Leveraging Rural Cultural Wealth Toward Equity-Driven Secondary Transition Research in Rural Communities

Rural communities can serve as innovative contexts for preparing students with disabilities to transition toward their postsecondary goals, offering unique local assets that can and should be leveraged within secondary transition services. Nonetheless, the limited special education and transition research conducted in rural school communities has consistently highlighted inequitable limitations without consideration of these communities’ distinct local assets. This conceptual paper extends the Rural Cultural Wealth (RCW) framework by operationalizing its constructs within the context of secondary transition research to accomplish two purposes. First, we describe a six-step process that applies and expands upon the RCW framework to guide equity-driven rural transition research. Second, we employ examples of empirical data, procedures, and lessons learned from a recent study we conducted through a research-practice partnership to illustrate how rural cultural wealth strengthens transition scholarship to improve services and outcomes for rural students with disabilities. Finally, we offer guidance for researchers on collaborating alongside rural schools to harness the RCW constructs of “rural resourcefulness,” “rural ingenuity,” “rural familism,” and “rural community unity” toward transitioning students with disabilities’ postsecondary goals for working, learning, living, and thriving.