"We matter to society": Societal importance and complex market position of two rural upper secondary schools

• Published in: Tímarit um uppeldi og menntun
• Main Authors: Bjarnadóttir, Valgerður S., Ragnarsdóttir, Guðrún
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: Icelandic
• Published: Menntavísindasvið Háskóla Íslands 2022
• Subjects: rural education; upper secondary schools; marketization; spatiality; social justice; framhaldsskólar; dreifðar byggðir; samkeppni og markaðsvæðing; staðarsamhengi; félagslegt réttlæti; Iceland
• Online Access: https://ojs.hi.is/tuuom/article/view/3456; https://doi.org/10.24270/tuuom.2021.30.8

Previous studies on schools in rural areas have signified their importance for the communities concerned, for various reasons. Yet, research on education is most often approached from urban perspectives and theories, focusing more on what the rural areas lack in comparison to urban areas, instead of emphasizing their local value. Therefore, researchers have argued for the importance of studying the ruralities from different perspectives, acknowledging and contextualizing different realities and contexts. This study is an attempt to do so, by focusing on two different rural upper secondary schools, with the aim of exploring the value they bring to their local communities and the challenges they face in a marketized upper secondary school environment.The paper presents an analysis of semi-structured interviews with school leaders (N=4), teachers (N=4), and students (N=9) from two small rural schools in Iceland. The two schools participated in a larger research project on Upper Secondary School Practices, conducted in 2013–2015. The two schools presented here were the only schools in the sample that can be considered rural schools. They had fewer than 200 enrolled students and were in small villages in sparsely populated areas. The interview frameworks were different depending on the group that was being interviewed. However, some common themes were discussed, such as the school ethos and identity, policy implementations, school choice, and competition. The interviews were all about 60–90 minutes long and were transcribed verbatim before they were analyzed. The analysis of the data followed Braun and Clarke’s (2013) steps of thematic analysis which involved reading the interviews carefully more than once, adding comments and writing familiarization notes to each of them. Then the data set was coded by conducting focused coding, which involved reading the interviews a few more times while making exploratory comments and further developing them into codes, centering on patterns related to the rural challenges and ...