 He is now being recorded. My name is Caitlin Howley. I'm the director of the Appalachian Regional Comprehensive Center, which is one of 15 regional centers funded by the US Department of Education to provide technical assistance to state departments of education in our various regions. The ARC serves four states, Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia, and West Virginia. But we also think of ourselves as part of the larger Appalachian region. And so that's part of why we're delighted to introduce you to today's speaker, who hails from rural upstate New York, and where he's located falls into the official Appalachian designation. In any case, today's episode is episode two in our series called Local Know-How Appalachian Education Innovations. As we've worked with state departments across the area, one of the things that we've observed is that there's a lot of really novel stuff going on in schools and districts across our region that often doesn't get illuminated. And so our purpose here in this series is to shine a light on exactly those novel, place-based, and innovative practices. Just a few logistical notes. This webinar does not support audio integrated into your computer system. So audio is available by phone. If you signed in and did not have the webinar system call you, the number is 877-423-6338. And the passcode is 142587. Also, if you're having difficulty connecting, you may contact Adobe Connect at the number provided here. And you're also welcome to mention any problems you might be having in the chat box. We also ask that if you're not speaking to put your phone on mute until you are ready to speak. This just limits the background noise and allows us to hear our presenter even better. So it is my very great pleasure to introduce Casey to you. I'll let him tell his story so you can understand where his perspective is generated from. And then he is going to share with you the story of his innovation working with special education students who had essentially disengaged from their academic experiences. So we're delighted to have you, Casey, and to learn more about you and your work. Thank you, Caitlin, so much. It is a pleasure to be with you virtually. One of the most important things I'd like you to please keep in mind I'm doing this presentation is that some of you may have looked at that U word on my page, Urban Supervisor. I was only there for about a year and a half. And realistically, it was one of the time consuming points of my life to keep reflecting on the fact that I truly am a rural educator. And so one of the areas I'd like to share with you is that while I do have a little bit of urban experience, I am truly a rural educator in part. I have been in education now for almost 20 years at the varying levels, K through 16. I currently serve as a Associate Director of Leadership Studies at Rensselaer Polytechnical Institute. But I, at that phase in my career, were all working on a doctorate. I began to realize that I had some experiences that I wanted to share with people. And I was able to offer this opportunity to talk about these rural communities in New York because I'm sure many of you know New York has this reputation as a large city. And it is also subjected to Yankees fandom. We do, however, have a really large, really rural upstate and western part of the state. New York is unique in that almost half the counties are, believe it or not, rural. And the county specifically that I'm going to be talking about today with this experience was one of our five most rural counties, Delaware County. We have an Appalachian region in our southern tier that moves from Lake Erie in the west through to the Appalachian Mountains in the east. And we also, as a state, serve many diverse, as well as dispersed populations where there's a lot of rural agriculture going on in a lot of places. I've had the opportunity to talk with educators in Australia, Canada, and other parts of the United States, talk about some of these really unique happenings that happen in our rural communities here in New York state. To also give you a bit of a background, I am a social studies teacher by training. History and geography are two of my big passions. I have learned in the STEM world recently due to the work that I do with engineers. And I have found that it's really nice to be able to bounce between the two worlds of humanities in STEM. And one of the areas that I'd like for all of you to think about as we're going through this process is how can we help, especially in this day and age, with our school systems as well and their teachers, as they both have to navigate both their content area fields as well as in large and general. So enough about me. Thank you very much. I don't like talking about myself. I like talking about my students. And so one of the things that we're going to be talking about today is really what did we do? And really, there are five areas that I want to cover with you in the next hour or so. You can, by all means, feel free to type in a question. And Caitlin will help me by identifying if it's a really cool question or if it's something where I may have accidentally either spoken too fast or spoke incoherently. Because after all, I'm from New York. We occasionally don't get across our stories or our message. So please do feel free to ask. Also, if you want to laugh, I love laughter. So if you're on mute, you can always go ha ha in the chat box unless the joke really went flat. And then you can thumbs down emoji it. So within it, we're going to talk about what are some of the stories I want to tell. What is the place of these stories? How did we get together as a small rural community and try to help our really disengaged students, all of whom were special education? And especially in this day and age, because really, since 2001, all schools are under immense pressure from our national and our state standards. And as you may or may not be aware of, we've gone through multiple iterations of state standards in different