Conference Agenda

This paper contributes to our understanding of the role of schools within the social processes that contribute to the development of rural communities. Neoliberal mechanisms, marked by market policies, have imposed a capitalist logic on rural areas, shaping them to serve interests external to them (Cheshire et al., 2015; Suarez-Miranda, 2024). As a result, depopulation processes have occurred throughout Europe (Collantes & Pinilla, 2022), where the possibilities for existence in rural areas have been eroded (Perpiña-Castillo et al., 2023). In this context, international organisations such as UNESCO (2015) and UNICEF (2022) recognise “critical thinking” as a key element for community development.

The purpose of this paper is to explore whether and how critical thinking is developed in schools when the community is involved. Within this framework, taking a conception of critical thinking in line with Freire's theoretical framework (1978), we start from the meaning of “critical thinking” as questioning, oriented towards critical reflection and action in the face of existing inequalities (Salinas-Atausinchi & Huaman-Lucana, 2021), as opposed to the idea of critical thinking as performative, reduced to a set of performance-oriented cognitive skills (Papastephanou & Angeli, 2007) to achieve pre-established goals (Lim, 2012; Lim & Apple, 2015). The aim of this paper is to find out if and how this problematising reflection occurs between the community and the school through a dialogical process.

Different studies have shown that the development of critical thinking in the classroom can contribute to reflection and action on the context, enabling the recognition of culture and the importance of its preservation (Carias-Pérez et al., 2021), strengthening the sense of belonging (Pérez-Vallejo & Arroyave-Montoya, 2020) or reflecting on the difficulties faced by communities (Hitotuzi, 2012; Torres-Cruz et al., 2017). In relation to community participation in schools, although studies do not specifically refer to the term critical thinking, they do recognise that dialogue with the community could contribute to territorial development by recognising its potential and needs (Tabor et al., 2023; Vigo-Arrazola & Beach, 2022; Villa & Knutas, 2020). However, this dialogue does not always seem to generate critical reflection within communities (Beach and Vigo-Arrazola, 2025; Beach & Öhrn, 2025) and may sometimes normalise the hegemonic logics behind the processes of depopulation in rural areas. In this sense, the lack of more specific studies on the development of critical thinking in depopulated rural areas reinforces the relevance of this work.

Background

I came to my research project as an educationalist with more than 40 years’ experience in the field of Rural Education. I have lived and worked in rural areas all my life. I have a strong connection and depth of understanding with the place and the people. As a researcher I wanted to look through the window at rural education but was also aware that I was looking in the mirror too (Dufour 2004). Through an ethnographic approach I focused on the life experiences and human action by understanding the culture within a small rural primary school. Throughout my study my own experiences and life history as a rural educator are utilised and built on to help to interpret my participants’ views. Utilising auto ethnography as a method to support the ethnographic process allowed me to examine the “inner correspondence of spirit with my informants” (Geertz,1974, p.29)

Topic and question.

This paper discusses the role of autoethnography as a research process (Ellis and Bochner,2000) to analyse and narrate a portrait of a small rural school. I explored and questioned how my lived experience as a rural educator could enhanced my researcher role in creating a portrait to demonstrate the relationship of policy to a small rural school and its impact on a range of practice. As an ethnographer involved in rural education my understanding of the policy landscape of small rural schools is heavily influenced by my own lived experience.

Objective

The objective was to create a portrait of a small rural school which illustrated how policy becomes practice and the role of the staff in enacting policy. The portrait was created from fieldwork within a small rural school. Thick descriptions of policy and practice within the school and its community were captured from the daily experiences within the school. As researcher I analysed these descriptions by drawing on my own knowledge and experiences in the rural education field. This ensured that there was a broad social cultural understanding. I scrutinised my own positionality, background and biases influence during the creation of the portrait. The autoethnographic approach brought a personal dynamic to the portrait allowing me to incorporate a researcher subjective voice, emotional reaction and embodied experience to create a representation (Denzin and Lincoln, 2000) and more nuanced understanding of the rural school context.

Theoretical Framework

Using autoethnography to analyse an ethnographic portrait involved a reflexive, insider research technique that merges the artistic in-depth documentation of others. This methodology allowed me to paint a portrait of the small rural school from the fieldwork data and to turn the lens on myself to analyse the data through my lived experience, positionality, emotions, personal and professional histories. Autoethnography provided a systematic analysis of my experiences and understanding of culture of rural schools as a researcher. I was both an observer during fieldwork and observed my own actions against my previous knowledge. I was an important instrument within the analysis. My research stance took on a more subjective engaged perspective rather than the object observer role. I wanted the research to demonstrate that as a researcher I had not “looked in from the outside through a lens of global or national policy but had looked out towards communities and environments” (Gristy, 2020, p304). The lived experience was integral to this research and drew on the lived space (Lefebvre,1991) spatial theory. The lived space that I inhabited supported me drawing on autoethnography whilst crafting the portrait of the school to provide a deeper, more ethical, more nuanced understanding of the cultural life to transform the portraiture from a representation into a lived experience.

