Creating virtual learning communities of rural school teachers

Mario Barajas ٭, Mónica Martínez ٭, Sara Silvestre ٭, Roser Boix†

University of Barcelona, Faculty of Pedagogy٭, Faculty of Education†

ABSTRACTThis paper is based on the analysis of the experience obtained in the development of rural teacher communities under the umbrella of the project NEtwork Multigrade Education (NEMED) in Spain. The article briefly shows the current situation of the rural school in Spain and highlights the links that have been created through the creation of a virtual learning community of teachers spread in several isolated areas, the so-called Virtual Rural School. This in fact acts as a virtual community of practice (VCoP)

First, a brief analysis of the educational policies and the current situation of the rural school in Spain is presented. Secondly, a detailed description of the settings and training process in which the school teachers were involved: a profile of the networked schools, of the learning management platform and resources used in the Virtual Rural School and a brief analysis of the uses of the platform. The training took place during four months in 2007, with nine schools and 15 primary school teachers spread along different Spanish regions. The training and communication activities were based in the use of a Learning Management System platform (Moodle).

There is a trend to think that rural school teachers, and particularly rural school teachers, have prejudices against ICT in general, because they have more urgent priorities, or have a low level of digital literacy. However, although this can be certain, the need for communication and fight isolation, makes that they learn and apply faster what they learn. It is important not to guide ourselves for preconceptions, even when the very teachers show an initial mistrust on ICT.

Throughout the project, it was surprising the fact that the community of teachers, when following the calendar of the training, were able to create their own communication dynamics and their own learning initiatives, beyond what was initially planned. One example is that, whereas the learning activities were initially planned to be made at design level, the teachers were applying immediately what they learnt in the classroom: teachers, together with their children were preparing digital resources to exchange among peers of the different participating schools. It was obvious that, beyond training, teachers needed to communicate with other colleagues, even more than learning new things and tools. This dynamics favoured also that teachers designed collaborative activities for and with the children, so the students benefited from the teachers’ training right away.

This is a symptom of the need for exchange among teachers of rural areas alienated from the regular professional training circuits, but also a good example of the added value of the telecommunication and collaboration tools for facilitating the networking and the motivation of teachers.

Rural school teachers need to be active in their rural environment, and are used to solve many and different type of problems in close collaboration with the local community. This has been an advantage for the project more than an issue. On the other hand, the experience shows that it is necessary to keep an eye on changing needs and conditions of the participating teachers throughout the training, circumstances related to the socio-cultural reality of the rural environment: we cannot expect to implement a formal training course without respecting the time limitations of teachers, the specific calendar of the school, the local events, the attention to other needs that came up on the spot, and other situations that are different from metropolitan primary schools.

As a way to build sustainable rural communities of practice that last and expand, we hope that this work will contribute to the improvement of the Rural School teacher profession in Spain, since this pilot experience could be applied to a larger number of schools and rural populations, and, to some extent, to school teachers in metropolitan areas.

1. Background

This paper is based on the analysis of the experience obtained in the development of rural teacher communities under the umbrella of the project NEtwork Multigrade Education (NEMED) in Spain. During the past three years, a groups of Spanish rural schools spread throughout different regions and isolated areas have been participating in the European network, together with the University of Barcelona.

Now that the experience comes to an end (although the continuation of the network activities is assured for the following years), we make an account of the key aspects and lessons learnt from the activities undertaken, aiming at depicting how a community of practice (in this case rural school teachers, university researchers) has been growing and evolving based on the initiatives and events that happened during the lifespan of the project.

NEMED1 is a network of dozens of rural schools from nine different European countries. It started in 2004, continuing operations until 2007. It intends to stimulate an effort to bring multi-grade education to the policy front, and thus contribute to the upgrading of multi-grade teaching and learning. Despite the fact that multigrade teaching schemes represent a usual means for providing "education for all" in remote and rural areas in Europe and the rest of the World, multigrade education remains at the educational systems' margins. The network focuses attention on the phenomenon of multigrade schooling. Under the umbrella of a new European project, RURAL WINGS, it will continue working at the international level until 2009. However it is certain that the networks of schools at national level will continue working after that date, and we envision that the international cooperation will also continue without the support of the EU, given the success of the experience.

