Conceptualising rural schools in a metro-centric and globalist culture

The voices of those who live there

Abstract

Although the definitions of rural schools vary across educational research and from different educative realities, all educative rural contexts are suffering from the same social and cultural situation (globalisation, depopulation and school closures) and the framing of these schools as a disadvantage, problematics and from a deficit discourse. This situation can affect the perceptions that teachers, families and students have about the rural school and the meaning it has for them, shaping a social imaginary around them that determines the educational practices and the sustainability of the territory. In this context, the purpose of this study is to advance theorical knowledge of senses and meanings of rural schools from the voices of those who live there (teachers, families and students), challenging the prevailing negative representation and dichotomy culture between rural-urban context. For that, the research will be carried out in two phases: (i) exploratory and (ii) ethnographic study considering the experiences and perspectives of 8 community small rural schools in northern Spain (Aragón). The results reveal the existence of different meanings around rural schools. On the one hand, there are metro-centric perspectives that tend to reproduce an urban model in rural areas and show a reductive sense of rural schools as monolithic reality related to school organisation, services and school culture. On the other hand, there is a sense of the rural in relation to participation, community and sustainability, addressing a pedagogical and contextual approach valuing the idiosyncrasy of the rural realities. These discourses seem to be influenced by the implementation of metro-centric and neoliberal policies, which jeopardise the contextual logic of rural schools.