states. We went through the Common Core Learning Standards process. And now as we speak, we have content-specific national guidelines as well as national work. As a social space teacher, I'm most closely aligned with the C3 standards. And I most commonly ask to talk about how teachers who are really good at their craft can either retrofit programs to meet those C3 standards or, more importantly, do a better job of getting their students ready for college, career, and civic engagement. So let's jump into the story that I'm going to tell you for a little bit. But one of the things I would like you to please do keep in mind is that a lot of the conversation that we're having is really pre-extensive internet days. While you may be thinking, how is this relevant? We, of course, know that many of our rural communities suffer from a lack of broadband, not for lack of trying, but because the infrastructure isn't quite there. And so in a lot of places, high-speed internet, especially in rural communities, lacks. And because of this, we have to, as educators, help our students with the resources which we have on tap. And believe it or not, the stories that we can tell can really focus in on the fact that we're all local. And when we do our local, we need to ensure that we keep in mind the context. And so I want to give you, again, this real basic context of where I was. And in this area, nearest city was Binghamton. Now, Binghamton, New York is not very large. It is home to one of the four research centers of the State University of New York system. It is also home to Endakette Johnson, if you remember the old shoe company. And it has a couple of technology firms in the area. Our school had only about 1,000 students in it, K through 12. And I can hear some of you going, that's a large district. I absolutely completely understand because rural is defined, unfortunately, by the NCEF as not urban or suburban. I really do hoping that as our research continues to grow and develop, that one of the things we begin to do is give a more positive approach to how we define rural. And because we are in this rural area, we are also extraordinarily historical. The community that I taught in was a frontier settlement area during the American Revolutionary Process. It was on the Susquehanna River, which is one of the largest river estuaries in the United States. I'm sorry, one of the largest river systems, not estuary, my apologies. And the Susquehanna starts very, very, very small in a lake called Lake Otsigo. And it travels south along a number of mountain and valley regions into the Chesapeake Bay down in Maryland and Virginia. The Susquehanna River Valley is one of those transit points and transitional places for people to do a lot of trading. It was really critical during the American Revolution in the time period afterwards because farm products were harvested off the hills in Otsigo, Delaware, and Shenegar County and floated down the river to the markets, both in New York City as well as in Philadelphia and further south. One of the other areas that we have that's very unique is that this community was settled by a number of New Englanders following the Revolution. One of the things that was done by the federal government was land bounties were paid to individuals who had served during the American Revolution so that they could pick up farms in these frontier areas. As such, many of the New Englanders who had served on Sullivan's campaign as well as other campaigns throughout New York and the American Revolution began to leave the overly farmed and densely populated regions of New England moving into the frontier zones of what is now central New York and setting up farms. In the process of doing that, unfortunately, as you know, we only have a certain amount of lifespan and they passed away. And as the older settlers passed away and died, they were entombed in cemeteries or graveyards throughout these communities. Many of them were attached to churches but others of them were standalone in community groups. So if you drive through central New York, one of the things you're gonna be really surprised about is our traffic jams are quite often two turkeys a deer and the person taking a photograph of them. We also have a lot of very open spaces. We have a lot of burying and we also have a lot of resource extractions within these communities. But we also have a lot of history and historical markers to talk about in the area. And one of the community points that we had was how do we utilize our local place-based history to try to engage students who the bigger national picture wasn't picking up? And so I lead you to the next part of the story which is how did we get together and figure out a way to engage our students? Well, it was summer. So number one, nobody wanted to be there. It was hot, it was humid, and well, quite frankly, again, most of the students didn't wanna be there. They were all classified under students with disabilities and they mostly fell into the attention deficit disorder hyperactivity disorder. They also had difficulty with reading and writing. For those of you who are more research minded, you will know that the research that we quite often find is that students are, especially with disabilities, classified usually because of a reading and writing issue. As you all are also very well aware of, when you look at the reading and writing difficulties, middle school is a transitional stage from learning to read to reading to learn. And information and tech-based information is quite extensive, especially in the fields of history and English. And science, you gotta read a lot to understand a lot. All of our students had experienced difficulty in middle school. For many of them, they were really subjecting themselves to a moment in time when they really wanted to be more kinesthetic learners, to use Howard Gardner's term. They were also poor, as defined by the free and reduced lunch count. And they had all come from outlying elementary schools. One of the unique