarantee full access, as people might be reluctant to participate and talk to someone they do not know well (Hamm, 2014). Furthermore, even if a researcher does have insider status, it can complicate how they might interact with participants and collect data. For example, participants might assume the researcher knows things about the community and some things will remain unspoken, or a researcher may be unable to see things differently because of their involvement in the community (Brann-Barrett, 2014; Henderson & Lennon, 2014).

When thinking about ourselves as rooted in a place—meaning how we live and participate in certain places—we must also consider how broader contexts can be viewed through place. In writing our research, we must first convey this information so that others may understand our work. As Coladarci (2007) argued in their piece regarding the quality of rural education research, being able to provide information about and descriptions of context is important for understanding exactly how a place is rural. In many instances, it is not enough to provide demographics, geographic distance from cities, or economic factors as indicators of rurality (Biddle et al., 2019; Coladarci, 2007). In fact, it may be beneficial and necessary to describe the environment or ask the people in a community to describe their own community or their own place (Coladarci, 2007). Biddle et al. (2019) furthered this call to include explanations of how research is critical to rural communities. This means that power dynamics, politics and other important contexts should be included in our understanding of education research and should be used to further our understanding of rural places (Biddle et al., 2019).

In addition to writing, engaging in a context through a lens of place requires an understanding of the historical, sociocultural, political, ecological, and economic aspects of a community. As Kingsolver (2017) suggested, it is important to consider what it means to be rural in a specific place. What it means to be rural in one place is not the same as what it means to be rural in another. Rural communities often have a range of diversity that is often ignored when they are painted with a broad brush or essentialized to numbers and demographics alone. This approach is often used to paint rural places and experiences as homogenous, which might also often ignore specific histories or groups of people in rural places. Furthermore, people tend to hold many assumptions about rural places which tend to build on each other. For example, assumptions that rural places are uneducated and backward are related to assumptions about what counts as valuable knowledge and who gets to define value. The focus of placing blame on individuals removes focus from the systemic issues present in many rural communities (Eppley, 2017). On the other hand, there also runs another line of stereotypes that only seek to emphasize the idyllic or imagined rural life, for example, where there are no problems and everything is simple (Azano et al., 2020). Other stereotypes of rural places and people reinforce an assumed Whiteness (e.g., words like “White trash”; Azano et al., 2020) of rural places. However, it is certainly not the case that only White people live in rural places (Walker, 2021). Each of these assumptions and stereotypes serve to erase important social, historical, and political contexts that inform the landscape in which People of Color live. Furthermore, assumptions around rurality and Whiteness may also ignore issues pertaining to poverty, income, and education disparities experienced by People of Color in rural places, particularly in light of COVID-19 (Rowlands & Love, 2021).

As Peine et al. (2020) described in their paper about Appalachian identity and dispossession, there are unique historic implications of many places, and having this understanding is important for engaging people in their place. For example, we might understand that climate change is a global issue and a broad context that may inform our work. Viewing climate change through a lens of place can help us understand more about climate change as a local issue that is impacting the systems and people in a place. For example, climate change and energy production may be linked because many communities throughout Appalachia might have relied or may still rely on coal mining which likely affects how people might feel about renewable energy alternatives, regardless of if those feelings are generally positive or not. Therefore, recognizing this context can inform how we might develop activities or make connections to energy production. Without this lens of place, it can be hard to understand what engineering topics or approaches might be relevant to our work. Additionally, using a lens of place can help dispel perceptions that all rural places and people are the same—it is crucial to recognize that there is not a singular rural experience.

It is often the case that we might reflect on our positionalities as it pertains to our methods and practices, for example, and the view that researchers are an instrument in data collection or reflect on how our identities inform what we study or how we engage with communities. Additionally, we often address broad contexts in our work, connecting our activities, outreach, and engagement to complex, global issues. Doing these things through a lens of place can only serve to enrich our understanding of ourselves and broad contexts, and is necessary to achieve a deeper understanding of engineering education work in rural places.

Seek to (re)contextualize curriculum

After understanding more about context and self is shaped by places, it can be easier for us to understand how we might leverage contexts to (re)contextualize engineering curriculum and learning. The term (re)contextualize refers to the reintroduction of local or relevant contexts to curriculum, which many scholars and educators argue has been decontextualized. According to Gruenewald (2003a), “current educational discourses seek to standardize the experience of students from diverse geographical and cultural places so that they may compete in a global economy” (p. 7). Gruenewald ultimately argues that this goal of standardization is harmful to learning, and, though Gruenewald’s argument was presented almost two decades ago, standardized testing and learning outcomes have not gone away and we still rely heavily on other quantifiable school metrics.

