Contemporary Joads: Educating in a Rural Boomtown

We are three educators working in rural space. We came together to craft a story of early-career teachers’ experiences working in an intermountain western boomtown. To uncover the unique challenges of this context, we explored themes related to schooling in communities undergoing economic dislocation represented through master narratives of boom and bust. Teachers confront these challenges in both phases of the cycle. Here we tell a story about teaching in the boom, one that nests within the boosterism associated with the economic good times. Those good times, however, are ever shadowed by awareness of the consequences of the inevitable bust. These economic trends originate in places far from the impacted communities. Early-career teachers, exposed to in-flux classrooms, often bear this weight. From that experience, we present a resultant protean rural narrative, and we hope that through its telling we may share unique insights that resonate among other educators, regardless of setting. Keywords: rural, early-career teachers, boom-bust, narrative