Troubling rurality and rural schooling: a qualitative meta-synthesis of research in rural schools in three European national school systems

Abstract

ABSTRACT This qualitative meta-synthesis collects and analyses the multiple and many-faceted understandings, experiences, practices, and school to community or individual relationships described in qualitative research on rural education and schooling in three European national contexts (Sweden, Northern Ireland, and Spain). Our aim was to generate and present a simplifying analytic synthesising narrative about the politics, practices and outcomes for and in schools in rural areas. In all three countries, the lack of specific relevance of the school to its community through the curriculum is palpable. Instead, the curriculum tends to be performative and to transmit primarily ‘official metro-centric knowledge’, rather than a more local culturally sensitive knowledge with intrinsic value to local communities. That said, the relationship between rural schools and the communities they serve, and the space and place they occupy, still has the potential to be important, meaningful, powerful and disruptive toward dominant power relations and official knowledge.