School of Education

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Browsing School of Education by Author "Azano, Amy Price"

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    Confronting Challenges at the Intersection of Rurality, Place, and Teacher Preparation: Improving Efforts in Teacher Education to Staff Rural Schools
    Azano, Amy Price; Stewart, Trevor Thomas (Mercy College, 2016)
    Recruiting and retaining highly qualified teachers in rural schools is a persistent struggle in many countries, including the U.S. While rural education researchers have long lamented the struggle to recruit and retain teachers, there is relatively little known about intentional efforts to prepare teachers, specifically, for rural classrooms. Salient challenges related to poverty, geographic isolation, low teacher salaries, and a lack of community amenities seem to trump perks of living in rural communities. Recognizing this issue as a complex and hard to solve fixture in the composition of rural communities, we sought to understand how teacher preparation programs might better prepare preservice teachers for successful student teaching placements and, ideally, eventual careers in rural schools. In this study, we explore teacher candidates’ perceptions of rurality while examining how specific theory, pedagogy, and practice influence their feelings of preparedness for working in a rural school. Using pre- and post- questionnaire data, classroom observations, and reflections, we assess the effectiveness of deliberate efforts in our teacher preparation program to increase readiness for rural teaching. In our analysis and discussion, we draw on critical and sociocultural theories to understand the experiences of a cohort of teacher candidates as they explore personal histories, the importance of place, expectations, and teaching strategies for rural contexts. We conclude our article with recommendations for enhancing teacher preparation programs in ways that might result in significant progress toward the goal of staffing rural schools with the highly skilled teachers all students deserve.
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    Folklore Unit_Lesson 06
    Kuehl, Rachelle; Azano, Amy Price (Virginia Tech, 2022-01-25)
    This is a component of the Fiction Unit of the place-based language arts curriculum developed by the Appalachian Rural Talent Initiative.
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    Folklore Unit_Lesson 09
    Kuehl, Rachelle; Azano, Amy Price (Virginia Tech, 2022-01-25)
    This is a component of the Fiction Unit of the place-based language arts curriculum developed by the Appalachian Rural Talent Initiative.
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    The Forgotten Many: Rural Gifted Learners
    Kuehl, Rachelle; Callahan, Carolyn M.; Azano, Amy Price (IGI Global, 2022)
    Limited economic resources and geographic challenges can lead rural schools in areas experiencing poverty to deprioritize gifted education. However, for the wellbeing of individual students and their communities, investing in quality rural gifted education is crucial. In this chapter, the authors discuss some of the challenges to providing equitable gifted programming to students in rural areas and present approaches to meeting those challenges (e.g., cluster grouping, mentoring). They then describe a large-scale federally-funded research project, Promoting PLACE in Rural Schools, which demonstrated methods districts can use to bolster gifted education programming. With 14 rural districts in high-poverty areas of the southeastern United States, researchers worked with teachers and school leaders to establish universal screening processes for identifying giftedness using local norms, to teach students the value of a growth mindset in reducing stereotype threat, and to train teachers on using a place-based curriculum to provide more impactful language arts instruction to gifted rural students.
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    Responding to the Challenges of Gifted Education in Rural Communities
    Azano, Amy Price; Callahan, Carolyn M.; Brodersen, Annalissa V.; Caughey, Melanie (Mercy College, 2017)
    There are both achievement and opportunity gaps for low-income students when compared to their economically advantaged peers; and, for rural students, these gaps may be even more pronounced. In this manuscript we draw from our ongoing work in a five-year federally-funded, Jacob K. Javits grant focusing on promoting gifted education in rural schools. To address issues of under-identification of gifted students in these settings, and to investigate ways to maximize achievement, we established an alternative process for identifying gifted students in rural schools; and we created units integrating place-based pedagogy within an evidence-based curriculum model as an intervention. Finally, we discuss preliminary findings from the pilot year and first half of the second year of the study documenting success in augmenting the pool of identified students and engaging teachers in implementing the curriculum. Perhaps more importantly, we document lessons learned and more global takeaways for the field. Specifically, we discuss the influence of deficit thinking with regard to rural schooling (and subsequent recognition of gifts and talents), the risk of generalizing rural to all rural places, and the nuances of rural poverty not captured in commonly used metrics, such as Free and Reduced Lunch.
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    Understanding the Puzzle Behind the Pictures: A Content Analysis of Children’s Picture Books About Autism
    Azano, Amy Price; Tackett, Mary; Sigmon, Miranda (Sage, 2017)
    The growing visibility of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and the trend toward inclusive classroom practices present teachers with the unique responsibility of providing an inclusive learning environment for all students. This study sought to explore how teachers may use children’s picture books about autism to provide nondisabled students with experiences aimed at increasing student understandings toward autism. Researchers compiled 35 children’s books for content analysis and identified significant themes presented as five assertions. Findings indicate children’s picture books about autism may (a) teach readers about the core characteristics of ASD, (b) illustrate how individuals with autism may be “at risk,” (c) expand on ways neurotypical children are similar and different to individuals with autism, (d) emphasize the importance of influential language, and (e) present insights about autism through the use of multiple perspectives. Findings with exemplar texts representative of each theme are presented, and practical classroom applications are discussed.