Friday, August 3, 11:00-11:30, SUB Ballroom C, Theme: Profession

Within the field of education, activity theory has been used to explore pre-service teachers’ appropriation of pedagogical tools (e.g., Grossman et al., 2000; Leko & Brownell, 2011) and in-service teachers’ professional development (e.g., Yamagata-Lynch, 2003; Yamagata-Lynch & Haudenschild, 2009). Up to this point, however, activity theory’s application in rural education research has been minimal with respect to exploring teachers’ enactment of their role as teachers in a rural context. Following a review of the literature, I synthesized the findings of several studies of rural teachers to illustrate the elements of an activity system and explore how those elements -- subject, object, mediating artifact, rules, community, and division of labor -- might manifest in a rural education context based on the extant literature.  I then conducted a multi-case study of rural teachers to explore how they conceptualize and enact their role as teachers in a rural context. Cross-case analysis revealed that the subject element of the activity system provided the most insight into how these rural teachers conceptualize their role; the mediating artifact and division of labor elements of the activity system provided the most insight into how these rural teachers enact their role. Although both teachers are independent and interdependent and employ similar pedagogical tools, differences in the ways the teachers enact their role can be explained by the differences in the way they conceptualize their role, which leads them to divide the labor of teaching and learning in their classrooms differently.