This paper explores the rural school as a site from which to think differently about education, vulnerability, and the conditions that make pedagogical life possible. Focused on the Spanish context, and especially on small rural schools at risk of closure due to ongoing depopulation, it asks how we might reframe precarity not merely as a deficit or a failure, but as a relational condition through which other forms of agency, care, and educational presence emerge.

Rather than adopting an evaluative or policy-driven stance, the paper develops a philosophical and empirically grounded inquiry into how these schools persist (often quietly, sometimes precariously) through assemblages of human and non-human relations: teachers, students, families, housing, roads, regional laws, local traditions, and community hopes. Drawing on Actor-Network Theory (ANT) and assemblage theory, the paper seeks not to stabilise these schools conceptually, but to understand them as provisional educational constellations, configurations always in motion, always dependent on the tenuous work of keeping relations alive.

The concept of vulnerability, rather than being understood as an unfortunate trait to be overcome, is here engaged as a condition of ontological openness (Braidotti, 2019), a space from which educational creativity and reconfiguration might emerge. This paper approaches the rural school as both materially fragile and potentially generative, a place where different logics of schooling take form: multigrade teaching, shared governance, community-rooted curricula, and the interweaving of care and learning across generations. Such practices, the paper suggests, do not offer models for replication, but openings for reflection on the narrowness of current imaginaries around what counts as education, where it should happen, and on whose terms.

Case examples are drawn from several Spanish villages (Monleras, Mozárbez, El Carracillo, Juzbado, and Viloria) where schools have either been reopened, repurposed, or sustained through local collective efforts. These cases are not offered as success stories, but as invitations to think with the world as it is, in its complexity, contingency, and unevenness. They show how educational life can persist in places marked by loss, and how such persistence often takes the form of improvisation, care, and the slow reweaving of social and material bonds.

The paper is informed by a relational ontology that sees educational institutions not as autonomous units but as ongoing achievements, fragile networks that must be continuously enacted and renewed. ANT provides the vocabulary of translation, irreducibility, and mutability to describe how schools are assembled through these relations, while Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the assemblage allows for attention to how these relations territorialise and deterritorialise (stabilising or unravelling the conditions of educational possibility).

This theoretical grounding allows the paper to move between conceptual reflection and grounded description, attempting to hold space for both. It aims to think from the rural school, not just about it. In doing so, it resists both nostalgia and problem-solving logics, seeking instead to ask what educational research might become when it listens closely to the quiet endurance of places often excluded from its primary focus.

In line with the ECER 2025 theme of “Charting the Way Forward,” this paper suggests that rural schools may not represent an educational past in need of saving, but a form of world-making that remains vital to reimagining education under conditions of planetary uncertainty, demographic transition, and institutional fragility. The paper offers no solution, but a shift in gaze, a philosophical and ethical redirection toward the slow, relational, and precarious work of sustaining educational practices in the margins.

The paper is grounded in a philosophical approach to educational inquiry, drawing particularly on relational and post-structuralist thought. It employs Actor-Network Theory (ANT) and the Deleuzian notion of assemblage not merely as conceptual frameworks, but as methodological sensibilities, ways of attending to the complexity, instability, and relational constitution of educational institutions. Rather than building from a fixed research design, the structure of the paper follows a layered composition. It begins with a contextual reflection on the territorial, demographic, and institutional conditions shaping rural schools in Spain. It then introduces ANT and assemblage theory as tools for rethinking the rural school not as a stable unit but as a contingent and emergent formation. These theoretical movements are accompanied by case-based descriptions drawn from publicly documented rural schools, examples that are treated not as data points but as invitations to think with the world rather than about it. The method here is post-qualitative in spirit, refusing clear divisions between theory and evidence. Case material and conceptual reflection are interwoven to highlight the situated ways in which rural schools are sustained. The emphasis is not on the production of generalisable knowledge, but on cultivating sensitivity to the lived conditions, tensions, and possibilities of education in marginalised spaces. Rather than offering a single explanatory claim, the paper develops a philosophical reading of how rural schools enact precarious stability, and how such configurations might complicate dominant assumptions about institutional legitimacy, resilience, and educational value. The goal is to amplify what rural schools do, to make their forms of persistence thinkable, not to extract models for replication. In this sense, the paper may be understood as a contribution to the philosophy of education not by prescribing what should be done, but by inviting attention to what is already being done, often quietly, and under fragile conditions. It participates in a tradition of educational thought concerned with the ethics of care, the politics of marginality, and the ontological plurality of what counts as education.

The paper concludes with a reflection on how rural schools might be reimagined, not as marginal institutions to be preserved out of nostalgia, but as spaces where educational life continues under conditions of precarity, improvisation, and care. In tracing how these schools hold themselves together through unstable yet meaningful relations, the paper suggests that vulnerability may be better understood not only as exposure to risk but also as an opening to relational possibility. What emerges is not a model or a set of policy recommendations, but a philosophical provocation: how might we think education otherwise, from the vantage of these fragile constellations? Rather than viewing rural schools through the lens of lack or exception, the paper proposes that we treat them as speculative sites, places where the categories of educational theory and policy can be revisited and rethought. This orientation does not deny the very real pressures rural schools face. It acknowledges them but also attends to the ways in which these schools respond (sometimes modestly, sometimes experimentally) to the instability of their conditions. Their responses, the paper argues, offer a quietly radical form of educational thought: one that is situated, adaptive, and committed to making life possible in specific places, with the people and resources available. In this way, the paper contributes to the broader ECER 2025 conversation by suggesting that the future of education may not lie in scalable innovation, but in deepened attention to fragility, situatedness, and the ethical textures of educational persistence.

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