In this symposium, ethnographic research will be presented and discussed in order to create deepened understandings of education in different rural areas in Europe and relate this to both local and global discussions (Beach et al. 2018). This is important, as there exists an unawareness towards rural contexts in research on education and towards spatial perspectives in general (Corbett, 2015a; 2015b). Research tends to be dominated by metrocentric tendencies (Farrugia, 2014). These tendencies have led to diverse and pluralistic representations of urban education but have contributed to a picture of rural settings and rural education as uniform. This symposium aims at developing and deepening understandings of education in rural areas by focusing especially on spatial perspectives and processes of inclusion and exclusion from different perspectives.

The symposium will include researchers from six European countries whose work has addressed rural primary and secondary schools. With a critical ethnographic perspective as a common theme, the papers will cover issues dealing with different processes of inclusion and exclusion related to spatial perspectives. These issues are of great relevance for European educational research, where some European countries have large remote rural areas and all countries have different kinds of rural areas. In this way the symposium challenges metrocentric tendencies and contributes to diverse and pluralistic representations of education in a Europe today. 

The first paper presents ethnographic fieldwork from six different rural areas and schools in Sweden. It explores processes and experiences of youth participation and social relations connected to places and spaces. In the second paper there is a presentation of a multi sited ethnographic study focused on understanding young peoples’ educational pathways and senses of belonging in a village located in the Portuguese inlands, close to the Spanish border. The third paper presents and analyses stories of immigrant students in compulsory schools in rural areas of Iceland and Sweden. Two specific questions are how immigrant students talk about their agency in their classrooms, schools and peer communities, and how immigrant students use agency in their classrooms and schools.

The presentation in the fourth paper draws on ethnographic research conducted in three small village schools in Austria. These schools have been going through a process of change over the last years, by developing a special profile, and the presentation explores the working of these schools and in particular the opportunities, challenges and consequences of their transformations. The fifth paper analyses policy changes and how two primary school head teachers in contrasting rural settings interpret the complex multi-layered socio-economic, cultural and political contexts.  The data are derived from a three-year ethnographic investigation in two contrasting English villages. The final sixth paper presents meta-ethnographic research on educational and spatial justice in rural Finland. The focus is on the interplay of the material consequences of educational policies and the construction of young people’s spatial identities.

The symposium will be divided in two sessions with three papers in each session and this is part 2. Both sessions close with a discussion of the contributions led by an external discussant as a way to synthesize the conclusions from each paper within the vista of a broader European perspective.

Beach, D., From, T., Johansson, M. & and Öhrn, E. (2018). Educational and spatial justice in rural and urban areas in three Nordic countries: A meta-ethnographic analysis. Education Inquiry. DOI: 10.1080/20004508.2018.1430423 Corbett, M. (2015a). Towards a rural sociological imagination: Ethnography and schooling in mobile modernity. Ethnography and Education, 10, 263–277. Corbett, M. (2015b). Rural education: Some sociological provocations for the field. Australian and International Journal of Rural Education, 25(3), 9–25. Farrugia, D. (2014). Towards a spatialised youth sociology: the rural and the urban in times of change. Journal of Youth Studies, 17(3), 293-307. Jeffrey, B. & Troman, G. (2004). Time for ethnography. British Journal of Educational Research, 30(4), 535-548.