The start of the school year is not the same for everyone. The NGO Entreculturas remembers this and warns in its latest report Rural education, between oblivion and justification: Students and teachers in rural areas are once again facing various additional challenges to avoid suffering irreparable educational exclusion.
One of the most obvious problems that teachers in these schools face is that rural education does not usually have its own place in the training plans of most teaching degrees, so that when they land in a Rural Grouped Center (CRA), they can find themselves a little lost when faced with the particularities of this type of teaching.
Jesús Rivera Olmo, a professor in Cádiz and author of several studies on rural schools, highlights this general absence as one of the great obstacles when it comes to obtaining quality education in CRAs: “Everything is seen from a city-centric perspective, despite this, more than 80% of the Spanish territory is rural. He explains that teachers are not usually adequately trained for the particularities of these centers. “A rural school is a very heterogeneous concept. When you attend these schools, you may end up with a multigrade class in which you have to teach the first, second, third and fourth grades together. And how can teachers teach children of different ages simultaneously if it is not provided for in the degree? “We end up using teachers who have more experience.”
Another “surprise” that teachers usually receive, he says, is due to the organization of these centers. “For example, here in Andalusia, there are usually four or five schools that share the same territory, and one of them is the headquarters, where the director, the head of studies is located… And the teachers have to take turns in all the schools. schools. I didn’t know that when I left the university,” he says.
The content related to rural schools in the teaching degree of the different Spanish universities is scarce and is rather relegated to the specialized degree in early childhood education. According to a study carried out in 2022 by the University of Zaragoza, only seven public universities in all of Spain offer a subject or block of primary education degree related to rural schools. These contents are not taught in any private university in the country, with the exception of the University of Navarra.
Rivera Olmo denounces this “invisibility” since “to work in a rural school the ideal is, for example, to know that it is vital to know the sociocultural context of the child, of the center. The family-school-Town Hall triad is also very important, as well as having notions that allow teaching from the environment. The school needs the territory and the territory needs the school. How many times have we seen people in the news talking about the importance of having children in the city? Gives life. The school, even if we do not realize it, plays a fundamental role in ensuring that the child remains in the territory,” he explains.
Misrepresentation in textbooks
However, the professor assures, “it should not focus only on the teaching staff: it is a political, ideological conglomerate… Many variables and complexities come into play”, such as the low or absence of representation in the school textbooks of children in rural areas. “In school textbooks, the rural is not represented, it is treated as something secondary or as “the other”. It is presented as something stigmatized and biased: a farm, a dog, a pig and that’s it. We do not often talk, for example, about the mutual wealth that can exist between urban and rural areas. They do not show a vision that leads to wanting to know it. If a teacher does not have a critical look at school textbooks, we end up contributing to stereotypes,” he says.
When we talk about educational inclusion, we always talk about children with functional diversity, but to ensure educational inclusion, rural schools must also be involved.
Jesus Rivera Olmo
— Professor from Cadiz and author of various studies on rural schools.
Ultimately, he says, this ends up impacting the very identity of the boy or girl who lives in a rural area, who will end up feeling forced to leave, because “urban life is associated with success and when we talk about rural life, that doesn’t happen. “When we talk about educational inclusion, we always talk about children with functional diversity, but to guarantee educational inclusion, rural schools must also be involved,” he says.
And all this despite the fact that the work of teachers in these areas is essential, Entreculturas emphasizes. Teachers must overcome all the difficulties they face in this environment, such as the poor state of infrastructure, difficult access to transportation, the vulnerability that exists in some areas in terms of basic services (such as water or energy), the lack of teaching materials in schools or the lack of access to technology and the Internet.
It’s not just the hardware
But it’s not just about materials, says teacher María José Hernández, who works in a rural school with 110 students in the Extremaduran municipality of Zahínos: “It is often thought that with the material issue other needs can be met, but another The focus should be on the service to teachers. I myself sometimes do not have continuous permanence every year. In peripheral centers, the permanence is not continuous. This volatility also has an impact on students at the academic level, who do not feel as familiar with their teachers,” he explains, while calling for support and care for teachers in the establishments.
One of the great challenges that teachers face in their sector is motivating students, because, Hernández assures, there is “a lot of lack of interest and enthusiasm” for studies. But the educational system itself is an obstacle, he explains: “This profession must be born from vocation, but that is not always the case.” She began promoting the Youth Solidarity Network in her center in 2013, and since then she has been actively linked to this program, which tries to involve adolescents in the challenges that arise both locally and globally.
The teacher from Extremadura recalls two of the concerns that continue to prevail in the territory: depopulation and emigration: “What happens with emigration is that we do not have references of former students who have completed their primary and secondary studies in our cities. They have gone to study at university and only come back on vacation. This lack of references means that our boys and girls find themselves a little adrift.”
The NGO Entreculturas has approached the Spanish government to demand, among other things, the promotion of the development of public policies that defend the future of rural areas; expand the coverage of public services with a focus on quality education; include in initial teacher training a specific professional profile to address the reality of rural schools; and allocate at least 3% of total official development assistance to education for sustainable development and global citizenship.
The autonomous communities with the largest number of students enrolled in the Grouped Rural Centres are Andalusia, Catalonia, Castile-La Mancha, Castile and León and Galicia. Behind them are Ceuta and Melilla, Murcia, La Rioja and Cantabria, according to data from the Ministry of Education.
