Handbook for Counselors Serving Students With Gifts and Talents

Development, Relationships, School Issues, and Counseling Needs/Interventions

Tracy L. Cross, Jennifer Riedl Cross, Tracy L. Cross, Jennifer Riedl Cross

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000493238
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Bildung
• Subtopic: Inklusive Bildung

The second edition of Handbook for Counselors Serving Students With Gifts and Talents provides the definitive overview of research on the general knowledge that has been amassed regarding the psychology of gifted students. This book:

• Introduces the reader to the varied conceptions of giftedness.
• Covers issues specific to gifted children and various intervention methods.
• Describes programs designed to fulfill the need these children have for challenge.
• Is updated and expanded, addressing contemporary issues.
• Reflects the latest research on giftedness.

With chapters authored by leading experts in the field, Handbook for Counselors Serving Students With Gifts and Talents is a resource professionals can turn to for answers to a wide variety of questions about gifted children.

SECTION II Special Populations

DOI: 10.4324/9781003235415-10

CHAPTER 8 Counseling the Rural Gifted

CRAIG HOWLEY AND AIMEE HOWLEY

DOI: 10.4324/9781003235415-11

The task is to discover what their experience is, not to tell children what their experience could or should be. (Coleman et al., 2015, p. 359)

This chapter takes an ecological perspective, seeing rural children as part of families and communities first of all. This ecology notably rests on rural commitments and preoccupations, which diverge from the mainstream and are ignored and sometimes dishonored in schools (Carr & Kefalas, 2009; Theobald & Wood, 2010). Rural communities are not even represented as a cultural variant in textbooks about multicultural education (Ayalon, 2003). Schooling instead valorizes a suburban-upper-middle-class experience of life and its story of success: status and wealth in the city (Berry, 1970/2010). In rural schools, able students learn that their responsibility is to leave; those unable and unwilling to leave remain stuck, often seen by educators as "losers" (Corbett, 2007; Hektner, 1995; Rebanks, 2015). The cost of such an imposition is perhaps felt most acutely by those students most attentive to ideas about how the world works and how it should work (including many able learners in rural schools; e.g., C. B. Howley, 2009; Rebanks, 2015). Beyond the personal and cultural insult, however, the imposition is also an American cultural disaster.

Counseling services in rural schools could and should mitigate the disaster. In explaining the importance of this work, this chapter considers what rural is, the nature of rural identity, the advantages of rural life and rural schools, and how rural counseling can find opportunities within the dilemmas confronting gifted students and their families.

WHAT IS RURAL, AND WHY PAY ATTENTION?

Both the Bureau of the Census and the U.S. Department of Education have very clear definitions of rural places and rural schools. These definitions carve off rural areas (counties, school attendance zones) from metropolitan ones. Rural places are, in general, more sparsely populated, and many are distant from cities.

Necessarily missing from these useful definitions are conceptions of what it means to inhabit rural places. Missing are the once-familiar human orbits involving commitments to family, community, and place (land and how people interact with it). Thompson (2002) argued that caring for hearth and home is an activity that enriches the lives of both men and women. In her feminist view, the marginalization of the domestic realm in the modern world has seriously diminished the quality of life throughout America. The homeplace is important. Domesticity is not contrary to progress, equality, or well-being. Suburban-upper-middle-class prerogatives and aspirations, which construe success in terms of status and income, cannot be the one best way to a good life. In the view of some critics (e.g., Deresiewicz, 2014; Kunstler, 1993; Rose, 2014), in fact, these prerogatives might even undermine prospects for living life well.

Unexpectedly, the COVID-19 pandemic forced together many families, setting up a natural experiment focusing in part on life in the domestic realm. This social experiment, which led to increased family togetherness and increased domesticity for some and increased domestic tension for others, illustrated the need for alternatives within the national cultural toolkit. Whatever the specifics, it did point in general to the fact that humans need alternative conceptualizations of how to live: There is no one best way. Rural ways of living, knowing, and loving (e.g., being devoted to an extended family living nearby) give to all humans one such alternative conceptualization (Berry, 1977/2015; Gruenwald, 2003; Rebanks, 2015).

