The symposium proposal starts from the Italian research experience within the context of the small and rural schools. In Italy a network of schools under the umbrella of a Manifesto promoted and supported some of the teaching practices in the multiage classrooms context, considering this kind of organization “a priviledged place of innovation”.  

With this focus the symposium will explore the research activities of different European countries (Spain, Switzerland, Italy and Norway) to describe how different research activities have been conducting in the mentioned countries with a focus on the practices in multiage classrooms.

Each country will highlight the observations conducted within the teaching practices (the organization of the class group, the preparation of spaces and learning times, the method of programming and didactic planning, the relationship with the territory and families, the use of digital technologies to support linguistic, mathematical or social skills) and with a focus on the curriculum to “connect the life inside and outside the school” up to identify a specific practices that can be transferred in all the European multiage classrooms where differentiation could be applied.  “Differentiation can be defined as an approach to address the diverse needs of individual students and small groups of students to maximize the learning opportunity for each student in a classroom”.

Multi-method approach are used tin each of the presented research activities from the “meta-ethnographic analysis (Noblit and Hare, 1988; Noblit, 2019) to show different teaching practices and experiences from teachers and families” to a combination of grounded theory and  phenomenological approach (Mortari 2010), will identify the main critical issues and the opportunities for teachers to improve the teaching and learning process in the multigrade classrooms.  To a mixed-methods sequential research design with a prior questionnaire survey. All of the countries will present case studies as outcomes of the research carries out.

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