Multilingual Educators in Superdiverse Rural Schools: Placing Administrators and Teachers’ Cultural and Linguistic Wealth at the Center of Rural Education

Centered on reconceptualizations of “rural” and “rurality” that reimagine and transcend the “traditional imaginaries” of rural educational settings as places of disadvantage and isolation, this article presents the partial results of a mixed methods study funded by the Spencer Foundation about expanded and pivotal roles played by rural multilingual (ML) teachers, paraprofessionals, and administrators in two rural school districts located in U.S. Midwest COVID-19 hotspots. The pandemic made the historical struggles and inequities that ML students face in U.S. schools glaringly evident, as ML families experienced a disproportionately negative impact of the virus on their health and financial stability and showed a disparity of resources from their urban/suburban counterparts. In these contexts, this study focused on how two superdiverse rural school districts with unique histories of place-based language education policies, encompassing a range of multilingual programs and a high number of multilingual educators, mobilized unique linguistic and cultural capital to ensure that rural low-income ML students and families received equitable access to education during unprecedented times. Drawing from ML educators’ interviews and surveys, the findings unveil how rural ML educational settings can be reimagined as places of opportunity for multilingual/multiethnic students and families, when equitable ML education policies and ML educators are made a centerpiece of localized language education policies.