Rural Scholars or Bright Rednecks? Aspirations for a Sense of Place Among Rural Youth in Appalachia

Abstract

In this article, we promote sense ofplace as a legitimate aspiration of rural youth, including very able rural youth. The aspiration concerns the quest for rootedness and community as opposed to mobility and individual status. We con-ducted exploratory analyses ofdata gatheredfrom 158 participants in the 1994 West Virginia Governor's Honors Acad-emy (GHA) andfrom a contrasting group of644 students in seven rural high schools. Findings suggest that GHA students (whether rural or more urban): (I) are less alienated than students in the contrast group; (2) that they are not more eager to leave their local community than students in the contrast group; and (3) that GHA students exhibit stronger modem dispositions than students in the contrast group, but do not exhibit weaker rustic dispositions. In addition, GHA students do not pppear to be less satisfied with their (more urbanized) communities than rural students-at-large; however, rural GHA students do appear to be less satisfied with their local communities than GHA students living elsewhere. Findings are discussed in light ofconventional wisdom about aspirations and in view ofemerging rural s~hool improvement aims.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 92 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.