ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the professional learning opportunities available to educators in rural contexts in order to share how networks can support and enhance educators’ development of adaptive expertise. A focus on connecting teachers across contexts and on developing adaptive expertise can help teachers and their school communities to respond to the uncertainties and shifts that their students and local communities face. Adaptive expertise focuses on the uncertain and ambiguous situations educators face, which in fact are not unlike the uncertainty and ambiguity rural communities face as they look to their futures in a global, interconnected, and changing world. In working toward its aim of improving the teaching and learning of writing, the National Writing Project operates as a network that recognizes the expertise of teachers working in their own particular contexts and that also reaches across geographic boundaries to strengthen the connections between educators teaching in all contexts.
