Small and rural schools as education “taking place”

In this paper I will explore the question “To what extent can the experiences of small and rural schools help us to imagine the future of the school?” through an educational philosophical-theoretical lens. In particular, I will focus on three closely interlocking themes: community-formation, sense of place and the school as studenting-hub. I will, first, distinguish two possible understandings of “community”, one construing it as something ‘given’ and the other valorizing its being always taking place through an incessant exchange of gifts/duties (cum-munera), which should be underpinned by an educational dynamics. Secondly, I will revisit the “sense of place” of small and rural schools (Bauch, 2001; Kvlasund & Hargreaves, 2009) through two conceptual tools: Nel Nodding’s idea of philochoria (love of the place) and Robbie McClintock’s (2012) opposition between the logic of “area mapping” presiding over modern schooling and that of ‘place mapping’ which highlights that “persons, and all beings that have existential reality, […] are always in the course of taking place, occurring as lived experience, as happenings, co-existing with everything else that is taking place” (p. 46). In this horizon, we should care about the ways in which education takes place without submitting it to ‘enclosure’ (construed as a typical modern gesture): small and rural schools may represent precisely a model of this alternative understanding. Finally, I will propose that small and rural schools perform this task to the extent that they are conceptualized as studenting-hubs and I will give some reasons for preferring the vocabulary of “study/studenting” (Fenstermacher, 1986; Biesta, 2017) rather than that of learning.