1.2 NEMED as a Virtual community of practice for rural school teachers

Communities of practice and activity theory are good frameworks to explain the characteristics of scenario set, a group of teachers participating and building a virtual learning community. Wenger (2001) points out three dimensions of the relation throughout which practice becomes the source of coherence of a community: a) a mutual commitment; b) a common enterprise, and c) a shared repertoire. For this author, practice does not exist in abstract terms. It exists because participants negotiate the meaning of their actions. Teachers in this case share their knowledge and work together, negotiate what they know and what they don’t with the others.

At the same time the common enterprise has been the result of a collective negotiation which reflects the complexity of the mutual commitment. It is not to achieve a goal, but that participants build a mutual responsibility which is an integral part of the practice. Furthermore, the community of practice eventually creates a shared repertoire of resources which acquire a meaning in the practice of this community. Under the umbrella of the project NEMED, the network of teachers is in fact a virtual community

1 Socrates Programme (Comenius 3 Action) of the EU (project no. 114323 - CP -1-2004-1- GR - COMENIUS – C3PP).

of practice (VCoP) in the sense of Zarb (2006)2, which very occasionally has physical meetings; the connecting threads are their participation in NEMED, whereas the virtual learning classroom is the virtual space in which people negotiate meanings. They learn from each other as a result of doing tasks and solving problems, so knowledge is a product of a situated activity (Lewis, 2002).

2. Rural education and NEMED in Spain

The diversity of geographical and political contexts in which the rural school in Spain required two extended models of schooling in the rural spaces:

a) Non-grouped rural school, whose operation is self-governing, although the general tendency is sharing activities, and even masterful travelling specialists, with other schools nearby.

b) Grouped rural school, which constitutes what it is known as groupings. These clusters of rural schools are born in Spain with the following purposes:

- To break the professional isolation of the rural teacher. - To open cultural horizons to rural boys and girls. - To strengthen cooperation and team work. - To share human, structural, administrative and managing resources, materials

and economics to be used by all the schools of the group. - To develop unique models of participation for the education community in the

daily tasks of the rural school. - To collaborate in territorial balance and to dignify the rural population.

In the Spanish State there are groupings of schools that receive different names: CRA (Grouping Rural Schools) in Castile Leon, Castile La Mancha, Asturias, Galicia and Madrid; CER (Rural Educational Centres) in the Valencian Community; CER (Collective of Rural Schools) in the Canary Islands, CPRA (Public Grouped Rural Centres) in Andalusia, and ZER (Rural School Zone) in Catalonia.

2.1 Key issues in rural schools in Spain

During the last 20 years the quality of rural education in Spain has improved considerably. The political and administrative decentralisation of the educational system has brought the development of public policies closer to the needs of the rural territories; however, it is certain that the pace of development of these policies, as well as the legislative deployment, has been diverse. In any case each autonomous regional government has created school structures, educational and support services for the rural school adapted to the needs of each region. Taking into account the diversity of the rural contexts in Spain (there are rich rural areas as well as poor and isolated ones), we can

2 Zarb (2006) gives this definition for VCoP: “Virtual Communities of Practice are informal networks, existing outside of any one particular organisation, that support professional practitioners to develop a shared meaning and engage in knowledge building among their members by providing opportunities for relationship building and interaction through the use of internet based ICT’s as well as other methods.”

point to the fact that, despite the improvement of the educational structures and resources in the rural contexts, there are still clear needs to be tackled:

There is a lack of specific initial training of rural school teachers; this does not mean asking only for specific training, but also training to be delivered in the rural school, as is the case of urban schools.

There is a lack of continuous training for rural school teachers aiming to keep pace with new didactical approaches, with dealing with diversity (growing immigrant rural population), and with use of ICT in the classroom and for professional development.

Although the creation of certain organisational structures for coordinating resources and specialist teachers for clusters of rural schools based on proximity has contributed to having more shared resources, these continue to be scarce, especially in territories in which immigrants have populated rural areas, with the corresponding increase of a number of children in the villages.

