This symposium seeks to contribute to the discussion about the practices of education and teaching and learning in multi-grade classes. The main focus is on small rural primary schools in Austria, Finland, Spain and Switzerland. They usually employ one to three teachers who teach different grades in the same classroom; this is called multi-grade or multi-age teaching. The term of multi-age is used when students are taught rather according to their developmental stage and less according to their age or grade (Cornish, 2006; Hoffman, 2003).

Multi-grade teaching is common throughout the world, in both developed and developing countries (Cornish, 2006, Little, 2006). The International Journal of Educational Research highlighted the importance of research in rural schools by publishing a special issue on the topic in 2009 that included reviews of research about rural schools and their communities in Norway, Sweden, Finland, England, and Scotland (Kvalsund & Hargeaves, 2009).The reviewed articles were, however, based on studies conducted ten years ago or more, and thus the need for new diverse studies is clear.

The papers of this symposium pay attention to the point of view of teachers and students in rural schools with multi-grade classes. The papers present the different cultural contexts in the four countries Austria, Finland, Spain and Switzerland. All of the papers evolved from data of comparative projects, which included different schools of different regions in one country and all of the projects were carried out in two and more countries. The comparative approach gives us a possibility to increase our theoretical understanding of multi-grade teaching and to discover not only differences but especially similar patterns of multi-grade teaching and learning across the four countries.

Our common research questions are:

• What kind of teaching approaches can be observed in the participating small rural schools with multi-grade classes in the four European countries?
• What chances and challenges do teachers of these schools experience?
• What chances and challenges do students experience?
• Is there a special didactic for teaching and learning in multi-graded classes? 

The papers were developed on the base of following projects: 

Domingo, Laura and Boix, Roser: “The efficacy and the quality of skill acquisition in rural education: is this model transferable to different types of schools?” EDU2009-13460, Subprograma EDUC, Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation, carried out in Chile, Uruguay, France, Portugal and Spain.

Hyry-Beihammer, Eeva Kaisa: Pedagogy in small primary schools: ignored potential of multi-grade teaching and place-based education. The Austrian Science Fund, FWF, M 1377–G17, (2012–2014), carried out in Austria (Salzburg) and in Finland.

Raggl Andrea and Smit Robbert: Small Schools in alpine regions: Interreg Project (2012-2015), carried out in Austria (Vorarlberg) and Switzerland (Canton St. Gallen and Grisons).

The methodological approaches in our studies are mainly qualitative ones including ethnographical observation and interviews with teachers and students in Austrian, Finnish, Spanish and Swiss rural primary schools. The data analysis has been based on content analysis (see e.g. Neuendorf, 2002). The research project from Raggl and Smit also carried out a questionnaire survey. Robbert Smit applied structural equation analysis (Kline, 2010). Our interview and questionnaire proceedings were based on theoretical pedagogical knowledge of teaching methods.

By confronting our theoretical knowledge with the rural classroom realities we have developed our pre-concepts of teaching and learning in rural schools. We were interested how teachers of small schools with multi-grade classes deal with the age heterogeneity in their classes. We investigated curriculum, task-based, differentiation- and individualization, grouping, peer-learning as well as assessment approaches. In the symposium, different aspects of these approaches will be presented giving examples of the different case studies of the four countries.

Cornish, L. (Ed.). (2006). Reaching EFA through multi-grade teaching. Armidale, Australia: Kardoorair Press. Hoffman, J. (2003). Multiage teachers’ beliefs and practices. Journal of Research in Childhood Education, 18(1), 5–17. Kline, R.B. (2010). Principles and practice of structural equation modeling: New York, NY: Guilford Press. Kvalsund, R., & Hargreaves, L. (2009). Review of research in rural schools and their communities: Analytical perspectives and a new agenda. International Journal of Educational Research, 48(2), 140–149. doi:10.1016/j.ijer.2009.02.002 Little, A. W. (Ed.) (2006). Education for all and multi-grade teaching. Challenges and opportunities. Dordrecht, the Netherlands: Springer. Neuendorf, K.A. (2002). The content analysis guidebook. Thousand Oaks: Sage.