Identities on the Move
Series:
Edited By Flocel Sabaté
Changing rural identity. Discourses on rurality in catalan schools: Teresa Sala, Lluís Samper And Xavier Burrial
Extract
Teresa SALA, Lluís SAMPER and Xavier BURRIAL
Universitat de Lleida
Everything rural seems to be fashionable in today’s societies; even so, population continues to be mainly concentrated in our cities. Coming from a village seems to be perceived as something positive, but we need to ask ourselves the reasons for this supposed or real revaluation of what is rural. Is this the natural consequence of lacking urban roots or just another identity mirage? How should we define rural identity today? To what extent is this fashion part of a much wider process of trying to return to values associated with the community?1
One of the advantages of working with qualitative methodologies (ethnography, discussion groups, life histories…) is that these operations can lead us to discover things that we were not originally looking for serendipity. In our case, in a piece of research into the perceptions and evaluations of the mothers and fathers of schoolchildren and of teachers of rural schooling in modern day Catalonia2 we observed that a key element in the essentially positive evaluation of formal education was a discourse strongly in favour of that which is rural. Hover, this pride in the community was not completely exempt from ambivalence and even contradictions. To put this in the words of one respondent: “this is a double-edged sword”. ← 367 | 368 →
On the other hand, in other studies relating to the provision of social services in the comarca (low district) of...
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