Teachers recognising the value of the environment

In AlSchool, where 40% of the students are of foreign origin (mostly Moroccan), as part of a project on the roots and origins of the village in collaboration between the school and the community as a broader educational collective community was conducted by involving local families and other community members in the design and delivery of the local enacted curriculum. Examples included contributions from a local chef who a designed a recipe book for the school and taught teachers to teach pupils how to cook various dishes with their families using vegetables and products from the school solar garden and near-environment. Teachers and head-teachers emphasise the importance of learning about the local area through projects such as these that invite and help pupils to identify value in things in and around their village and, as one head-teacher put it, fostering a sense of belonging and contributing to sustainability (Moreno-Pinillos, Reference Moreno-Pinillos2022). The learning process takes place through interaction and incorporates the life experiences of community members and includes learning from an intergenerational perspective when teaching incorporates elements of the local environment and reinforces the possibility of sustainability of the rural territory in educational practices.

Examples of these kinds of inclusive learning exhibit tendencies toward weakening boundaries of insulation of the school from the community (of overcoming a challenge in other words). They include local artists helping teachers to teach how to depict the local landscapes and images of local spaces through art, including digital art, and similar activities, the curator from a regional museum presenting cultural historical events that connect the local area to national and global events. They may come from the civil (in Spain) and Second World War (in Sweden) shown also through large glass display cases in the hallways to exhibit the features or features about other issues. They explicitly positioned schools and community members’ local history in the local geography and profiled natural and cultural historic features, social and cultural activities, and even, in some few cases, social labour relations. As well as physical displays were displays on webpages.

Experiences of promoting interaction with the natural environment

OlbSchool made use of collaboration between families, teachers and pupils in different ways on various projects, particularly geological projects on rock and alluvial formations. They involved visits into the local landscape to collect stones and later working with identifying them as sedimentary, volcanic, igneous, and so on. The school is in a heritage area of identified natural attraction connected to a nationally identified area of special natural importance. It makes these kinds of activities easy in this school. But as a teacher in another (Swedish) school pointed out, environmental beauty and value exist also in unrecognised areas and locally knowledgeable people know where. In Mountain School for instance, tourism, culture and local history were highlighted, and in Inland School the region being “unique, biodiverse and rich in natural resources” (teacher) was stressed, along with a notion of the value and challenges of an untamed nature and sustainability. Local value was seen also in other ways. In home economics in Mountain School for instance the teacher made a point of (the locally accessible) moose meat being a more sustainable meat choice than (the nationally widely bred) cow, pig or chicken, and this theme of the value of local game was repeated also by pupils and in PoSchool

In PoSchool students researched crane migration and the importance of conservation in the area. It helped them develop or deepen an interest and sense of care in and for the local environment, which they recognised as also ecologically important. Experiences of features working against teaching for sustainability and resilience typically included examples relating to a variety of cultural and environmental elements on the curriculum that misaligned with sustainability goals, through subjugation to a standardised curriculum (cf. Roberts & Downes, Reference Roberts and Downes2016) and difficulties of cultural opposition to capitalist relations of production when people and places relied on capitalist production for their sustenance.

Community involvement

Community involvement occurred through community members and pupils’ families supporting learning activities in school about environmental knowledge and skills in community heritage projects. As one teacher pointed out, without people from the community, many things just would not be possible and wouldn’t happen. They also identified a value in digital media, in terms of connecting people through everyday relations and interactions in the local communities and broad-casting interesting educational features of local everyday life and the environment. In Mountain School the history teacher took the class to visit the local museum and in Forest School content included visits to the local labour market and discussions of the competences it required.

Pupils in these schools had regular assignments that targeted local values or traditions, which got them working outside the school and in the local environment. They helped to make them aware of and in some cases involved in important political decisions that proliferate rural regions by building a place-conscious curriculum with mutual involvement of the community in the school focussing on the value dynamics of local areas. Two common tactics were (i) using place-based education to nurture place identities and (ii) using local contexts to feed the standardised national or regional curriculum. Both can assist place-focused engagement with the community and encourage pupils/students to think about local issues, assets, and challenges (cf. Beach & Öhrn, Reference Beach and Öhrn2025; Price Azano et al., Reference Price Azano, Brenner, Downey, Eppley, Azano, Brenner, Downey, Eppley and Ann2020). Using student and community voices to develop creative and sustainable education and searching for ways to develop strategies against depopulation were important themes in the dynamics of place, participation and integration for sustainability and education and spatial justice

Presenting possibilities for sustained local employment and careers

Generally, the ethnographies presented very few examples that have highlighted local vocational or career opportunities in curriculum content. Consequently, the idea that students can study to develop avenues by which to leave their rural community behind and, potentially settle in another part of the country or world is essentially reinforced and sometimes indeed made very evident by teachers in the classroom. In one investigation one teacher was very clear that he saw nothing left of any value to local people in the local area. He spoke instead of how he had told his children to move as soon as possible. Employment opportunities no-longer included possibilities for sustaining a good life for the next generation he said. Aspects related to the economic dimension of sustainability had already led to depopulation, and schools often remained silent about this (Bagley et al., Reference Bagley, Beach, Fargas-Malet and Vigo-Arrazola2026; Beach & Öhrn, Reference Beach, Öhrn, Öhrn and Beach2019, Reference Beach and Öhrn2025).

