Appalachian Future Educator Pioneers Place-Based Literacy Research

Place-Based Education, or the intentional connection between learning and any place’s local community, economy, and ecology, is easy to conceive of in, say, science or business class. If studying biology, students can explore the woods behind school, or for an entrepreneurship project pupils can collaborate with local businesses for real-world examples. Place-Based Education makes learning more engaging and relevant to students, and helps them better understand the assets and challenges of their community. In a class like language arts, however, the opportunities for teachers to infuse Place-Based Education pedagogy into their lessons may be less obvious. Gwen Akers is setting out to change that.

Gwen is a rising sophomore at Morehead State University (MSU), which co-leads Rural Schools Collaborative’s Appalachian Regional Hub, along with the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. In 2021, RSC supported Morehead State in the launch of their Rural Teacher Corps via the Catalyst Initiative, creating the Appalachian Future Educators (AFE) program (for a full summary of the program, read more here). The AFE provides scholarships, support, and intentional instruction around rural teaching for students from across rural eastern Kentucky. An AFE member and aspiring language arts teacher, Gwen is active on campus, also serving as president of the Reading Eagles Club, another education-focused student organization at MSU.

As a native Appalachian with a passion for reading, teaching, and research, diving into ways to make language arts culturally relevant for Appalachian students was a natural fit for Gwen. “I am from eastern Kentucky: I grew up in Ashland, Kentucky. . . I love the hills and I love nature. And I also love to read. My mom read to me a lot as a child and I remember asking her ‘Hey, how come the people in these books are never from the mountains? Like, did they just not have mountains there? I wanted to see more of that. I wanted to read about that. I wanted to read about people that were, you know, in my shoes from the places where I had been stuff like that.”

As Gwen grew up, she kept her love of reading and writing, which led her to an English Education major at Morehead State. In considering her journey, Gwen shares that “as I'm moving up into school, I kept looking around and trying to find that Appalachian literature. I wanted to find my voice in the literature that I read.” That connected her with Becky Roach, former director of the AFE program and a social studies education professor at Morehead State. Under Becky’s supervision, Gwen launched into researching the presence of Appalachian-based authors and books in local classrooms.

“First, I determined that I wanted to have a survey of some sort because I wanted to talk to educators specifically in the MSU service region, and I wanted to hear from these teachers, ‘what kind of books are they teaching in their classroom? How are they teaching these books? How are they selecting these books? And do they think that the literature that they teach impacts their students in an important way?’” Underlying these questions is a hope to explore Appalachian literature and “the connections it holds with inspiring competence and positive sense of self within students” of eastern Kentucky and beyond.

Gwen connected with about twenty local educators of various subjects and ages, and administered a ten-question survey that assessed the availability, prevalence, and perceived importance of Appalachian literature in their respective classrooms and libraries. After tabulating results, Gwen was left with a lot of both qualitative and quantitative data, which highlighted both existing challenges and potential opportunities to feature Appalachian voices in curricula. Half of the participants noted a complete lack of either local and/or regional literature in their building, with 26% saying that there is neither local nor regional literature available to them.

Despite the dearth of available resources, over half of the teachers highlighted that they would *like* to teach local authors, if given the opportunity. Moreover, many identified other ways they connect their students with Appalachian culture and heritage, including many who described how their teaching staff utilize outdoor play areas to immerse their students in Appalachian ecology. This is an important bridge to connecting students with place, but the lack of literature utilized in classrooms still presents a missed opportunity to instill pride of place and community-connected learning in classrooms.

After analyzing the surveys and existing literature around Place-Based Literacy, the way forward for Gwen became clear. Gwen doesn’t place the onus on teachers to overhaul their curricula, but rather identifies that there are opportunities for collaboration within schools and between schools and communities to foster increased access to culturally-relevant reading options. “The first step is just getting Appalachian literature and regional literature in schools. We need it to be there even if it's not taught in the classrooms. It should be available in our libraries for the students to check out and to read. Schools may work in conjunction with public libraries, local authors, or even grant writers to secure these works for their libraries in their schools.”

For Gwen, the potential is personal. She draws upon her own experiences (or lack thereof) reading Appalachian literature in school, noting it held personal value for her that further enriched her education. “I know for me the first time that I read an Appalachian novel in school was in my high school freshman literature class. So we can always start there, try and have more choice when it comes to picking the novels to teach and then kind of move down into the rest of the grades.” Furthermore, Gwen points to more research into the importance of Place-Based Literacy, which can help make the case for the value of featuring local literature.

Gwen’s research and paper were accepted for publication into Literacy, Teaching, and Learning, the official journal for the Kentucky Reading Association, her first time engaging with the peer-review process. As a rising sophomore, there will be plenty of opportunities for additional research and study for Gwen. While she still plans to be a classroom teacher, Gwen’s experience with research has opened her eyes to the possibilities of spreading the gospel of local literature wide and far: “I really hope one day that I'll get to be an English professor and I can teach Appalachian literature in my classroom and help showcase to students their voices.”

Rural Schools Collaborative is grateful to April Miller and Becky Roach for hosting RSC, and to Gwen Akers for sharing her research with Rural Schools Collaborative.