Conference Agenda

This proposal is a part of an ongoing project that concerns educational institutions in Swedish rural societies, with focus on digitization and entrepreneurship. Even though almost half of the population worldwide still live in rural societies (43% in 2021 according to Statista, 2022) there is lack of research concerning rural societies and rural education in comparison to research on city areas and educational institutions in those areas (Åberg-Bengtsson, 2009; Beach et al, 2019). This spare interest from research communities, and/or, from governmental institutions contributing with research grants, may of course have many explanations. Huge capital is generated in metropolitan areas, high status educational institutions are located there, and the political decisions are made within the larger cities. To this should be added the prejudgment views on rural communities and their citizens – particularly on the rural working class – exploited and transferred over the world via the dominating urban-centric middleclass media culture Walker-Gibbs, Ludecke, & Kline, 2015, 2018). The metro-centric cultures lack of concern for the less urbanized part of the world, are also seen in the often simplistic understanding of “rural” and “rural education” (Bagley and Hillyard, 2014; Beach et al, 2019; Their et al, 2021). ”The challenge for all rural research is how rural is defined” says Walker-Gibbs, Ludecke, & Kline (2018).

In research on the field “rural education” heterogeneous and context-dependent nature of rurality are empathized (Nelson et al 2021). Rural areas present a great diversity among them in terms of social, cultural, religious, economic as well as topographical characteristics both within and across countries (Showalter et al., 2017). On the other hand, it is well known that rural youth to lesser extent then their urban counterpart is prone to complete a college degree, but that does not mean a complete absence of factors in smaller rural communities that can be helpful for rural youth in relation to their future ambitions (Roberts & Grant, 2021; see also, Beach et al, 2019). It has been argued that teachers have greater opportunities to provide support for and information on students’ postsecondary options in rural areas then in non-rural ones. However, while teachers and school personal staff do influence, and support, their rural students, research also show that this support is often inadequate for helping students enact the necessary steps for achieving their postsecondary ambitions (Roberts & Grant, 2021).

With Massey (1994) we argue that social relations are what construct space, and therefore, particular social relations – stretched over time, with its politics, culture and its history – is what makes up a particular space. In our case this means that we view our particular rural social spaces as imbedded in the relational life of the school, and in the same time as stretched out over the world via the continuing digitalization. Our research sites are three rural municipalities. We focus on one elementary school at each research site.

We concentrate on the places for education, in the era of digital tools, and possibilities for the schools and the communities to educate children and at the same time work with entrepreneurship, beneficial for the individuals as well as for the communities (Pettersson, 2018). Entrepreneurship in this project builds on the idea of relationships and mutual concerns as starting points for developing and acting on opportunities in diverse contexts (Berglund & Johannisson, 2012; Weicht & Jónsdóttir, 2021). The aim in this paper is to analyze and exemplify school-work and their local surroundings in relation to classroom work as well as to the social organization at the school with particular focus on entrepreneurship in the digital era.

We discuss how an ethnographic approach allowed us to describe and analyze cases of interdisciplinary educational practices that recently took shape in Belgian Flemish secondary schools after an educational reform.

Since 2019, secondary education in Flanders is being gradually reformed (Flemish Ministry of Education and Training, 2023). In particular, this reform stimulates interdisciplinarity in a diversity of forms and gives individual schools a lot of freedom in how to organize the concrete realization of the curriculum in a specific school. While mandatory learning goals before the reform where listed under well-defined school subjects that had to be implemented as such, legal learning requirements are now listed as groups of competencies not anymore associated to the obligation to organize learning based on specific school subjects. As a result, Flemish schools today can choose to work with traditional school subjects, interdisciplinary clusters, projects, seminars or other organizations of learning. In this context, in the last years a multitude of school-based, interdisciplinary practices with an experimental character arose in Flemish secondary schools.

While seminal papers in the literature classified at theoretical level the many ways in which interdisciplinary curricula can be constructed and organized combining elements from different subjects (Fogarty, 1991) and how this shapes instruction (Lederman & Niess, 1997) (Nikitina, 2006), the recent changes in the Flemish secondary school system suggest a different perspective: to consider interdisciplinarities as complex and diverse educational practices, to be studied as such by suitable research approaches and methods.

Engaging in ethnography in educational contexts, considered to be interdisciplinary by local school actors, allowed us to experience, describe and analyze interdisciplinarities as practices in today’s modernized secondary schools.

