PORTLAND, Ore.
Focusing on rurality across race and ethnicity in the United States was among the many sessions that brought scholars, grant makers and policy leaders together for the 44th annual conference of the Association for the Study of Higher Education (ASHE).
This year’s theme, “The Will to Reimagine the Study of Higher Education,” called on scholars in the academy to translate their research into policy and practice.
At the “Rurality Across Race and Ethnicity,”session, Tyler Hallmark, a doctoral student at The Ohio State University and Dr. Sonja Ardoin, an assistant professor of Student Affairs Administration at Appalachian State University, led panelists and audience members in a spirited discussion focused on how institutions can best serve and invest in rural students.
Ardoin noted that the term rural has too often been identified as White and poor, and discussions of other communities, including the plight of rural Blacks, Latinos, Asian Americans and Indigenous peoples have been left out of everyday conversations.
“There is a deficit narrative,” said Dr. Heather J. Shotton, an associate professor of Native American Studies at the University of Oklahoma who said that higher education must do more to focus on this growing demographic. “No one is going into these communities to recruit.”
A citizen of the Wichita & Affiliated Tribes, Shotton said that scholars have to be intentional about including indigenous students in their research studies and not rendering them as invisible. “You have to think about who you are not including,” she said, adding that there are many experts already in tribal communities that scholars should actively engage.