things about some of our communities in off state New York is that we often have a village which hosts an elementary school in the middle and the high school. And sometimes we'll have outlying distance, outlying elementary schools in communities surrounding the village. These elementary schools that were outlying were typically smaller, as well as more homogenized from the quote-unquote village elementary school. And there's also a lot of research to indicate that as this time period was happening, we were beginning to use more and more standardized testing. Our students were having difficulties with the reading and writing aspects. They were also finding it extremely difficult to focus and concentrate on work. And they were quite often subjected to disciplinary measures, such as suspensions or detentions. And so with these boys in this group, we needed to try to figure out how we can help them. And more importantly, one of the areas that we wanted to do was we wanted to, as faculty, raise their interest by using something that they had all been forbidden to go into. You see, many of the cemeteries are sacred spiles. And so in it, you can't trust past. Well, what we decided to do was that we were going to utilize the Local Village Pioneer Cemetery as a way to help our students begin to think like historians. And so what we did was we began by aligning our past with the fact that the New York State Regents had in 2001 issued a new set of standards. The Regents Examine New York State is the graduation exam required for end of courses. If you're interested in looking into research about the Regents Exam, I would please beg of you to look at anything that S.G. Grant has written or Gabriel Rich out of Virginia Commonwealth has written. There's quite a bit of information on this Regents Exam. For those of you that are interested, New York has just recently now released a new set of standards in 2015-2016 and new exams that cover more common CCLS-aligned work. We also have begun to notice that a lot of our students, we're going to face struggles with, and as today our students are beginning to face struggles with this idea of writing. A lot of the writing that students are asked to do in schools is of course on-demand writing. They're asked to create an essay using a prompt. They have very limited time, quite often only three hours to take a multiple-section exam, but they then have to write up at least a large, if not one, two essays, and quite often they have difficulty with the analysis, interpretation, and evaluation of sources they're given in order to write these exams. For those of you that are familiar with the Advanced Placement Exams, Regents Exams and AP Exams are cousins. If you look at it, the Document-Based Question Essays, which is part of the Advanced Placement Exams, has also made its appearance on the Regents Exams, and the Free Response Thematic Essay also made its way into the New York State Exams. Since these students were in eighth grade, about to go into ninth grade, we were very concerned that they weren't going to be successful in accomplishing the task of doing the Regents Exams. And now for all of you out there, within your C3 standards and the Common Core Learning Standards, we have so much more emphasis on using skills and abilities of evidence and classifying evidence and using evidence to ensure that you can substantiate a claim. And so one of the things we wanted to give our students practice with was identifying evidence and what type of evidence they could use to substantiate a claim. We wanted our students to feel empowered to be able to go out and find things that really interested them, when they were out in this quote-unquote forbidden fruit field of the Pioneer Cemetery in the Valley. The other thing that we wanted to do was we wanted to give the students an opportunity to get out of the school. One of the areas that I'm sure all of you are very well aware of, especially in the area that the arc serves, is that it can get hot in from our school and it can get humid. And we don't have air conditioning. It's a little bit of an oversight. So on a really nice days in July and August, when we had these students in summer school, we realized that if we didn't get them out, we were going to have difficulty keeping their attention, especially because the way we modeled it was they were going to get help from both me, the social space teacher, as well as an English teacher. On the other side of the world, a science and a math teacher were helping them with science and math work. The other area that I wanna share with you is that we thought that it was critical, oops, sorry, to make sure that we took a more of a forward-thinking approach to the summer school. We didn't want our students to be struggling because they were going into ninth grade with repeating seventh and eighth grade. There's also one of the areas that we understood is that reading issues create difficulty for students in the secondary level consistently. And there's a lot of research to indicate that if reading difficulties aren't addressed early and consistently, that by the time students meet secondary level, they're at risk to drop out. But also more importantly, they can't be successful in text-based environments. And so one of the areas that we were thinking about was how do we ease this transition? And how do we also work on their writing and reading issues that will be getting demount? And so one of the areas that we thought about was that if we wanted to go through this process of helping our students identify really unique things to talk about in the Pioneer Cemetery, we're going to have to scaffold them and not only scaffolding them for the reading and the writing, but also we wanted to make sure that we gave them an opportunity to learn how to behave in the community well and truly as adults and also begin to see how that our resources within our community could enliven and open their lives into a wide range of different things. One of the areas that we