(Re)contextualizing engineering education is important so that students might engage in something with which they are already familiar, which can lead to the validation of their own knowledge and experiences. Many scholars have presented different ways in which students’ contexts and experiences can be leveraged in education. Critical pedagogues, such as Freire (1968), have argued that education should engage students in their own worlds by focusing on problems related to their own lives. In later writing, Freire asked, “why not establish an ‘intimate’ connection between knowledge considered basic to any school curriculum and knowledge that is the fruit of the lived experience of the students as individuals?” (1996, p. 36). Ladson-Billings (1995a), in presenting the tenets of culturally relevant teaching, suggested using students’ culture as the vehicle for learning which can mean using music to engage students or engaging students’ family members in classrooms as the experts who can teach students. These approaches to pedagogy all argue for grounding educational experiences in something with which students are familiar, but many approaches to education filter knowledge and seek to standardize student learning and experiences which has significant unintended consequences.

In rural contexts, one way to (re)contextualize curriculum is through the use of place (Gruenewald, 2003a, 2003b; Smith, 2002). One approach to incorporate place into education is through place-based education. Place-based education often focuses on engaging students with the world around them through hands-on and experiential learning activities that focus on local landscapes and environments by placing education outside the walls of a school (Avery, 2013; Smith, 2002). By leaning on place in education, examples can be made relevant to the students because they can look around their community and make connections. Furthermore, Smith (2002) suggests that it can be important to engage students in problems in their immediate contexts which encourages real-world problem solving and shows them local occupations that might also engage with problems or opportunities in their communities. Critical pedagogy of place (Gruenewald, 2003a, 2003b) furthers the idea of place-based education by embracing the connection between classroom and culture in a local context. Gruenewald (2003a) argues that critical pedagogy of place seeks to link “school and place-based experience to the larger landscape of cultural and ecological politics” (p. 9) through the two related objectives to reinhabit and decolonize. In this case, reinhabit refers to learning to live in a place that has been disrupted and decolonize refers to recognizing that a disruption has occurred and addressing the causes of that disruption. Gruenewald (2003b) identifies places as being pedagogical through perceptual, sociological, ideological, political, and ecological dimensions, which can be used to think about the interconnectedness of systems and aspects of socially constructed places.

Some existing engineering education research suggests that it is crucial to use locally relevant engineering examples to spark and sustain students’ interests in engineering. As previously stated, findings from focusing on Appalachian students’ career pathways, suggest that these students desire to stay local, have a stable job and income, work that does not require physical labor, work that has variety, and work that helps others (Boynton 2014; Carrico, 2013). However, as Carrico et al. (2019) point out, the local economic situation presents both real and perceived tensions when it comes to students’ desire to stay local, as many Appalachian counties are at-risk or at a transitional stage of economic development. To mitigate this, connecting students to STEM professionals has been shown to have an influence over students’ career decisions and help spark and sustain students’ interests in engineering (Boynton, 2014; Carrico, 2013; Matusovich et al., 2017). Therefore, connecting students to engineers in local industries is one way to introduce students to locally relevant examples of engineering. Bringing these engineers into classrooms to serve as content experts can also serve as a visible connection to engineering happening in students’ communities (de-identified citation). Other examples might include asking students to develop an activity that would be relevant to them in their places or encouraging students to explore more about their place. Community members can also be engaged in activities to provide more local context. Another example of other work being done to (re)contextualize engineering in engineering education include projects like EPICS that seek to connect engineering with real-world examples for K–12 spaces by partnering with teachers to implement relevant curriculum (EPICS, n.d.). Though these ongoing projects are not always in rural spaces, they can serve as examples of what it means to (re)contextualize learning for students.

Encourage student assets and multiple ways of knowing

Aligned with many of the frameworks and calls to shift away from deficit-based discussions of people in engineering education research, this tenet seeks to encourage the identification and recognition of rural students’ assets and multiple ways of knowing. Moving to a focus on students’ assets broadens what is valued in engineering education (Martin & Wendell, 2021). Some of these asset-based approaches are informed by bodies of literature around community cultural wealth (Yosso, 2005), culturally relevant and culturally sustaining pedagogy (Ladson-Billings, 1995a; Paris, 2012), and funds of knowledge (Moll et al., 1992), for example. Though some of these theories and approaches are mentioned here, please note this is not an exhaustive list. In the subsections that follow, we briefly introduce foundational work from these approaches before synthesizing across them in consideration of our aims to highlight asset-based practices for rural education.

Engage critically and hopefully

The final tenet of this conceptual model deals with the development of critical consciousness, both in ourselves as engineering educators and the students with whom we may work. This final tenet is incredibly important to engaging in rural contexts. We do note that this tenet is also a tenet of culturally relevant teaching (Ladson-Billings, 1995a) and has been discussed by other authors of critical pedagogy such as Giroux (1992) and Freire (1968) and is therefore not unique on its own but should be acknowledged as a key challenge we feel is important and is something with which we (the authors) are grappling.

