Learning to Lose: Rurality, Transience, and Belonging (A Companion to Michael Corbett) (2009)

In Learning to Leave, Michael Corbett (2007) documents the ironies and contradictions of formal education and rurality, demonstrating how education is implicated in the depopulation and decline of rural areas, consequence of increasing urbanity, in turn fuelled by global forces naturalized through narratives of progress within modernity. His arguments imply central point I wish to make in this commentary: education, and in particular what is called rural education, is premised on loss. This loss is often not fully articulated, but it is deep and abiding. It is registered in efforts to stop the flow of peoples and resources, to resist consolidation and closure of schools, and to attract and retain educators. I want to argue however that such loss can also be productive in that it unsettles. And within such unsettling lie opportunities to generate new knowledge. A reconceptualization of loss as central and explicit component of an education that addresses the concerns of rurality enhances our understandings of what is possible. While it is important to understand the sociological conditions that frame the physical mobility of rural people, it is just as important to consider its affective, even psychic, dimensions as mobility relates to attachment, to belonging, to transcience-and to loss. For whether one stays in or leaves rural area (and the oscillations of mobility and transience are rarely so simply demarcated), indeed, regardless of geographical attention to such affective dimensions, what William Pinar (1991) calls a social psychoanalysis of place (p.165), can reap rich insights into both the challenges and possibilities for education and/in rurality. Furthermore, wrestling with the vicissitudes of loss is reminder of shared global and planetary vulnerability, one which, while highlighting the intricacies and specificities of place, also transcends those specificities and shores up our interdependence, the manner in which our destinies-and our places-are intimately connected to others. As Jonathan Lear (2006) argues, this deeply etched vulnerability is both ontological, part of what it means to be human, as well as inherited, part of what it means to be cultural beings who inhabit way of life. An education for rurality would encourage fuller consciousness of this shared vulnerability through an examination of loss-real, anticipated, generational-as it relates to our felt or refuted attachments. It would also encourage new forms of belonging (Bromley, 2000) and new practices of inhabitation as the basis of both reparation and hope. Reconsidering the Place of Loss in Rural Education The meanings of home, place, and belonging have never been more highly contested than in these times of unprecedented migration, displacement, and exile, shifting national borders and identities, and multiple diasporas. As large scale and ubiquitous as these forces are, they are lived and experienced within deeply specific sociocultural relations and highly localized geospatial arrangements. Such specificity underscores the importance of focus on as means to excavate possibility and interconnection. In local and global contexts, reconsideration of loss and its provocations is critical to the objective of renewal-itself borne of loss. As Corbett suggests, dominant technicist, rationalist, and decontextualized modes of education are woefully inadequate to address the complexities of places. An education that might begin to address the needs of places must first of all resist simplistic binaries of identity and locale, and ask broader questions about loss, vulnerability, and difference, and what these questions suggest for new project of conviviality and sustainability within rurality. Such an education asks students to consider the responsibilities and challenges of staying and leaving and to understand the conditions of citizenship and attachment. For, within what Corbett calls mobile modernity, whether and when we stay or leave, we are always travellers: cultural boundary crossers who benefit from an understanding of the relations of difference that underpin all forms of movement when we are able to converse across these differences while striving to live respectfully in relation to others. …