Contribution

Background

Involving diverse residents in urban and neighbourhood development is essential for creating inclusive and sustainable cities. By engaging local communities, municipalities can ensure that neighbourhood development aligns with the needs of residents. Residents’ firsthand understanding of local challenges and opportunities ensures that development initiatives are grounded in real-life contexts.

Challenges exist when it comes to involving residents in collaboration with civil servants and municipalities. These challenges stem from communication gaps, a lack of representation, insufficient participatory methods, and difficulties in engaging marginalised communities. However, everyday activities provide the most relevant context for resident involvement.

The study is based on a three-year participatory action research project Caring and Sharing Networks conducted in the city of Espoo, Finland. The empirical data consist of interviews, participant observation, and a series of residents’ and community workshops (Lund & Juujärvi, 2018; Lund & Kerosuo, 2019). Ethnography using multiple methods has the potential to investigate the residents’ agency and learning and the resolution of wicked societal problems in informal context.

Objectives

The study investigates the development of residents’ agency and learning within the context of neighbourhood transformation. It emphasises the pivotal role of learning in fostering agency, enabling residents to transcend challenges by envisioning alternative futures and engaging in actions that extend beyond the prevailing system. Learning occurs through participation in change and emerges through social interaction. This process encourages residents to reflect on the challenges they encounter and to find ways to overcome them. At the same time, it reinforces their agency and expands their perceptions of future possibilities. The overarching research question is: How does the process of residents’ agency develop through learning?

Engaging residents in neighbourhood development and recognising their agency and local knowledge is important. In this study, the activity-theoretical approach makes it possible to monitor the challenges and obstacles that emerge in neighbourhood activities and to examine the dynamics involved in the formation of residents’ agency and learning during a neighbourhood change process. The context of neighbourhood development within municipalities, where various heterogeneous actors depend on one another to enact their respective activities, exemplifies recent studies of cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT) focusing on fourth-generation activity theory (see Engeström & Sannino, 2020). The emerging fourth-generation activity theory is applied to address the wicked problems of society. These problems are often related to the social, economic, and political inclusion of vulnerable people (Sannino, 2022).

The study increases knowledge of the collaboration and learning processes between civil society and municipal administration by building local practices for and solutions to the challenges of neighbourhoods undergoing change. The study contributes to research on agency and learning by emphasising the emergence of residents’ agency and learning in an informal neighbourhood setting. The study also advances fourth-generation activity theory by elaborating on multiple, simultaneous learning processes at various levels and in diverse, interdependent activities.

The French philosopher Henri Bergson describes the intellect as a consciousness that searches for information that is useful for the daily life. Managing all incoming perception, selection is needed in a heterogenous environment. A selection according to doxa and habit, however, excludes various paths to what life and nature can be beyond the daily life and mundane politics of nations. A homogenous space as an illusion is then produced and reproduced in daily life, in education, in politics and in research. How can humans intervene into reality and cause effects? This reachable world, however, is an illusion, would say Bergson. On the other hand, how can we as humans access a heterogenous highly complex nature, especially in the fields of education where children are handed tools of thinking and acting responsibly in their environment?

In this paper deals with two dynamics:

1) Can “alethurgy”, a dynamic that Michel Foucault describes as a regime of truth and knowledge that inserts subjects in a governance system help to foster sustainability?

Structures that are based on narratives of a future for children focus on children’s behavior, morality and self-control. This divides a generational interconnectedness towards life and a “whole” of a planetarian life into administrative and didactic strands. Interlinked educated rationality justifies and leads actions and didactics that would miss this kind of nature humans are an integral part of.

2) The bias of cognitive psychology towards children’s syncretic perception and a habit of colonializing indigenous knowledge would block human mind’s capacity to get access to the complexity of planetarian life and to oneself as a human being.

According to Henri Bergson who refers to intuition that links sensitive self-awareness to the flux of time, Gregory Bateson’s works on aesthetics as a pattern that draws the interconnectedness of all life and finally David Bohms concept of implicate and explicate order a more than cognitive, categorizing, reproducing systematics of representing the human mind in the world. Following these celebrated authors it is obvious that there are more ways to see, to feel and to think than we are used to and we tell and teach our children.

The question then arises: How can we – as adults being responsible for the discourse of sustainability in education and research – get access to these subjective dimensions of thought and consciousness and how can we not ignore or devaluate these multiple accesses children and first nation people have to nature when we try to do the right thing we think we are supposed to as neoliberal subjects?