wanted to give them was an opportunity to show to the administration that yeah, they could do really good work. And we wanted to give them the opportunity to showcase this work, not only to the administration who had put them in summer school, but also to almost use the wax idea of a growth mindset even though the book is newer and that from the time period, I think what we were beginning to really gravitate to was this idea that if we can show the students winning on the small level and the small progress, then they would start gaining the momentum that everybody needs to do the small wins. And as we were doing all these small wins and we were scaffolding and we were beginning to develop an engaging process, we began to notice that our students were going to also feel like they had value. And one of the things I wanna share with you at the moment is that one of our thoughts that I've come upon now that I've done some work with my dissertation is this idea of local-based education or place-based education. One of the interesting things is that Paul Fiabold has talked about in this book, teaching comments, the idea that we need to give students an opportunity to understand their place in the world and to not devalue their place in the world. One of the areas we quite often find is that we have within this concept of education, we educate people to grow into communities that are quite often, frankly, larger or urban. We also give people an opportunity to feel like the only path to success requires them to move away. Using Paul Fiabold's concept, the idea of place-based education and retrospectively applying it, what we realized was that we gotta give students an opportunity to see that, yes, the communities that they live in have value. History happened there, there are stories to tell there and more importantly, they're the first people to tell those stories since the individual died almost 200 years ago. Also, one of the areas that we wanted to really focus on was this concept that we were going to get them to think like historians. And so when we were looking at it again, retrospectively placing this, we were asked our students to think like historians. For those of you who would like to know a little bit more about it, Sam Weinberg, who's a Stanford History Education Group, has written extensively on this idea of using document sources to help students think like a historian. The habitats or the heuristics and the hermeneutics of historical thinking ask students to take evidence evaluated against each other. Find the places where it overlaps and can support a story or where it clashes. And if it overlaps, how can you interweave to make the narrative dialogue even greater versus where it clashes? Where do you find answers that tell the story? So the other area is that within these areas of place-based as well as thinking historically, we wanted the students to feel successful. And we wanted them to have an opportunity to take some time as they were moving towards feeling success within this community. Tell their own stories, but also more importantly, to get to know the resources within the community. So if something did interest them in the future, they would know where to look. As we were going through these processes of place-based education as well as thinking like historians, we were also wondering how we could integrate all of the different social studies and English standards into all of this. Part of the issue becomes introducing students not only to the broader historical narrative of the United States, but also the broader historical narrative of the communities within the Fesquahana Valley region. And so one of the areas we asked the students to do was to find things that interested them within the library at schools, but also to go further in that. And we asked them to find books that they would like to read on their own about a subject that interested them within the communities. And so as we were beginning to move them out of the assigned books and into the self-selection books, one of the things that we allowed the students to do was have an opportunity to become agents within their own learning. One of the things we find is that when students are turned off to learning, it's because it's so prescribed or so narrowed that the students feel like that their voice and their opinion is left out. And so by telling the students that they had the opportunity to pick a book and to look deeply into that book and read it, some of the students were very interested in how the Native Americans got a warm in the area, other students were very interested in war. Some of the students were very interested in how people earned a living, farming. And it managed to align with their own individual and family interests, as well as the academic interests within our community. I would encourage you to help as you are working with your groups to really look into these place-based opportunities and these thinking like a historian opportunities to give students a chance to really think through the process of what they are doing and how they are doing it. So I'm gonna move to the next point I wanted to bring to, which is our emphasis on specifics within our community. And within our program. As I've already told you, this idea was a summer school, we needed to flip it and we needed to move it from a remedial-based process where we were trying to re-educate students on things and techniques and processes and skills that they had missed to more of how do we prepare them for the high school. The other area that we really wanted to focus in on as we've talked about is literacy. But we wanted to talk about specifically disciplinary-based literacy. There's a lot of research out there to indicate that social studies especially is one of the harder subjects for students to learn because of the introduction of what's referred to as Q3 vocabulary terms. Quite often, Q1 vocabulary terms are words that we use that are sight words that are very easy. They really have no out-of-place