This symposium is part of a wider project in ECER network 14 which aims to promote the collaboration of educational and other researchers across Europe who are examining the impact of internal and external forces on rural schooling. The project focuses on what we can learn from researchers operating in a diverse range of countries in Europe, including countries from nation states new to the EU. The project also embraces perspectives from a range of disciplines which has led to interdisciplinary engagements with the complexities and of the different nation’s educations systems.

This particular symposium will consider perceptions of the changing nature of schooling in the last decades, diffracted by examination through a “rural lens” and how this diffraction might illuminate differently national and international education policy developments across several European regions.

Educational policy, like any centralised policy or decision making, has not only the prospective consequences in the sector but also many unintended societal and territorial impacts which influence everyday life of individuals, communities and institutions. From a  structuralism perspective,  it can be claimed that the development of politically and economically non-autonomous areas (which rural and peripheral areas may be considered to be) have shaped decisions and driving forces that originate from outside rather than inside the territory (Mackinnon and Cumbers 2007).

In accordance with the other experts in education we consider the rural elementary school environment as a special school culture, which is overridden, even often violently transformed by central educational policy which are informed by urban models of concentrated, “economic” education in large (urban) schools (Kvalsund 2009; Ribchester and Edwards 1999). Therefore we regard the study of schools in rural areas as a right place to view changes in national and international educational policy and politics on issues of social justice and equality in education.

In this Symposium, five papers will be presented, representing five national perspectives. It includes papers by Sam Hillyard and Carl Bagley (from the UK), Andrea Raggl (from Austria), Outi Autti and Eeva Kaisa Hyry-Beihammer (from Finland), Artur Bajerski (from Poland) and Kateřina Trnková and Zdeněk Kučera (from Czechia). These papers jointly debate the impacts of internal and external factors and decisions on elementary school provision in rural spaces and on the resemblance of school culture in particular places. These papers emanate from four different disciplinary perspectives (ethnographic, sociological, geographical and educational) using different research methods (observation, biographies, interviews, questionnaire survey, statistical analysis and cartographical visualisation) to investigate changing conditions in rural education and schooling.

References:

Kvalsund, R. 2009. Centralized decentralization or decentralized centralization? A review of newer Norwegian research on schools and their communities. International Journal of Educational Research 48, pp. 89-99.

Mackinnon, D., Cumbers, A. 2007. An Introduction to Economic Geography: Globalization, Uneven Development and Place. Harlow: Pearson Education, 354 p.

Ribchester, CH. and Edwards, B. 1999. The Centre and the Local: Policy and Practice in Rural Education Provision. Journal of Rural Studies 15 (1), pp. 49-63.