A Focus on Rural Student Strengths: Dismantling Deficit Thinking and Language on Rurality in Higher Education

Ty C. McNamee, Assistant Professor, University of Mississippi

In recent years, issues that for decades have plagued rural areas have been front-and-center in mainstream news outlets, such as high rates of poverty, declining population, fewer white-collar job opportunities, and comparatively lower levels of educational success. Such issues impact rural students’ higher education attainment, a topic that news media have appeared to notice with headlines such as: “Colleges Discover the Rural Student,” “The Rural Higher-Education Crisis,” and “For Colleges, A Rural Reckoning.” Each piece highlighted rural youth holding some of the lowest college attainment rates in the country, compared to other geographic locales.  

These pieces put rural students at the forefront of higher education conversations for the first time in decades. Unfortunately, much of the discussion surrounding rural Americans frames their lives and educational experiences as deficient. In turn, my co-researchers and I started asking: How can we, as higher education scholars, practitioners, policymakers, and other stakeholders, attribute postsecondary attainment barriers for rural students to institutionalized and structural challenges created against these students, instead of placing the onus for such barriers on the rural students, their families, and their communities? How can we illuminate the strengths rural students bring from their families and communities to campuses to succeed in higher education?

By asking such questions, we follow in the footsteps of and give much credit to higher education scholars before us who have pointed to the importance in not employing these types of deficit frames when exploring the experiences of minoritized and marginalized students in higher education (Bensimon, 2005; Harper, 2010; Mwangi, 2015). Instead, such scholars ask postsecondary audiences to highlight valuable attributes students bring to thrive at institutions and critique the postsecondary systems that minoritize and marginalize specific groups (Harper, 2010; Rendón et al., 2000; Smit, 2012).

Increases in research on the strengths of rural students and the systemic barriers that impact them do well to disrupt the notion of rural deficiency in higher education environments. However, research through a strengths-based lens still lags behind scholarly work on other minoritized and marginalized students in postsecondary education. It is for these reasons that my co-researchers and I have developed a rural student strengths-based higher education theoretical framework. This framework builds and expands upon ideas from seminal scholars focused on strengths of minoritized and marginalized populations in educational environments, such as Yosso’s (2005) Community Cultural Wealth (CCW) model, and Vélez‐Ibáñez and Greenberg’s (1992) Funds of Knowledge (FOK) framework.

CCW draws upon Critical Race Theory to demonstrate how social structures uphold racism and oppress people of color. CCW challenges how education typically views cultural capital – capital defined by the white, middle class and that others outside those identities should strive to acquire. Instead, CCW illuminates how cultural wealth is accumulated through multiple types of capital that people of color bring into educational spaces and use “to survive and resist macro and micro-forms of oppression” (p. 77). FOK centers how everyday activities and traditions in minoritized and marginalized students’ (i.e., working-class Latinx families) homes and communities can be applied in classroom settings by those same students (González et al., 2005; Moll et al., 1992; Vélez‐Ibáñez & Greenberg, 1992).

These frameworks were developed around important identities, including race, ethnicity, and income. However, to complement that work with more rural-specific lenses, we intertwine such models with rural strengths-based conceptualizations. For example, Flora (2016) detailed that rural populations, diverse in identities and demographics, engage in Community Capitals (natural, cultural, human, social, political, financial, and built) to address challenges faced by their communities. Rural-centered forms of capital, such as rural resourcefulness and rural familism (Crumb et al., 2022), as well as rural ways of knowing (Almond, 2022), have even been shown to be useful in rural student PreK-12 and higher education success. Through creating a framework that connects theory across CCW, FOK, and rural strengths, we engage thinking that allows us, as a research team, to understand how rural students bring strengths from their rural identity and backgrounds, often in the face of higher education systems that minoritize and marginalize them through not understanding rural ways of life and/or not connecting with rural communities.

Where Do We Go from Here?

Rurality seems to be on the minds of many throughout the country. Just this year alone, federal legislation continues to focus on higher education access and attainment for rural students. A small group of selective institutions started the STARS College Network to “create new pathways to college for [small town and rural] students.” However, these efforts must acknowledge rural strengths in their work. Much of the past language from both the media, academics, and additional stakeholders surrounding rural students’ relationship to higher education has focused on how to address crises in rural America and how to outreach to rural youth to connect them to higher education. Discussions such as these fall in line with the unjust historical assumption that rural students are deficient (Theobald & Wood, 2010), a population that needs higher education to “save” them. I challenge these assumptions and echo the call by other scholars (Bensimon, 2005; Harper, 2010; Mwangi, 2015; Means, 2019; Smit, 2012) to study minoritized and marginalized students in higher education – including rural students – not through deficit frameworks, but instead through lenses that acknowledge the characteristics, traits, and background knowledge that can help rural students succeed at institutions and critique the systems that do not value those assets.

Note: I would not have been able to write this blog and conduct my research without my amazing fellow strengths-based research team members Dr. Sonja Ardoin, Dr. Vanessa Sansone, Nikki Cooper, and Wendy Pfrenger. I look forward to continuing our scholarship together in this space!

 About the Author

Ty McNamee is an Assistant Professor of Higher Education in the Department of Higher Education at The University of Mississippi. Growing up as a gay, poor, and working-class student on a farm/ranch in rural Wyoming greatly influenced Ty’s research interests. He uses critical, sociological, and anthropological lenses to conduct qualitative research on higher education access, success, and equity for rural students, particularly those from poor and working-class backgrounds and those who are queer, as well as college teaching and learning and faculty development at rural postsecondary institutions. Outside of his research, Ty co-founded and ran the Rural Education and Healthcare Coalition, a Teachers College, Columbia University student, faculty, and staff network focused on rural education and healthcare programming and research. He also actively serves in professional organizations, including the Association for the Study of Higher Education (ASHE) and the American Educational Research Association (AERA). Ty received his doctorate in Higher and Postsecondary Education from Teachers College, Columbia University in 2022, his Master of Arts in Higher Education and Student Affairs from the University of Connecticut in 2015, and his Bachelor of Arts in English from the University of Wyoming in 2013.

 

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