or differentiation to them. Q2 vocabulary are often the ones that are possibly multiple meanings. They don't have as much specificity as Q3, but Q2 vocabulary words become narrow and are focused, whereas Q3 are discipline-specific words that need to be learned for the purpose of mastering the discipline. And so one of the areas that we thought about was as we were moving up the chain on this emphasis on literacy and as we were asking students to use Q3 vocabulary, we needed to also reaffirm and make sure that they're aware of the Q2 vocabulary as well. Within the social studies-based content area, we also asked the students to use a wide variety of documents, primary sources, as well as secondary sources, as well as tertiary sources. We were asking students to also do something local. So in the process of not only reading about the word as well as how the community grew and developed, we were also asking students to see how things aligned at the national level, with the regional level and the local level. And we decided to use an engaging moment in the C3 social studies world and specifically the inquiry-based design movement that C3 teachers have come up with. One of the areas that we looked at was this idea of an engaging trigger or the idea of a overriding question. And so one of the points that we thought about was that this local pioneer cemetery has quite a bit of war of 1812, that's a local subject in the local cemetery. And we also had quite a number of headstones that were approaching 200 years old or 100 years old. Sorry, I'm not a math person. And so one of the areas that we thought about doing was focusing in on who were those veterans, who were those families, who were the people that were interred in the cemetery and what story did they have to tell. And by doing that, one of the areas that we got through and we got to was this idea that we needed not only to collaborate, but we needed to help the students create artifacts to tell the stories of the people that were in this community. And so one of the things that we did was within creating the artifacts to demonstrate learning was we asked the students to go in and do a scavenger hunt. I talk about a little bit in more detail because we don't have time to necessarily get into it in the New England Journal of History. And it was the idea of how do you collaborate and use genealogy and history education as well as how do you use historical cemeteries within it? So one of the scavenger hunts we did was try to find the oldest stone, try to find a family that had multiple children, try to find a family where there were multiple marriages, try to find family as stones where veterans may have served in wars, try to find unique inscriptions. We also tried to do a lot of research in the local library because quite frankly, we were extremely fortunate in that the local pioneer cemetery was right next door to the local town library or village library. And so one of the things that happened was that we were able to go into this library and look at the documents, the books in the local collection of materials that were in there, including a wonderful book called Carved in Stone, which talks about the Delaware County New York cemeteries. And I'm sure many of you are in communities where there's quite a few resources in local historical societies or local libraries that will allow you to do this type of model. And one of the other areas that we did was in addition to finding the scavenger hunt of materials within the cemetery, we also asked the students to put together a booklet of what they had done and what they had found. And so within this booklet, what we asked the students to do was to tell the person's story, whether they could completely, totally tell it based upon information they found or if they could talk about the person may have experienced, the person may have asked or inquired about, the person may have been involved in. Because, and sometimes one of the areas that you may notice is that quite often due to boundary movements of different states, a lot of the materials that pulled the story of our community were actually located in the next county over historical society because at one point in time it was all the same county and then I got broken up. So ever since we began to do this product, one of the areas that we thought that they would want to know about is how do they share their stories with others. We wanted them to have an opportunity to distribute this knowledge. And so as we were moving with our knowledge and our expertise into this product, the other area we began to do was we began to focus in on how do they communicate this information via the booklet, via presentation, via having conversations with others. And so we asked the students to do some work where they talk to somebody at home or another person within the community to tell the story. So, how does this all tie into the national standards and specifically our C3 standards? Well, number one, what we wanted to do was we wanted to give the students an opportunity to determine the types of sources that would be helpful. And we wanted to give them multiple viewpoints so that as we were doing this research and while we were having the students experience this point, what we began to notice was that they were finding difficulties dealing with multiple points of view. And so we intentionally helped pull in multiple documents to tell multiple stories about multiple people within the Pioneer Cemetery. We discovered that a whole slew of children died around the same time. And so we began to investigate what could have happened and found out it was one of those epidemic seasons. They quite often carried away a lot of people, especially on the frontier. And that got some of the students to think about medicine. What does it mean to have things like penicillin and an amphibiotics? It also got the students to think about, well, how do you talk about and how do you convince people who are in areas where there's a lot of danger