Supporting small remote school teachers’ professional development through networked learning designs

Abstract

Equal education is a buzzword, but the description of how it will arise differs. Spatial educational inequality is shown in several studies, and one explanation of this is the lack of professional development for teachers in remote schools due to the distance to peers. In the small remote schools, the teachers are few, and they are often solitary teachers, according to grade and subject. Therefore, the networked learning design needs to be adapted to these unique conditions. In this study, networked learning is put in the context of rural education, more specifically in relation to teachers’ professional development. In rural and remote schools, networked learning designs enabled by digital technologies can afford equal education. The web-based professional development could compensate for the distance between schools. Therefore, the aim of this study concerns the relationship between networked learning designs and the professional development of teachers in small remote schools. It is guided by the research question: How is networked learning designed and arranged to support teachers’ professional development in small remote schools? The sampled data contains transcripts from meetings and interviews from an ethnographic study. The study applied the theory of practice architecture (TPA) to analyse the data. The concepts of sayings, doings, and relatings from TPA provided the analysis to understand the studied practices. In TPA, these concepts and practices all ‘hang together’ in a project. The project in the studied practices is professional development. The preliminary findings show the networks emerge in the district of several small remote schools and are arranged in two different networked learning designs. One is meetings in real life, with time-consuming travels, but a networked learning design with many social aspects embracing time for dinner and visiting different schools. This design enabled sensemaking, an important process in remote areas, including meetings adapted to the sense of place. The other networked learning design for professional development in the district was web-based meetings, including fewer social arrangements but a higher frequency of meetings. When this meeting was combined with real-life meetings it worked well and enabled sayings, doings, and relatings in the professional development practice.