There is a lack of ICT infrastructures; although the situation has improved dramatically during the last three years given some State programmes for deploying Internet access, it is certain, that there is still much to do in this respect. As a consequence, there is a smaller number of Internet users in rural areas compared to urban areas.

The infrastructures and school buildings, either new or renovated, need continuous maintenance.

There is a lack of basic services for maintaining the rural schools: transportation, soup kitchens for children, and kindergartens.

Very few regions in Spain have developed adequate legislation for supporting and promoting rural education.

2.2 The current telecommunications situation in the Spanish rural areas

One of the key priorities of the Ministry of Education and of the Ministry of Industry is to provide broadband connection to all rural areas, including the isolated ones. The plan is implemented by the regional governments. The areas of application are 14,560 towns, villages and isolated spots in 3,770 municipalities with about 6.5 million inhabitants.

Currently, there are several regions in Spain in which 100% of the population can access Internet broadband connection. The objective is that by the end of 2007, 100% of the Spanish population will have access to broadband connection. In March 2007, 5,659 towns and villages had broadband access, so 5.5 million of the 6.5 million rural population were covered by the plan. However, access does not mean use, and we can see that the number of users in rural areas is still low.

The Ministry has also financed the creation of 270 new “Telecenters”, which are community public centres in towns and villages financed by both the Ministry and the regional authorities, who provide broadband services and training. The isolated areas and places with no broadband connection are prioritised. The program started in 2005 and will end in 2008.

With respect to the schools, only isolated rural schools do not have access to broadband Internet connection. This is the target group of Rural Wings. ICT resources are scarce,

but the multi-grade schools do have a few computers in the classroom. The plan for providing broadband connection covers also the schools, which means that in a couple of years all isolated schools will have broadband ADSL-type access.

3. The Spanish NEMED network of rural schools

The participation of Spanish schools in NEMED is distributed along 6 regions. The list of the Rural Schools active in the NEMED Local Network in Spain includes 15 schools and more than 30 primary school teachers.

Fig 1. NEMED Multigrade School in Teo (Galicia, North West Spain).

The network is growing constantly and recently several schools in the Canary Islands and in Southern Spain have joined the network. The NEMED activities will continue under the umbrella of the project RURAL WINGS (European Commission, VI Framework Programme).

Fig. 2. Computer classroom in the NEMED Rural School of Sant Serni (Pyrenees Mountains, Catalonia, Spain)

Within NEMED, an Educational Platform called Virtual Rural School has been created (http://www.futurelearning.org/exchange/course/view.php?id=3 in both Spanish and English versions. In this space we have placed the training activities designed for the module, as well as some spaces designed for exchanging opinions and ideas among the students (multigrade teachers), the teachers and the tutors. These spaces are discussion forums, chats, distribution lists, spaces to share documents, etc. The method used is e-learning, understood as distance learning based on the use of computer and telecommunications and within a Virtual Learning Environment.

The Virtual Rural School has been designed using the free, Open Source software package Moodle. This software is a Learning Management System designed to help educators manage effective online learning communities. This system allows an easy interaction between teachers and students, as well as among students. The design and the development of Moodle are based on a "social constructionist pedagogy", which asserts that learning occurs particularly well in a collaborative environment that everyone builds together. This Virtual Learning Environment includes characteristics that support role sharing, such as permission-based options that allow each participant to be a teacher as well as a learner. Furthermore, the role of the 'teacher' can change from being 'the source of knowledge' to being an influence, connecting with students in a personal way that addresses their own learning needs, and moderating discussions and activities in a way that collectively leads students towards the learning goals of the class.

Besides this space, a project website has been created with the theoretical contents visually organized and shown in three languages (Spanish, Catalan and English) (http://www.ub.es/euelearning/nemed/localNEMED/). This website facilitates the implementation and development of the activities suggested in the Virtual Rural School.

Fig 3. The local Virtual Rural School platform in Spain (Moodle environment)

Other communication tools have been used on a daily basis; among them, Skype was always available in the classroom, so children from different regions could communicate at any time, especially during the recess period. Productivity software and video, produced by the teachers and the children, were also part of the resources used. This has allowed the teachers of the Virtual Rural School to exchange audiovisual materials among the multigrade schools. The exchange of the material has been carried out through the Moodle platform.