to do a job of settling? And so one of the things we had the students do was create a placard to invite people to come live in the community. The other area that we did was that we wanted to look at what are the environmental and cultural characteristics in an area. And so we asked the students to look at homes in New England where people were born, as well as our local community where they passed away. And we wanted the students to see that within human existence, we quite often will set out to move into areas that are different but also are similar. And we talked about how the model of typical New England villages was brought into Central New York. We also talked about how, besides these duiglet villages being brought into Central New York, you can see a lot of the housing. The older housing and the older farms resembles the New England areas. And that's because of the way that people wanted to only create the villages and the communities that they had known. We also compared and contrasted what it would have been like if they would have gone further down the valley. So for instance, what would they have experienced if they were in two towns down? Or what would they have experienced if they were in Pennsylvania? So one of the areas that we really asked the students to think about was brought in their horizon from the local community to the regional as well as the area community. We also wanted the students to get an opportunity to locally anchor their knowledge and information with things that were going on internationally and nationally. And again, by picking on the word 1812 specifically as the touch point for the local knowledge, we could also talk about what happened with the American Revolution, with the Native Americans, with African American communities, with women and with the settlers, as well as the war of 1812. If you look at it also, the war of 1812 does not get as much play as it should in our curriculum because we have a wide range of areas in the state to talk about. But New York was one of those pivotal points for the war of 1812. There were quite a number of battles fought along the northern and the western frontier, as well as there were a lot of issues internally that cost farmers to have to become greatly involved in what was going on in the war of 1812. Finally, what we wanted the students to do was to think about the influence of different events on what was happening during this time period. So not only are we looking at the war of 1812, but we're also looking at what was going on with trade movements, the embargo. We're looking at Native Americans and Native American removal during the time period as well as the treaty signings that were going on in the state. So for approximately six weeks, the students got a really in-depth viewpoint of what was going on. And we tried very hard to remember that these were middle school students, these were middle school students who would rather be out and these were middle school students who schooling itself was not their greatest game. And so as we were doing these processes and as we were running through these processes, what we began to notice is that, well, yes, we would definitely have met to see three standards of today when we were doing the work for and with our students back during this time period, we were meeting the state standards for New York. I'm not gonna go too much into New York state standards because all of you need to know your own state standards because after all, we are a federal democracy and states theoretically should have control of their own curriculum and knowledge. But I wanted to share with you this thought with as you begin to look at the state standards, a lot of times teachers look at those things as, I need to do this, this is a requirement. Instead, if it's portrayed to the teachers as this is a guidepost, this will help you in making pedagogical decisions as well as curricular decisions and gathering resources to help your students be successful as well as understanding experts as well as understanding what is expected of students as they move on. Then I think when one of the areas that you happen to view very well with is you can see this as an ally and not in cause for conflict. I wanna now move on for a second to the results. For many of you, I'm sure you probably would like to know what happened to these guys. And for one of the things that we began to notice was that there was a movement from at risk of failure to being able to understand and meet the standards. As they're going through and meeting these standards, we saw that their writing was still an issue. But one of the areas that we were able to do was we had built up enough of a portfolio of their writing from over the summer that the teachers that were working with them over the school year were prepared and began to understand what plans we're going to need to view in order to help our students improve their writing. Remember, writing is an ongoing process. I'm sure you're all very well aware of the fact that your first draft is usually the first one that lines the bottom of the garbage can to the other draft until you get to one that's assembling of enough to go out. And for those of you who publish, you know that it's usually reviewer number two that tells you really shouldn't be thought your love of this paper. The other area that we began to look at was this realization that the students were able to handle multiple texts. They didn't just need the textbook to tell them what to think, but they can actually use primary and secondary sources to begin to make their own decisions and they could have their own debates. What was really very impressive was that now that they saw that their village, which was a little out of the main way, which was an exit off of an interstate, was actually connected to the wider world and that a lot of the events which happened in the community that they could see from the past were related to what was going on overseas. And it gave them pause, especially in