This teacher stood out as an exception. He spoke out on the effects of material hollowing out of a region by capital in the interests of the generation of private profit at the expense of local people (and other species) and their life conditions. He said this represented “a material challenge for sustainability and resilience brought about locally through global entrepreneurialism and rural area population and resource exploitation.” Yet these things remained largely outside of the enacted curriculum. Positive global possibilities appeared instead. An example was when an official in the municipality stated that “you can live here and be part of something bigger, as citizens of the world.” Learning in school he said created advantages for young people by helping them move away from the area “to widen their perspectives and opportunities,” thus inducing an image of greener pastures of employment outside the local area and the value of education and schooling for fashioning access to these greener pastures as opposed to finding ways to protect rural spaces and develop sustainability and resilience in and for communities. “Identity today is less connected to where we were born. We travel an incredible amount. It is often cheaper to fly to the Mediterranean than to Stockholm.” (Coastal School, 27 January).

Teachers experiences of curriculum performative pressure

Teachers described ways of wanting yet also struggling to put a face to local history due to having to communicate official knowledge as presented in the formal curriculum and its specific learning objectives, content and assessment methods. Moreover, whilst they gave examples of how features of local conditions formed content around which to develop pupils’ analytical capacities and global understanding, they admitted that this was rarely purely in the interests of these values in and for themselves or for valuing cultural heritage and local epistemic knowledge for its own sake or the sake of the local community bond (cf. Beach & Öhrn, Reference Beach and Öhrn2025; Beach et al., Reference Beach, From, Johansson and Öhrn2018; Vigo-Arrazola & Soriano, Reference Vigo-Arrazola, Soriano-Bozalongo, Gristy, Hargreaves and Kucerová2020). Instead, two alternative ways of subordinating local to global epistemologies took place:

1. 1. The demands of national curriculum performativity obtained complete primacy over local variations and local knowledge and its implications for the possible future of pupils and for the resilience and sustainability of their communities

2. 2. Teachers in rural schools attributed interest and value towards local knowledge and culture but also saw this content as valuable primarily for helping pupils to learn official curriculum knowledge and perform well on national examinations

As one teacher explained things, the curriculum pressure doesn’t usually give you the opportunity for other activities. Teachers were usually so tied up with the curriculum that it was very difficult to create and include other activities.

Difficulties in articulation of critique of the capitalist political economy

Critical ethnographic research in the humanities, education and social sciences gives rise to interdisciplinary investigations of global and societal structures and discourses of power to reveal forms of injustice and the sources of the reproduction of inequality. Typical possible themes include overt deconstruction and criticism in classroom interactions of:

1. 1. Global capitalist wage labour relations.

2. 2. Private accumulation and exploitation of the planet’s resources.

3. 3. The reproduction of hegemony, and economic, social and cultural reproduction in education, society and culture.

4. 4. The spread of neoliberal global capitalism from 1990 onwards and the power and exploitation it uses to develop economic growth.

5. 5. The free space provided by complicit politicians who allow neoliberal capitalists to freely accumulate vast wealth.

These points are among the most significant threats to global health and welfare and the sustainability of rural communities according to for instance amongst others Benatar et al. (Reference Benatar, Upshur and Gill2018), Cullenberg (Reference Cullenberg1998), Labonté and Stuckler (Reference Labonté and Stuckler2016) and Yusoff (Reference Yusoff2021). Yet analysing the ethnographies in Table 3 indicated that basically none of them are visible in schools and classrooms and that neoliberal capitalism’s mechanisms of accumulation continue to roll on almost as if they were self-perpetuating. However, they do not operate automatically and here is another missed opportunity for critical pedagogues. There are support mechanisms that themselves require maintenance and support that research has uncovered, and that teachers could teach about, both in relation to the local context and as a global feature.

The most obvious support comes, in line with point 5 above, from governments and government policy (albeit with strong economic and other external pressures, such as from the UN, UNESCO, UNICEF, the World Bank and the WTO), and critical educators for sustainability working in school can identify and call this out. Moreover, this is not all they could do. They could also initiate social processes of development of self-organising social networks for fostering forms of counter-hegemonic globalisation in the interests of planetary sustainability in rural and in most circumstances also planetary futures. It has not happened in schools working for rural sustainability in the research sample (Table 2), at least not yet, but it could. Curricular activities in rural schools generally fail to make a significantly meaningful contribution to the sustainability of rural territories and populations. They reinforce instead an established curriculum to the service of a standardised society (Bagley et al., Reference Bagley, Beach, Fargas-Malet and Vigo-Arrazola2026; Beach & Öhrn, Reference Beach and Öhrn2025; Beach & Vigo-Arrazola, Reference Beach and Vigo-Arrazola2025; Faber, Reference Faber2018; Hart, Reference Hart2018).