We designed a training module for the Virtual Rural School, with the intention that the teachers participating in NEMED learn to design a collaborative telematic project for subsequent creation and application among the schools. The activities that configured the training module were created to be carried out individually; however, the teachers were asked, specifically, to upload their exercises and resources in the educational platform with the aim of sharing them with their colleagues.

Telematic project "Sharing Traditions"

The purpose of the project is to share the traditions that we celebrate at schools. The ways of sharing them can be different, such as we noted in the meeting via Skype and which Miquel commented on in the Moodle forum.

Two ways of getting in touch will be needed:

Synchronous Contacts (online) to explain to each other what we are doing to prepare activities and to solve problems. We will do the synchronous contacts via Skype.

Asynchronous contacts (offline) to send to each other those activities to carry out and those already carried out. We will do the asynchronous contacts via electronic mail and within the educational platform.

Human resources: The teaching staff and the student body of the participant schools.

Material resources: The traditional resources used at schools.

Technological resources: The ways of sharing them are different, all involving the use of ICT: Internet, Skype, e-mail (teachers’ or class’ e-mail), Office (Word and PowerPoint mainly), image processing, digital camera, sound processor application), microphone with speakers and earphones with micro, digital video camera, and also possible specific programs as Click, Hot Potatoes, spreadsheets, etc.

Following our e-tutor’s instructions, we can keep comparing our listings in this forum and address the needs in a synchronized meeting (Skype).

Fig. 4. Tasks carried out together by the teachers of Virtual Rural School during the design of the telematic project "Sharing Traditions" (designed by the teachers)

We considered a collective work for the second part of the module, in which there were different activities to carry out together among the teachers of the rural schools. Fortunately, to our surprise, the teachers of the Virtual Rural School decided to overturn the activities scheduled in the educational platform, converting them into collective activities; by doing this they managed to jump forward to what was scheduled for the third training phase. Therefore, the modules had to be quickly restructured in order to answer the need expressed by the teachers active in NEMED. This shows a great involvement and the taking over of the teachers reorganising the programme according to their views and needs.

4. The daily life of the virtual community of practice in the rural school

The teachers’ attitudes were very satisfactory, for they have managed to create a relationship that is only possible if are really thrilled and committed. On different occasions, the teachers in the Virtual Rural School have expressed their wide satisfaction and gratitude for being offered the opportunity to be connected and to generate a collaborative work that fills them with new ideas and stimulating experiences (exchange of photographs, videos, opinions, experiments, beliefs, etc.).

An indication of the success of the project is the incorporation of new schools by the initial team of teachers themselves. An informal network of collaborating schools was continuously growing to the point that we included double the initial number of schools and others are asking to be included. The introduction of these schools to the project was due to the motivation, enthusiasm and satisfaction of the teachers.

As said before, teachers were able to create collaborative activities (Fig.4) using their own initiatives, as an example of applying ICT to the rural context, and they’ve got involved in the design through ICT of educational materials adapted to their schools’ real needs and wishes. This has been possible mostly thanks to the extraordinary personal relationships developed at distance; only very recently have they been able to meet personally. Within a community of practice, as important as sharing goals and doing thing together, is the emotional aspect of sharing interests and concerns, which are very much common in the profession and in the context of being a rural school teacher.

Toward the end of the training period, there were some days of face-to-face training for evaluating the project and consolidating the network already created. During these days we were able to check some of the premises that guided us during development of the training and creation of the network. The face-to-face days served as opportunities for the teachers to express their concerns, needs, and critiques about the design, execution, and development of the project. Throughout this period, comments, opinions, and suggestions were expressed.