the global history and geography in ninth grade course to say, well, if this was happening overseas, what was happening at home? And only that, but how does that affect what we think and we view as history? And the other area was that we gained some tools in the trade. It was teacher and I were able to, after we had looked at some of these teaching and pedagogical techniques, we really began to learn how to have our students do journaling, how we could have them do research reports, but also more importantly, how we could talk to librarians and utilize library services. I also want to share with you a little bit of where do we go from here? I think as professional experts in this area, one of the points that we need to think about is what are we going to do with local based curriculums? Groom and Walpole has talked about this idea that we need to look at a pedagogy of place. All of the research that I've been reading, coming out of the Journal of Research and Rural Education, the Rural Educator, and even some of the National Journals indicates that we have to do a better job of making sure that place plays a really important part of education for students, especially students for adverse. We can also re-engage our disenfranchised students by asking them to research projects that they're interested in. We can also ask our students to think about how they can use local knowledge to engage them as experts, especially in communities where quite often local expertise is not considered top of the line. One of the other thoughts that we need to talk about is how do we as educators make sure that we value local knowledge in light of the National Standards Movement? The National Standards Movement probably isn't going to go away, but how do we use it to leverage what we can do locally? And how do we more importantly use our local partnerships of museums, libraries, and historical societies to help build our curriculum, pedagogical, and learning opportunities that are living and breathing for our students? In the same age for many of our rural communities, farming is no longer the primary source of income, but it is the historical source of income. We also look at a lot of our resource extraction-based communities that Sherman and Sage talked about in their wonderful work about brain-draining rural communities, as well as Karen Cephalus, and we understand that quite often, senses of communities, as well as these resources will help them grow and develop. And as we grow and develop, and as we think about it, I also want you to think about some of the reference points to this idea of using cemeteries as research-based places. There are quite a few research journal articles that I pulled out for, which talk specifically about how we can look at community but also more importantly, how we can use cemeteries. So one of the things is that these are always points of fascination for children, making sure that it's appropriate, middle school is a good time, maybe even upper elementary, but one of the things that you want to think about as you're introducing this idea into your toolkit is how can we utilize our local knowledge-based sources, as well as a central point of remembrance to teaching and educate about a wide variety of different areas. So what I'm gonna do now is, with about 15 minutes left in the recording, I am going to turn to questions. So please feel free to ask questions. You can type them in if that would be helpful or if you wanna turn on your microphone and ask, you can feel free. Thank you so much, Casey. Oh, you're very welcome, Kayla. You said something earlier that was both beguiling and distressing. And I think that it was in part what your play-based approach was an answer to. And you've said that one of the goals of this work was to help students to value, rather than devalue, their local place and their rural background. Where do you think that sort of devaluation comes from? That's an excellent question. And if we can just go back for a second. And by the way, Katie, please keep typing because I really am looking forward to your question. When you look at one of the issues that we have, specifically within the evolved work, it's coming essentially from our central capital communities where urban, especially in New York, because we have very urban rural divide. A lot of the devaluation is coming from the fact that people view rural communities as technologically stopped or technologically behind and rural as a community basis is not the idea of the ideal. And I don't know if any of you have ever looked at Richard Florida's book, The Creation of the Creative Class. One of his points is that really creativeness comes only in an area where you have a high concentration of creative people. This is not true. You can have very creative people out in rural communities. The difference is that what we as rural educators need to do is ensure that our stories get told. And we also need to push back a little bit on our standards, which specifically gloss over our unique regional differences and say to kids, well, just because you really know where a really good fishing place is in your local community, that's not very valuable because I will tell you from dollars to doughnut, I as an outdoors eagle scout, I want to know where to go fishing and camping. And if I don't know where how to, then I'm just a city slipper. So I hope that answered your question. Katie's question, oh nice, former upstate New York special ed teacher. Yeah, that's a really great question about the idea of how do we use it during a school year and foster a more inclusive environment? That's a really great question because I think one of the areas Katie that we need to think about is play space education as a way to put people on the same footing. So one point is to look at how play space education can allow students in a science department or a science course to everybody go out into the field and do something as simple as a tree count. A lot of the communities that we have had schools