Freire (1968) made an argument for problem-posing education as opposed to the banking-method of education, which he described as being as a method that relies on students only engaging with what they are told to memorize and recite as dictated by the teacher in the position of power. Instead, Freire presented problem-posing education that allows for students to become producers of knowledge by deeply engaging with and critiquing the world around them, exploring and questioning their own realities. Freire referred to this development of critical consciousness as conscientization or “conscientização.” This development of critical consciousness requires intention and engagement on part of the facilitator, teacher, or instructor, and must be done in tandem with students. However, in many contexts, raising critical consciousness can be difficult. In fact, Ladson-Billings (2014), in a reflection on the use of culturally relevant pedagogy, noted that this final tenet of the original approach has largely been lost in implementation. Ladson-Billings (2014) suggests that few teachers have pushed students to consider critical perspectives of their realities and those practices that directly impact them and their communities. Similarly, Azano (2011) utilized a lens of critical pedagogy of place to understand an English teacher’s place-based instruction. Azano (2011) found that while the teacher engaged in place with references to the larger community, culture of the rural town, and texts that were relevant to the students’ lives, the teacher did not engage students’ critical lens or critical consciousness to talk further about the challenges the students and community faced. A critical lens allows students to confront complicated aspects of their communities with the aim of developing a more nuanced understanding of their place (Azano, 2011). While it is imperative to focus on the good things—what students bring with them as assets, what the community can offer, and the knowledge that already exists in places—a critical consciousness approach that embraces a tension of both critique and possibility can further strengthen students’ understanding of their world and current realities.

Giroux (1992) describes this tension directly and argues that while focusing on real problems and situations is crucial, critical approaches must provide the language of both critique and possibility to provide hope for future action. A critical pedagogy provides critique around cultural production and the manifestation of unequal power relations, particularly in educational contexts (Giroux, 1992). Along with this, however, critical pedagogy must also seek what is possible, beyond the critique, so as not to continue to reproduce problems. As such, critical pedagogies of place, which was previously discussed, encourages teachers and students to become involved in the well-being of their places. Gruenewald (2003a) argues that critical pedagogies of place combine place-based education with a specific focus on situations people face, which have spatial, geographical, and contextual dimensions. Therefore, critical pedagogies of place challenge people to reflect on their own situations “in a way that explores the complex interrelationships between cultural and ecological environments” (Gruenewald, 2003a, p. 6). Gruenewald (2003a) also argues that critical pedagogy of place should engage students in action to address issues of justice (or injustice). In educational contexts, critical pedagogy of place readies learners to engage with complex ecological themes and prepare them to engage and participate in their communities. Holding the tension between critique and possibility offers opportunities for growth and for students to feel in control of their present and future.

While Patterson et al. (2021) further noted that engaging students in critical consciousness development can help them recognize privilege and marginalization as it pertains to various systems of oppression, there are sometimes challenges with encouraging it. The classroom environments in which critical consciousness can be engaged, however, must be open environments in which these discussions are welcome (Patterson et al., 2021). However, this openness is often uncommon, typically out of a desire to avoid conflict in the classroom or conflict from outsiders (Patterson et al., 2021). In some states, now, engaging critical consciousness has become increasingly difficult to address in a variety of different contexts. For example, the governor of Virginia set up a tip line for parents to report teachers who approach “divisive subjects” like critical race theory (Ankel, 2022). Additionally, many other states have proposed “Don’t Say Gay” bills which seek to ban schools from discussing topics of gender identity and sexual orientation (Jones & Franklin, 2022). Though there has been significant pushback against these practices, they are still indicative of the challenges pertaining to this specific tenet. In many ways, these bills and tip lines, and the culture surrounding them have created unsafe environments for both students and teachers to discuss difficult yet important issues.

For engineering education in rural places, acknowledging this final tenet related to critical consciousness remains important. For example, engineering is not blameless in the exploitative practices related to the extraction of resources for energy production (e.g., coal mining), to the pollution of land, air and water, and to the decisions made about resources and their distribution across all geographies (e.g., city planning). If we aim to engage students in engineering, in some cases recognizing that engineering has created or contributed to problems, particularly in rural communities, is imperative and offers a chance to allow students to consider the futures of their places. Additionally, understanding and acknowledging these contexts, as well as other socio-political realities, in what we do can be important for engaging students in their lived experiences and realities. Encouraging students to ask why things in their community are the way they are can engage them more deeply in their places and allow them to engage in strategies to address problems or opportunities they identify. Finally, we must also recognize that allowing students to explore and learn on their own, that they have expert knowledge about their communities informed by their lived experiences, and that they can influence learning is a crucial piece of this tenet. We must allow opportunities for students to be the teachers and we must be willing to learn from them.

Reflecting on the tenets

As a part of the process of engaging with this conceptual model, a list of reflection questions was developed to help facilitate how the conceptual model might be used by engineering educators to more intentionally design and engage with rural places and people. The questions presented in Table 1 relate to each tenet, and while not an exhaustive list of everything that could be asked, provide a starting point for thinking about how the tenets relate to engaging in rural places.