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The impacts of the coronavirus pandemic in the small central Appalachian town of Rainelle, West Virginia cannot be understood separately from the broader human-environment relationships of this place. These relationships are grounded in landscapes that hold tremendous natural beauty alongside the scars of coal and timber extraction, and which now face increased risk of flooding because of the changing climate those extractive industries helped create. Too often, stories of this place lack attention to this complexity because they do not account for the perspective and knowledge of the people who live and make their livelihoods there. This paper details findings from a photovoice project in Rainelle that captured life in the small town in Fall 2020, through the lenses of nine town residents. Their photos tell a story not just of the height of the pandemic in rural America, but also of what happened when the pandemic intersected with ongoing efforts to recover from a devastating flood in 2016 and decades of socio-economic hardship before that. The results show that photovoice is an effective method by which political ecologists can facilitate the telling of stories by and with research participants, while also offering insights for how we might envision more just climate futures with people not typically part of conversations about climate change, such as those from the precarious landscapes of rural Appalachia.

We explore how two “happenings” representing different political, social, historical and economic influences converge to shape the narratives of preservice teachers and teacher educators in West Virginia. These happenings are the 2017-2018 edTPA roll out and the teacher strike of February 2018. We use the framework of sensemaking to explore preservice teacher and teacher educator identity/agency using a phenomenological analysis of narratives accessed through narrative portfolios, artifacts, and interviews with pre-service teachers, mentors (supervising teachers), and teacher educators. We found that the confluence of these political moments reinforced a neoliberal orientation for both preservice teachers and teacher educators, positioning preservice teachers to expect teacher educators to intensively support the edTPA and ensure their success while silencing the collective history and moral imperative of protest. Preservice teachers and some mentors reframed the edTPA as a pathway to increased teacher pay/meritocracy by linking it with the National Boards, yet there were pockets of resistance within this among both preservice teachers and teacher educators. These findings are important for informing educational policy and practice around both corporate involvement in assessment/accountability policy and preservice teachers’ and teacher educators’ roles in protest at this moment when both are expanding simultaneously.

Universal pre-kindergarten (UPK) is a popular reform in West Virginia, offering part-time readiness-oriented instruction for four-year-olds and some three-year-olds with special needs. The reform joins public school sites and community partners (private preschool and/or Head Start resources) in the goal of pre-kindergarten for all eligible children, and has targeted the struggling lower-middle class. UPK may position parents between choices and rights by providing discrepant public and private choices for families who do not qualify for the Head Start strand while naming access “universal”. In this case study, I examine the context of access in relation to the discourses and politics of neoliberal globalism. Neoliberal globalism has shaped West Virginia’s UPK policy towards producing particular childhoods and roles for teachers and parents in service to the economic growth of the state. Specifically, I analyze the role of social class dynamics among lower-middle class parents who sought readiness opportunities in one UPK community. The results indicate that Bourdieu’s theory of social reproduction is relevant. Lower-middle class parents were active and instrumental choosers within the hybrid market system. Given two groups of lower-middle class participants (RMC-recent members of the lower-middle class descended from the middle class and HMC-historical members of the lower-middle class), RMC advantageously engaged resources traditionally designated for poor and working class families while HMC used social networks built locally over time to support their choice-making. In order to re-think West Virginia UPK’s position towards cultural pluralism and social justice, I suggest several possibilities in the areas of policy, community deliberation, and educational practice.