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This longitudinal case study explored one rural elementary art teacher 's praxis for two years after she participated in professional development sessions on place-based education (PBE). These sessions focused specifically on PBE within the discipline of art for K-12 art educators in a geographically-large southeastern school district. Through questionnaires, observations, interviews, and document analysis of curricular materials, the researchers investigated the teacher 's experiences with PBE as she taught art in a rural area of the district. Her curricular decisions transitioned from a focus on art reflecting her personal knowledge base to art that built on students' expressions of, experiences in, and knowledge of, their rural setting. Implications for teacher professional development focused on rural education include strategies for promoting the contextualization of content and communicating the benefits of transitioning from place-neutral to place-based instruction.
With first grade we 're doing printing where they draw on the foam, and they do a reverse print. The theme was love . . . . We almost did like a community circle where every student had to say what they loved and what they were going to print, and this little girl goes, "Chickens. " And I'm thinking of a rotisserie and she's thinking pet. (Patricia, Year 2 Interview)
As rural settings tend to offer children opportunities for outdoor experiences and families within those settings often have expectations that members will participate in daily chores, rural children often develop first-hand, experiential knowledge of their local environment, both sociocultural and ecological (Avery & Kassam, 2011). Through this local knowledge or "practical wisdom" (Avery & Kassam, 2011, p. 1), rural children often acquire a complex sense of relationality: they can recognize their interdependence within local social, cultural, and ecological systems (Kassam & Avery, 2013; Avery & Hains, 2017). Shamah and MacTavish (2009) suggested that rural students "gain their knowledge of place through their own explorations-and by interacting with community members and the land through agricultural work, recreation, and outdoorsmanship" and "remain actively engaged in nature"(p. 1). Avery and Hains (2017) claimed such knowledge and relational understandings have significant societal value: the scholarly community increasingly recognizes the importance of local and indigenous knowledge for addressing critical global issues, such as climate change.
Despite the wealth of knowledge that students in...