For the teachers who are members of the NEMED network in Spain the most important thing about the project for them, personally, has been the possibility given them to know each other and to communicate with each other, allowing them to escape the isolation of the rural environment through the establishment of a large community of teachers and friends. Here we have some examples of the teachers’ views:

“For me, participating in NEMED, allows me to do things that I can’t do in my ZER ( Zone of Rural Schools). But, beyond that is a place for experiencing new virtual acquaintances with other rural schools teachers, and this is more than a Chat or a local meeting of the ZER.” Although the ZER try to fight school isolation by sharing resources and teachers (for specific subjects, e.g. the English language) by having a common educational project, the environment is still local; whereas, NEMED gives me the opportunity to meet diverse colleagues and make friends, even without meeting them face-to-face.

Without a doubt, the NEMED network has contributed to the linguistic and cognitive development of the boys and girls who have had the opportunity to be part of it. The teachers have expressed their great satisfaction in observing the efforts made by the boys and girls to communicate in Spanish, a language they don’t use much in Catalonia and in Galicia. They have seen the need to change languages in order to effectively establish a link with children in other parts of their country. Equally important is the students’ enrichment from the cultural exchange generated by the contacts established among the schools participating in NEMED. Children also are aware of the importance of the exchange with other teachers and peers in remote schools:

“The children, when speaking in Spanish (our language in the school is Catalan) with the children of other Spanish regions, engage very much and have fun. They are very enthusiastic about preparing a common activity for the next year”.

This is one of the characteristics of the virtual learning community: the fact that the children are very aware of their participation together with the teachers. The fact of the schools being so small facilitates this familiarity with the project life.

5. Final observations

There is an urgent need of the teaching staff for communication and exchange of knowledge, personally and professionally. The teachers were very pleased to have us facilitate the creation of a community of learning and exchange of experience and knowledge.

There was a lack of training in ICT especially adapted to their needs, since in our country there aren’t any programmes or laws specifically for rural and multi-grade education. We attribute the success of the project in part to this lack, since, within the training aspect of the project, we tried to respond to the needs demonstrated by the teachers. Furthermore, there is the social importance of ICT as a tool of exchange and construction of knowledge, especially for those who, for reasons of place, space, or geographic location, have fewer opportunities for work relationships and collaboration.

There are the many possibilities for creativity and creation of interpersonal links that ICT affords, as much for the boys and girls as for the teachers. We must not forget that learning is a social activity that includes comprehension of languages and cultures, which ICT can greatly facilitate. Being able to share their work and experiences with other colleagues has made teachers value their work more, at the same time enriching and improving it, thanks to the support and suggestions they give each other. It is similar for the children, since they value their work more when they can share and show it. This is a way to strengthen a community of practice.

For the NEMED teachers, the computer has gained another dimension—it isn’t only for killing martians or downloading a programme; now it serves to establish links and exchange knowledge and experiences. ICT has converted it into a very important tool of communication that, besides awakening curiosity and imagination, helps students understand that they are part of a global reality that extends far beyond their own community.

Through the computer, it has become possible to establish personal connections as important as those created among the teachers and students in their own schools. For this reason, the teachers have come to the conclusion that the emotional factor is fundamental when establishing interpersonal connections, independent of the medium through which they are generated. We then consider the emotional dimension to be the key to all success in education.

It is important to say that the results of this project must be communicated to education administrators, policy makers and educators in order to show them how productive it can be to create a network of rural teachers at the national, or even the European, level. Besides, rural teachers usually don’t want to participate in educational experiments, because they hear about projects that haven’t been based on their needs and interests, but on the needs of the researchers—that is to say, the theoretical vision they have of how rural teachers should act, be, and teach. But it is a fallacy that teachers are reluctant to incorporate ICT into their classrooms. We have shown that in fact teachers can be very enthusiastic about projects that allow them to address their concerns and needs. This is the way to build sustainable communities of practice that will last and expand.

References

LEWIS, R. (1997). "An Activity Theory framework to explore distributed communities". Journal of Computer Assisted Learning (nº 13, 4, p. 210-218).

Wenger E. (1998) Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity, Cambridge University Press.

Zarb, M.P (2006). "Modelling Participation in Virtual Communities-of-Practice". LSE MSc ADMIS Dissertation. At http://www.mzarb.com/Modelling_Participation_in_Virtual_Communities-of-Practice.pdf (02-03-2007)