Of course, rural teachers and counselors and rural families and communities are not struck by this new "conceptualization." For rural people, the practices and commitments that figure as alternatives elsewhere are our everyday reality and not parts of some theoretical alternative. Even so, we shouldn't take them for granted. Notably, the experience of most counselors in rural schools connects to rural life. That experience is important because it can be an easily accessed source of doubt about the all-too-common messages about rural deficiency and the systemic bias toward the suburban-upper-middle-class view of success. Today, that view pervades the national culture and nearly all of schooling.

Contemporary schooling is less and less about learning to live well and contribute to the common good, and more and more about achieving status and wealth (Chaplin et al., 2014; Paul & Seward, 2016; Pope, 2001). If such a vision were productive of better outcomes for most people, or better outcomes for everyone (the common good), perhaps it would have greater intrinsic value. But just the opposite is the case. Under its reign, the middle class has been hollowed out, and income and wealth are more unequal than ever in the United States (e.g., Carr & Kefalas, 2009; Piketty, 2014). As a result, many Americans feel inadequate: innately striving for a meaningful life but not receiving much support to address that aspiration (e.g., Berry, 1977/2015; Chaplin et al., 2014; Deresiewicz, 2014). Public schooling ought to figure among the places where that support would be found, but it too rarely is.

THE NATURE OF RURAL IDENTITY: THINKING ONESELF RURAL

By "thinking oneself rural" we mean actively realizing one is rural. It is a process that might begin with an epiphany Such thinking positions someone (e.g., a talented student in a rural community) to question the deficiency narrative about rural places and people that schools too often propagate (Paul & Seward, 2016). Thinking along these lines connects skepticism toward suburban-upper-middleclass perspectives with deepening commitments to locale, family, and associated rural pursuits. Schooling might assist with such deepening, but typically it does not.

Anyone can do this thinking, and reading certainly helps. The story of English shepherd James Rebanks (2015) shows how this process of thinking oneself rural works, and also how such thinking is routinely deflected and marginalized in rural schools.

A Shepherd's Life

James Rebanks is a sheep farmer tending (as of 2020) a flock of about 500 Herdwick sheep in the rough English hill country. His account of high school echoes our own rough hill-country experience of rural schools in the Appalachian part of the United States (Rebanks, 2015):

I realized we were different, really different, on a rainy morning in 1987. I was in an assembly at the 1960s shoddy built concrete comprehensive school in our local town . . . listening to an old battle-weary teacher lecturing us how we should aim to be more than just farmworkers, joiners, brickies, electricians, and hairdressers. . . . I argued with our dumbfounded headmaster that school was really a prison and "an infringement of my human rights." He looked at me strangely, and said, "But what would you do at home?" Like this was an impossible question to answer. "I'd work on the farm," I answered, equally amazed that he couldn't see how simple this was. He shrugged his shoulders hopelessly, told me to stop being ridiculous and go away. . . . Plenty of us were bright enough, but we had no intention of displaying it in school. It would have been dangerous, (pp. 3-5)

Teachers were selling an enemy ideology: the supposed need to leave everything one loves in order "to be somebody" Rebanks continued:

My [paternal] grandfather was born in 1918 into a fairly anonymous and unexceptional farming family . . . He was, and we his descendants remain, essentially nobodies as far as anyone else is concerned. But that's the point. Landscapes like ours were created by and survive through the efforts of nobodies. . . . This is a landscape of modest hardworking people. The real history of our landscape should be the history of the nobodies, (pp. 18-19)

The teachers weren't interested, and so Rebanks described his high school self as belonging to a group of mischievous "lads" devoted to doing as much damage in school as possible. The enemy—schooling and teachers—had earned it, after all. To be sure, the enemy ideology is not about the practices of reading, writing, problem solving, logic, and critique. These are practices for everyone, as Rebanks discovered with no help from his high school. Rebanks effectively left school at age 12 and withdrew altogether as soon as legally possible.

