ABSTRACT
The Appalachian region of the United States has increasingly become the focus of scholarly investigation. Studies of the region's economics, history, literature, music, and culture blossomed in the 1970s and have continued to identify the region as inclusive of multiple identities and multiple meanings, both geographic and cultural. This chapter explores how the author approaches multicultural education with the preservice teachers at Western Carolina University, located in the mountains of western North Carolina. The author debunks the myth of the hillbilly caricature with the aim of enabling the students to develop a more informed understanding of the complexity and diversity of the Appalachian region and its people and to enable them to challenge the easily accepted stereotypes that perpetuate these negative and demeaning images in their own classrooms by situating the problem of rural and Appalachian stereotypes in the context of critical multicultural education and civil rights pedagogy through a deconstruction of the Appalachian mountain hillbilly image.
