Delivering Rural Education to Purdue from the Heart of Texas

October 5, 2022

A new College of Education faculty member is helping literature teachers connect students to their rural roots.

Chea Parton, visiting assistant professor of curriculum and instruction since August 2022, became interested in rural education due to many experiences in her own life – including being a rural student from Gaston, Indiana, a rural undergraduate and graduate student at Purdue University, a rural teacher, and then a rural doctoral student at the University of Texas at Austin.

Parton’s dissertation Country-fied city or city-fied country?: The Impact of Place on Rural Out-Migrated Literacy Teachers’ Identities and Practices details the experiences of out-migrated teachers who grew up in rural areas but taught at non-rural schools, and how they learned to blend their rural and non-rural language and cultural experiences into their teaching practices.

“I am a farm girl, former rural English teacher, and current assistant professor who has taught future teachers in courses on reading and writing methods, young adult literature, and teaching/learning in urban/rural contexts,” Parton said. “Now at Purdue I’m teaching introductory and advanced pedagogy and multicultural education.”

Growing up in rural Indiana, Parton’s interest in education began in her family, where she was the oldest of five children and had a father who taught music. She loved English courses while growing up, which later inspired her to pursue a bachelor’s degree in English at Purdue. Afterward she returned to Purdue to earn a teacher’s license, then began teaching English and Advanced Placement Literature at Southern Wells Community School in rural Poneto, Indiana, while also coaching middle school volleyball and basketball. Her interest grew in connecting education with greater issues of the world, and she came back to Purdue again to pursue a master’s degree in English Education.

After completing her master’s, Parton received a Dean’s Fellowship to start a PhD in Language and Literacy at the University of Texas at Austin (UTA). During her experience at UTA she began to see the city of Austin intersecting with the greater rural community of Texas, and this inspired her to want to impact rural education.

Parton recommended that current and future College of Education students work to understand the influence of where they grew up in shaping not only who they are as a person but who they are as a teacher.

“Don’t hide who you are – and when you don’t hide who you are, you will find that there are a lot of people like you in your classes that you would have never realized if you would have pretended to be somebody you aren’t,” Parton advised rural, first-generation, and working-class students, but acknowledged this really applies broadly to all historically marginalized students.

As part of her work in rural education, Parton writes a blog, (Non)Rural Voices, on her website, Literacy in Place, an online repository of rural literature resources to serve teachers. She also produces a podcast titled Reading Rural YAL (Young Adult Literature), which she describes as an opportunity to elevate voices of rural communities and to give students from these communities the opportunity to hear from people who truly represent it.

“It’s hard to be equitable and understanding if you don’t know about yourself first,” Parton explained. “If you don’t understand yourself as an individual, you won’t understand where you fit inside a community, and you won’t be able to know how you can use your talents and gifts to benefit the rest of that community.”

She was recently featured in a Daily Yonder article, “The Power of Place.”

Follow Parton on Twitter @readingrural, Instagram @dr_chea_parton, and Facebook @LiteracyInPlace.

Writer: Jonathan Martz, martz0@purdue.edu

Source: Chea Parton, cparton@purdue.edu