Please Note: The full outline of this two-part symposium was submitted separately with  Submission Number 1467. Conftool does not allow abstracts to be repeated, so here are some extracts from the full outline relevant to the three papers in this part. 

This two-part symposium responds to ECER Net 14’s Special Call, ‘Rural Schools as Hubs for the Socio-Educational Development of the Community’. It includes six papers from six nation states spanning Europe, north to south and east to west. These represent different political, economic and social systems, within a Europe currently grappling with unprecedented social challenges. Inevitably, then, it presents both pessimistic and optimistic perspectives on the role of the rural school as socio-educational hub of the community.  ...  ...

The rural school systems represented here exemplify various points of progress towards the less polarised, more interactive rural-urban dimension envisaged in the Call. ...

The authors in this symposium represent a range of disciplinary backgrounds including sociology, geography, psychology, ethnography, and education with refreshingly different ways of conceptualising and investigating the issues they address. Collectively, they respond to the following, slightly modified, questions in the special call:

• Do, and if so, how do local organizations (including local government) summon the contribution of the schools, in the rural context?
• To what extent can rural schools in their different socio-political contexts, promote the appreciation and nurture of local memories and histories, the ability to think together about difficulties and seek new ways of improving the territory, the use and potentiation of local (natural, cultural, human, tangible and intangible) resources, and the democratic participation in decision-making processes at the local level?
• How can different research disciplines contribute to this discussion?

...

Part II focuses on recent developments in rural contexts in response to the forces of globalisation and other changes and challenges to rural schools and communities.  Tantarimäki discusses how differing local municipalities in Finland are managing their school networks to incorporate a wider range of services (social, health, etc.) with education. Solstad and Solstad report surveys in 2005 and 2015 on the effects of school transportation in rural Norway. He finds shifting criteria for school closures, and negative consequences for children’s health.  Finally, Hillyard and Bagley's paper explores developments in rural headteachers’ roles in the changing contemporary contexts of ‘the village’ in England.

Corbett, M. (2015) Towards a rural sociological imagination: ethnography and schooling in mobile modernity, Ethnography and Education, 10:3, 263-277, DOI: 10.1080/17457823.2015.1050685 Kvalsund , R. & Hargreaves, L. (2009). Reviews of research in small rural schools and their communities : Analytical perspectives and a new agenda. International Journal of Educational Research, 48(3). 140-149.