New Publication! Parental Advocacy for Rural Education in BC

Along with my co-author, Yotam Ronen (PhD student in EDST), I’m pleased to announce a new publication from my SSHRCC-funded project on the history of parental advocacy for rural education in BC. Entitled ” ‘“I am desirous that she should have as good an education as possible” : A Century of Parental Advocacy for Rural Education in British Columbia,” the paper will appear in the August 2022 issue of BC Studies. From the abstract: This article explores the early history of elementary correspondence education from the perspective of rural settler parents in British Columbia in the early to mid-decades of the twentieth century. We use the hundreds of letters written by parents of students to teachers and administrators of the BC Elementary Correspondence School (ECS), the first distance education program in Canada, from its inception in 1919 to approximately 1950. We focus on the most prominent theme that emerged from our historical analysis of parental letters: the need for adequate resources to support the education of rural settler children. Our analysis is framed by reference to more contemporary examples of advocacy on the part of rural parents, exemplified through the 2016-2017 rural education consultation exercise undertaken by the then BC Liberal government. We argue that contemporary concerns about the state of rural education have a long, overlooked history that testifies to the indefatigable advocacy efforts of rural BC citizens over the course of a century.