On Resisting "Awayness" and Being a Good Insider: Early Career Scholars Revisit Coladarci's Swan Song a Decade Later

University of Maine, 333 Merrill Hall, Orono, ME 04469 (catharine.biddle@maine.edu). The Journal of Research in Rural Education is published by the Center on Rural Education and Communities, College of Education, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA 16802. ISSN 1551-0670 reevaluate the constructs of our fi eld: What constitutes rural education research? What ought it be? In this theoretical essay, we critically reexamine a piece of rural education scholarship that has become an important standard for judging rural salience, Coladarci’s (2007) “Improving the Yield of Rural Education Research: An Editor’s Swan Song. ” Written at the end of his tenure as editor of the Journal of Research in Rural Education over a decade ago, Coladarci laid out a handful of carefully explained standards for how to evaluate and enhance the unique quality of rural education research. These standards included, among other recommendations, the request that authors of rural education scholarship “make the rural argument,” or justify why rurality is theoretically relevant to their study with the goal of more carefully understanding what happens at the intersection of rurality and schooling. It is a piece that has been used to introduce newcomers to the fi eld of rural education research, and it is cited as a reference in the submission guidelines for the Journal of Research in Rural Education. As such, it has signifi cantly shaped the rural education research community over the last 10 years. We position Coladarci’s (2007) article as a powerful recent example of boundary work in our fi eld. As scientifi c research is a social endeavor, research communities must coalesce around a series of norms that help to defi ne the In 1983, Massey and Crosby argued that rural communities are “invisible,” stating, “Rural residents are far more likely to suff er in silence than demand attention from the agencies and institutions ostensibly designed to serve them” (p. 266). However, in the wake of the 2016 U.S. election, rural America has been thrust into the spotlight, with the critical importance of better understanding the circumstances of rural communities recognized by both national media and the broader fi eld of social science research (Black, 2017; Bottemiller Evich 2016; Cramer, 2016; Kurtzleben, 2016; Monnat & Brown, 2017). As rural education research scholars, we are as aff ected by this sudden attention as other rural social scientists are. It is our “boomtown” moment in which some out-of-fi eld scholars are rushing in to study this “under-researched fi eld,” while the lifetime residents seek to hold on to our boundaries and make clear our core assumptions. Now is the time to This theoretical essay critically examines the impact of Coladarci’s 2007 article, “Improving the Yield of Rural Education Research: An Editor’s Swan Song,” which he composed at the conclusion of his tenure as editor of the Journal of Research in Rural Education. Using boundary theory and “awayness” as a metaphor for understanding community in social science research, we use citation analysis to review the ways in which Coladarci’s work has been taken up by the fi eld, illustrating the ways in which this piece serves to socialize new researchers to rural education research. We then take up Coladarci’s invitation to further discuss what might defi ne a contribution to the fi eld of rural education scholarship and propose several additional considerations, including analyses of how power manifests across space and the criticality of a topic to rural schools and communities. Citation: Biddle, C. , Sutherland, D.H. , & McHenry-Sorber, E. (2019). On resisting “awayness” and being a good insider: Early career scholars revisit Coladarci’s swan song a decade later. Journal of Research in Rural Education, 35(7), 1-16. Retrieved from: https://doi.org/10.26209/jrre3507 Catharine Biddle University of Maine