Towards Using Critical Rural Pedagogy with Rural Community College Students in Undergraduate American Literature Classes

Abstract

This dissertation seeks to directly address the ways that rural students are not empowered, not fully engaged by critical pedagogy in my American literature survey course at Centralia College. Instead, I argue for the use of a variation of critical pedagogy that explicitly addresses the multiple positions of power and marginalization rural students occupy, and that enact the topoi of lack, lag, and rosy past as scaffolding that empowers rural students and develops structures for students to enter into conversation with these texts in ways that build on multiple perspective of the rural. I share activities and written assignments to model critical rural pedagogy as it can appear in my classroom, and to serve other American literature professors.