Ethnographic approaches in interdisciplinary educational contexts have been previously used for instance to gather information on perspectives of teachers on interdisciplinarity, within a framework where the implementation of well-defined interdisciplinary instruction was the underlying background (McBee, 1996). In our study, we took the perspective of studying interdisciplinarities as diverse and rich situated practices arising in schools, with the goal of achieving a case-based rich description of these educational practices.

An ethnographic approach had been previously taken for the study of educational practices with a specific focus on the materiality of education (Roehl, 2012), highlighting the contribution of things to classroom practices seen as complex, interwoven assemblages.

In a Flemish research project we selected cases recently arose in the context of the educational reform, being referred to as ‘interdisciplinary’ by local school actors (teachers, coordinators, school management). We dove in these practices as educational ethnographers with the purpose of achieving a rich, complex description of interdisciplinarities appearing in Flemish ‘modernized’ secondary education.

We considered the following research questions:

- How can interdisciplinarities in modernized secondary schools be described as practices by an ethnographic study of cases considered to be ‘interdisciplinary’ by local actors?

- What common aspects or elements arise (if present at all) from the analysis of the ethnographic descriptions of the studied practices, that can be associated with their being ‘interdisciplinary’?

While our research has been focusing on interdisciplinarity as stimulated in Flemish secondary schools by a local reform, a similar trend is present in other European countries (see for instance the case of Finland (FNBE, 2016)), and has been driven by European policy (EC - European Political Strategy Centre, 2017). For this reason, our approach and results can be relevant for educational researchers in other European countries.

At least since the 19^th century, schools have linked, in one way or another, history and citizenship education. Chile was not the exception (Serrano, Ponce de León and Rengifo 2012). In the last few decades, history curriculums around the world have experienced important transformations, as new ideas about historical thinking circulate transnationally and are adopted locally. “Concepts of second order” are a key component of this new way of understanding history education (Arteaga and Camargo 2012, Seixas 2015). Since the mid 2010s, the Chilean Ministry of Education has implemented a new history education curriculum, which closely follows these pedagogical ideas. In this context, this paper aims to answer the following question: in which ways this transnational curricular shift has affected the existing links between citizenship history and citizenship education in Chilean schools?

This paper proposes a vertical case study approach (Bartlett 2014, Bartlett and Vavrus 2014) to answer this question. Thus, it analyzes the shifting relations between history and citizenship education at three different, interconnected levels: 1) the curriculum level (how transnational ideas about history education are adopted and/or adapted in the process of crafting the Chilean history education curriculum); 2) the implementation level (how the curriculum directives are adopted and/or adapted by textbook authors and teachers); and 3) the learning-experience level (how students make sense of these ideas, as they experience them at school). Connecting curricular analysis with ethnographical fieldwork at one Chilean high school, I expect to illuminate the complex ways in which transnational ideas about history and citizenship education are adopted, resisted, and appropriated in local contexts and through interconnected social practices.

Achieving the aforementioned objective requires to understand citizenship as a relational practice (Lawy and Biesta 2006). By engaging in citizenship practices, individuals are constantly establishing relationships and positioning themselves with respect to others. Numerous anthropological studies have focused on how individuals and groups challenge the limits established by traditional understandings of citizenship and, in the process, affect their relationships with other members of their society (Lazar 2008, Paz 2018). Understanding citizenship as a relational practice implies also to recognize that the school is not a place where a set of citizenship knowledge and skills are unidirectionally transmitted. The anthropology of citizenship education has questioned this view, as well as other dominant theories that claimed that schools were ideological apparatuses of the state (Althusser 2006 [1971]), institutions for the reproduction of classes (Bourdieu and Passeron 1990), and sites of dissemination and induction in models of patriotic citizenship (Anderson 1991). Rather, these studies understand schools as spaces of contestation, negotiation and cultural production (Sobe 2014), in which students, teachers and other actors are affected by their context as they appropriate and/or resist the ideas made available for them (Benei 2008, Luykx 1999).

Further, citizenship as a relational practice has a relevant temporal dimension. As Lawy and Biesta (2006) rightly point out, understanding citizenship as a practice means abandoning the notion that it is the end result of an educational process, recognizing that "young people learn to be citizens as a consequence of their participation in the actual practices that make up their lives” (45). More importantly, the way how school actors approach this temporal dimension of citizenship, can have important consequences for the teaching-learning processes that take place in the school (Gordon and Taft 2011). This is way, examining the changing social practices that link history and citizenship education at different levels, can help us comprehend how young people are learning to be citizens and historical actors in the present.