In this paper, we take as reference studies that highlight the relevance of parental involvement in the school in order to recognize and respond to the needs of all pupils. More specifically, we reinforce the sense of this participation in the context of rural schools. This contribution is related to two independent ethnographic research projects that we conducted in the Autonomous Community of Aragón, which is one of the regions with more rural schools in Spain. This region, located in the North of Spain, has more than 50% of small rural schools with multigrade classrooms. In the first project, we were interested in knowing which were the teaching practices in multigrade classrooms; family participation in these schools arose in the context of creative teaching practices (Vigo and Soriano, 2015). In the second project , we aimed to know, in an explicit way, how family participation happened in rural and urban schools. The strategies used to obtain the data consisted of: participant observation, interviews, informal conversations and document analysis. Our findings emerged from a cross analysis based on the comparison of two rural schools and one urban school. Different types of parental involvement took place in these schools. The educational practices carried out in rural schools seem to promote family participation in a dual sense; from the family to the school and from the school to the family. The school recognizes the potential and the identities of the families (Autti and Hyry-Beihamme 2014; Corbett, 2013). This action in the rural schools seems to be related to concerns about the sustainability of the school and the environment, in the same sense it is reflected in the research on this subject (Bagley and Hillyard, 2014). Nevertheless, the actions carried out in the urban schools seem to facilitate family participation only from the school values and with few connections with the environment. The analysis of the practices and conditions of rural schools shows differences with the practices of urban schools. This analysis could contribute to question the little attention that rural schools receive and, at the same time, to point out the potential of the educational practices connected with the community and the local context.

- Autti, O., and Hyry-Beihamme, E. K. (2014). School closures in rural Finnish communities. Journal of Research in Rural Education 29 (1): 1-17. Retrieved from http://jrre.psu.edu/articles/29-1.pdf - Bagley, C., and S. Hillyard (2014). Rural schools, social capital and the Big Society: a theoretical and empirical exposition. British Educational Research Journal 40 (1): 63-78 - Corbett, M. (2013). Improvisation as a curricular metaphor: Imagining education for a rural creative class. Journal of Research in Rural Education 28 (10): 1-11 Retrieved from http://jrre.psu.edu/articles/28-10.pdf. - Vigo, B. and Soriano, J. (2015). Family Involvement in Creative Teaching Practices for All in Small Rural Schools. Ethnography and Education 10 (3), 325-339.