At this juncture in the story (Rebanks, 2015), his readers were left wondering how a youngster who hated school so much might have learned to write so well. It was all predictably accidental. It was actually three accidents. First, he discovered his maternal grandfather's books and read them; they were good books, and they helped him make sense of the entire world, including his own part of it. Second, he'd been observing his sisters do well in school; the enemy ideology was okay for them. Third, after arguing seriously with his father, he concluded he'd have to do something else than farm sheep for a while. At age 21, he enrolled at the local adult education center to prepare for his A-level exams (equivalent to the GED route in the United States): "It was fairly easy if you'd read the books I had" (p. 143).

The rest of the story took Rebanks to university (Oxford), into a relationship with a woman who wanted to farm with him, back to the farm, and to the part-time, off-farm employment needed by most contemporary farm families. The meaning of his and his family's and community's lives comes from their rural place and their work in it. Reading and thinking have enriched his commitments to place, family, and community—and to similar realities worldwide.

Rebanks's (2015) experiences demonstrate that reading, writing, logic, and critique are practices that naturally apply to enacting and elaborating engagement with life in local places: to thinking oneself rural. They help one live a better and wiser life both publicly and privately.

Observe, though, that an appreciation for nobodies (i.e., ordinary working people) does not mean that reading, writing, logic, and critique are necessary for living a good life. Still, it's unsettling that so few people do what so many people otherwise might (i.e., read, write, reason, and critique). Rural schooling ought, in theory, to help cultivate these practices widely in rural communities. To do so, schooling would need to take the side of rural communities. Instead, rural schools typically take the side of national manpower needs and end up sponsoring the rural "brain drain" (Carr & Kefalas, 2009; Corbett, 2007; Paul & Seward, 2016).

Possibly, many rural educators in the United States are themselves challenged to grasp what it takes to help students think themselves rural. They may not see value in rural ways of living nor understand the processes of reading, writing, reasoning, and formulating critique required to think oneself rural. Part of the challenge is the widespread failure to understand that working with hands and body requires a lot of thinking (especially reasoning). Builders, farmers, and mechanics of all sorts know that it does (Crawford, 2009; Rose, 2014).

Rural counselors and teachers can, however, learn to appreciate (and help others appreciate) the intellectual side of manual labor and, in doing so, learn to take the side of the nobodies. They can also learn to connect reading, writing, and critique (as well as reasoning) to the consideration of rural life. Bomer (2017) called this approach "culturally sustaining pedagogy":

Culturally sustaining pedagogy requires . . . that we take an appreciative stance—finding and foregrounding the resources [students] already have, such as their language and what they can do with it, their knowledge of stories and characters, their expanding expertise about varied things in the world, and the wealth of relationships that both sustain and challenge them. (p. 13)

For rural counselors and teachers, efforts to think oneself rural provide a good starting point for working with able students in rural schools. To explore this outlook, educators need first to affirm their own rural upbringing and experience. They need to acknowledge what it means to be a nobody oneself and, like Rebanks (2015), to recognize the virtue of that standpoint. This is a difficult proposition for anyone, but especially for educators in the United States, where being a somebody seems so important. It means, for the vast majority, unlearning what they've been misled to think is virtuous. Nevertheless, as Li (2006) claimed in his discussion of the aims of environmental education,

The cultivation of humility as a civic virtue could play a key role in sustaining collaborative efforts to develop inclusive and integrative environmental education. Humility as...

Table of contents

• Cover page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents page
• Introduction
• SECTION I: Theoretical Foundations/Conceptions of Giftedness
• SECTION II: Special Populations
• SECTION III: Developmental Issues
• SECTION IV: Relationships
• SECTION V: School-Related Issues
• SECTION VI: Counseling Needs/Interventions
• About the Editors
• About the Authors
• Index