where they have either wood surrounding them or they have open acreage surrounding them. And using something as a hula hoop, very, very easy to go out, throw it in the grass and have the students count how many trees are within an area that touch the hula hoop or if you're in a field, how many bugs you see in that hula hoop or how many blades of grass or whatever so that you can begin to get students to understand not only what there is, but how it also affects the environment and the impact. There's a second way, and this also came out of the community that I worked with is that they were part of the Susquehanna Regional Grant that came out of a number of watershed grants. Everybody pulled to clean up the local river. It was a huge environmental eyesore, but more importantly, they needed to do some work with monitoring it for when we had deluges and we had a number of hurricanes pop on through, which I'm sure you guys done in Virginia never get. That was a joke. Sorry, didn't go over well. The point is that they would go out into the river and they would monitor the height. They would monitor the turbidity, which is how clean it was. They would monitor the speed by throwing oranges into the river and seeing how long it took it to go 100 meters. This is stuff that any student can do. Any student. You don't need to be the top of the line. You don't need to be the bottom of the barrel. Every student can do that. I hope, Katie, that they'd answer your question. If not, please do ask more, and I would encourage other people to please ask questions. If you were going to give advice to a State Department of Education interested in supporting district use of a place-based strategy, what advice might you give that State Department? Kailin, that's an excellent question. Having served as a State Education Department social space curriculum person for a while, a school improvement person, I would say please do listen to the teachers first, first and foremost. It's quite often where we find people will listen, but you need to actually get those folks in to help participate. It's critical, critical that each and every school sees this thought as a compliance issue, but as a technical assistance moment. And we know how very difficult it can be to balance in the stay and age of accountability the idea that the State can be a curriculum leader. And the relationship between the State Education Department and the local schools is how can we help get the resources that are in the capital marshaled into your local community? Or are there introductions that my letterhead or my email with the .gov at the end can help make for you so that you as a school district can meet with your State Museum Council or your State Science Council or your State, whatever, or even with other groups to sit down and say, this is really doing a great thing. The other area that I would strongly urge, and this is something that you guys may be able to look at with the Rural Schools Collaborative Association, is getting out there and actually getting your best practices into each other's hands. For me, one of the areas that I faced as a rural educator in the community where I was the only social space teacher was there were very lonely faculty meetings and department meetings. And it's super important to become the hub where people can talk to each other. Right now we're doing a wonderful webinar opportunity, but there's also other asynchronous programs that colleges and universities use such as the learning management system, which is referred to quite often as Blackboard, where there's Google Hangout. There's a lot of different opportunities people have. And if the States would really like to partner with their professional organizations to do this, I know for a fact in terms of social studies, I'm very good friends with the executive director, Larry Pasca, of the National Council for the Social Studies. Larry and I would quite often talk about how teachers throughout New York State would really like to hear from each other. Constances are expensive, travel is difficult. I don't know how many states are having difficulty recruiting teachers, but it's very difficult for people to get out of the building and talk. And one of the most critical things we can do is be a professional learning community. So I hope that while I'm not asking you to save the world, you can at least move a little bit closer towards success. Yeah, those are good suggestions for the State Department to serve as a hub for information and to serve as connective tissue to help districts and schools overcome capacity gaps or professional isolation. That's absolutely right. And one of the biggest capacity gaps we quite often see in world communities is that the superintendent is the principal who's also teaching a period of gym and driving the kids home on the bus. So if the superintendent or the principal doesn't have time to sit and think, then we need to find ways to free that time up. Administrators, especially in smaller communities, are the master of all trades. And they also have to be the master to the groups that have put them into the position. So if you have a principal who's never experienced lab science because it's been 20, 30 years since they were an undergraduate or, oh dear Lord, it has been 20 years for me, never mind. But you need to give them the opportunity to understand how they can best see what's going on in the classroom because as an administrator, especially if you happen to have teacher evaluation process that came out to race to the top, you'll know that a lot of the administrators walking into a chemistry classroom wouldn't know what's going on or they'd be afraid that the fire was actually something intentional. Or in social studies, why are you asking me to take kids into the cemetery and to try to get them to understand the pedagogical improvement? It's huge, it's critical. Yep. We have time for one more question if there is one. Okay, well thank you so much, Casey. That was a fantastic presentation.