As a student who has focused most of her adult academic career around English the process of learning how to do historical research was challenging. Picking my topic for this assignment was easy however. If you refer to the About Me tab you will find out what inspired me to choose this topic. I knew what I wanted to research but narrowing that down was tricky and finding the articles and sources to support me proved to be a challenge. I started by typing things into the library search, at first the sources I was finding didn’t necessarily involve the history of rural schools across Canada. So, with some guidance I was able to find better sources that lead me to the history of rural schools in Canada around the 1930’s.
The articles I chose focused on a variety of places across Canada, which allowed me to get an understanding of rural schools in various locations. This was good because I was able to compare and contrast the schools from different areas. However, with my research I struggled to find articles all focused on the same time period. And so, I had to expand my 1930’s all the way to the 1960’s which gave me a broad scope of time for these schools. The problem with this was that 30 years allowed for a lot of time for change and improvement in the educational system. This made it harder to compare one school in one city with another due to a serious time gap.
The articles however did help prove my theory that rural schools tend to have a negative impact on the students who attend them. I focused on the impact that the rural communities had on the children. Such as the pressure to work rather then attend school, and the challenges that the remote locations gave these children. I also focused on the subject of the teachers at these schools. Often the teachers were young and new to teaching. The teachers and the schools also lacked the proper resources and support to give their students a better chance at success. With all this research I was able to find personal testimonies of what it was like to attend rural schools at this time and the impact it had on these people when it came to their experience with the educational system. And finally, with my last article I was able to use his research to help prove me theory that children who attend rural schools have a lesser chance at succeeding on an academic level. Often rural school students fail to complete grade 12 and there is a lower chance of students attending a post-secondary education.
What made this subject important to me was how it impacted me personally. And as a future educator I would like to see a change in the impact rural schools have on their students. And so now learning about the history has prepared me to have an impact on the future.