Beyond Community to Collective Care: Reimagining Inclusion for Rural Students with Disabilities

This conceptual piece examines how prevailing notions of community in rural schools influence inclusive education practices for students with disabilities. While rural communities often emphasize care and belonging, these values can mask exclusionary practices when inclusion is treated as sameness or is assumed rather than actively cultivated. We explore how disability is acknowledged or overlooked within rural community traditions and how these dynamics sustain outdated models of special education service delivery and reinforce exclusionary practices. To reframe inclusion as a collective and relational practice, we introduce a care-based framework rooted in three interrelated components: mattering, interdependence, and accountability. Informed by interdisciplinary scholarship across rural education, disability studies, and ethics of care, this framework offers practical strategies for creating inclusive educational communities that can attend to the needs of all their members through shared responsibility and collective dreaming.