Rural communities (settlements) are often expressed geo-graphically, in terms of a metrics of distances and density only, as tangibly belonging to and characterising a geographic place that is peripheral to or existing beyond urban spaces. However, though this may be valid for fixing rural areas in geographic space, it is insufficient for capturing the variations and differences of what rural/rurality means culturally (and across time and space variations) to and for people’s lives: i.e. relatively and relationally (Beach and Öhrn, 2022; Rönnlund, 2019).

In this paper, we adopt this (cultural) relativistic perspective within a cross-national comparative transdisciplinary analysis that seeks answers to the question of what constitutes rurality and the characteristics of rural places, the schools in them, people that work and study there: and their relationships. We draw on different academic disciplines to do so, and the concept of rural hermeneutical space, where rural areas, places and objects in them (including schools and the objects, interactions and people there) have meaning in relation to similar objects and representations not just “in situ” but also in other places. A key concept is hermeneutical rurality and the meanings that are attributable/ attributed to the internal school, the people in it and their actions, the community they are part of, and the larger social and production ecology (culturally, materially and historically) surrounding these communities. We use it to try to answer a simple question. Namely: What does the community function of schools in rural areas look like based on a cross-national synthesis of qualitative research; and in whose/which  interests does it operate?

We have explored this question relating to different rural places in three European countries (Northern Ireland, Spain and Sweden) using a cross-national synthesis of research products (published and in press) relating to how schools in rural places seem to work to help local populations and develop rural consciousness (Keddie, Mills and Mills, 2008). The paper drives the twin idea that (a) education and schooling are often conflated terms, but they are different processes- and particularly in terms of their community function; and (b) whether rural schools in rural places offer schooling rather than education is complex and contested. These main findings comprise key points that are presented in a narrative form in the paper, using a number of thematic headings followed by a discussion and conclusion section.

The data for the cross-national research synthesis comes from ethnographic research in two countries and qualitative research in a third. To be more precise, the paper derives from two meta-ethnographic analyses of ethnographic research products (reports, books, articles) from national research projects in Spain and Sweden, and a community schools project in Northern Ireland that has a sequential mixed method approach involving a questionnaire survey and qualitative case study approach (five case study schools). We have used this approach previously in comparative rural education research in Beach and Vigo Arrazola, (2020). As the name suggests, meta-ethnography forms a means to synthesise ethnographies and other qualitative studies produced in different times and places (Beach and Vigo-Ararazola, 2020). Its strength lies in its potential to retain the interpretative properties and contextual embeddedness of these original investigations when collating and interpreting findings across them and identifying trends and possible future research priorities (Beach and Öhrn, 2022). It consists of four steps: 1. Selecting the studies; 2. Detailed reading of the selected texts; 3. Individual analyses were contrasted with each other to find common themes related to the main focus; and 4. Reciprocal and refutational analysis and description of outcomes in narrative synthesis. For this paper, the Birmingham School Circuits of Culture Model and Massey’s (1994) spatial theory of social geographic development have provided support and drived the analysis.

Our results complicate and contest a common position that asserts that rural schools are always of positive value to their community and the people there. The complication comes about because whilst some of the ethnographies show positive examples, community service is neither automatic nor the same everywhere and some schools actually work against local interests through cultural silencing, by marginalising local knowledge and by obfuscating global capitalist interests of exploitation and cultural domination in/of rural places. Things are of course not always in this way. In Spain, a common meaning of value appeared through a notion of schools as vital to a community’s survival, even if this may be as a Trojan-Horse bringing external values into the rural community, or as an intermediary for cultural domination. Northern Ireland, unlike Spain and Sweden, is a recent political post-conflict setting where the community function of schooling works in relation to goals of peace and reconciliation (Roulston et al, 2021). These findings of reconciliation and peace appear also in Sweden too in some places in the past, though in relation to the struggles between (urban) capital and (rural) labour, representation and identity. They can work within and in line with capitalist interests and profit. The differences within and between the national contexts comprise a key analytical challenge and their (reciprocal and refutational) comparative analysis culminates in a line-of-argument about the phenomenon of community function of schools in rural areas that allows us to offer an interpretation beyond the level of individual studies or themes. We use a number of thematic headings followed to do so, by a discussion and conclusion section.

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